Farmer's Wife, Weaver's Wife: Women and Work in Two Southern Ethiopian Communities

Abstract

It has by now been amply demonstrated that involvement of a local region with the world capitalist economy, or development, can have disastrous effects upon the status of women (Boserup, 1970). These changes are created by the involvement of the labor force in activities related to world markets in commodities, either by working as wage laborers on plantations, mines, and factories, or by cultivating cash crops as tenants or owners of land. In Africa women have been barred from much of the wage labor available, yet have been expected to subsidize low wages paid to men of their families by agricultural work and trading (Hay, 1976; Stichter, n.d.). Where new agricultural techniques have been introduced, men have been trained to use them despite the preponderance of female farmers in much of African traditional agriculture (Boserup, 1970: 53-65). I had the privilege in 1969-1971 of working as an anthropologist in Ethiopia, a nation at that time marginal to the world economy. Principal exports were cotton and coffee, both unsuitable for cultivation in much of the Ethiopian highland. Indigenous manufacturing firms employed fewer than 50,000 people in a population estimated at 25 million (Ethiopia Statistical Abstract, 1970: 54). The nation had never been part of a real colonial empire; Italian domination in 1938-41 was too brief to set up successful forms of foreign-dominated extraction. Various types of subsistence farming and pastoralism supported the bulk of the Ethiopian population. This paper presents a comparison of women's positions in two ethnically similar and economically different communities.1 These communities are located ten miles apart in the Gamu Highland of Southern Ethiopia. One of the communities studied, Dita, engaged both men and women in farming. Only a fraction of their produce was sold, and little of this reached markets outside the area. In Dorze, the men were primarily weavers. They often migrated to Ethiopia's urban centers, especially Addis Ababa, to eliminate some of the middlemen's profits in the cloth trade. While some of the women migrated with their husbands, most remained at home. There they engaged in agriculture, childcare, housekeeping, production for sale in local markets, and trading. Much Dorze agricultural land lay fallow, and food was imported from adjacent farming areas in both highlands and lowlands. The comparison made here, therefore, is between women's work in a peasant farming context with high economic autarky of the family group (Boserup, 1970: 15) and women's work in a community involved in the embryonic commercial sector of the Ethiopian economy. The farming area was not articulated with international commodity markets through cash cropping, and the weaving area's relationship to the world economy was indirect. Weavers used imported cotton yarns, and sold their product for cash. The monetization of the Ethiopian economy and the level of demand for consumer goods were in part affected by the sale of Ethiopian coffee and cotton abroad. Lacking strong connections with the world capitalist economy, to what extent do the economies of the farming and weaving areas exhibit equality between men and women? Has this equality been increased or diminished by the involvement of the Dorze community in male migration and male production for exchange value? These questions will