Women's Land Research Articles

Personal reflections on drafting laws to improve women's access to land: is there a magic wand?

This article presents the author's personal reflections on his extensive experience of drafting land laws in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda over the past 14 years. It highlights key legal issues in efforts to improve women's access to land through the law, and provides a frank discussion of the author's involvement in translating constitutional, policy and legal provisions into detailed common law legislation that can be consistently implemented to achieve the goal of gender equality in land rights. The three cases discussed represent quite different situations: a relatively high degree of legal clarity and progressive policy and government support for gender equality in land rights in Rwanda; a highly politicised context in Tanzania, involving a struggle to even get women's land rights onto the agenda; and a more technically focused process in Uganda of trying to translate detailed pro-women provisions into practice, particularly with regard to mortgages. Common lessons emerge from all three cases, which are drawn together in the article's conclusion and which have wider application to the land reform processes that are now ongoing in other countries across the Eastern African region.

Women's Land Rights and Privatisation in Eastern Africa – Edited by Birgit Englert and Elizabeth Daley

Women's Land Rights and Privatisation in Eastern Africa – Edited by Birgit Englert and Elizabeth Daley

Book Reviews

Books reviewed in this issue. Fixing Failed States: A Framework for Rebuilding a Fractured World. By Ashraf Ghani and Clare Lockhart. Development Economics through the Decades: A Critical Look at 30 Years of the World Development Report. By Shahid Yusuf, with Angus Deaton, Kemal Dervis, William Easterly, Takatoshi Ito and Joseph E. Stiglitz. Protracted Refugee Situations: Political, Human Rights and Security Implications. Edited by Gil Loescher, James Milner, Edward Newman and Gary Troeller. Inclusion and Exclusion in Local Governance: Field Studies from Rural India. Edited by B. S. Baviskar and George Mathew. Women's Land Rights and Privatisation in Eastern Africa. Edited by B. Englert and E. Daley. Gender Sensitive Disaster Management: A Toolkit For Practitioners: How To Incorporate Gender Mainstreaming in Disaster Response and Preparedness. By C. Pincha. Making Sense of Global Health Governance: A Policy Perspective. Edited by Kent Buse, Wolfgang Hein and Nick Drager.

Gender Levees: Rethinking Women's Land Rights in Northeastern Honduras

In the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch, one woman's impassioned speech linking women's exclusion from land rights with the failings of Honduras' state‐led agrarian reform and counter‐reform gathered gale force, simultaneously weakening particular levees of gender‐bias while constructing others. Post‐Hurricane Mitch organizational practices and reconstruction policies in Northeastern Honduras afforded women access to joint property titles and participation. Yet the practices and processes through which women gained new rights reproduced certain exclusionary gender structures and created new barriers to women's participation. These contradictory consequences speak to recent feminist assessments of women's land rights under neo‐liberal land titling programmes and a resurgence of policies addressing agrarian reform, and reveal the broader stakes of struggles for women's land rights. In so doing, they underline the importance of attending to spatial connections and historical articulations between the present and the past, and thus the past and the future.

Child of Steens Mountain by Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker, Barbara J. Scot

would-be communities? and in describing the source documents themselves ? ashe isby the actual communities and their residents. In chapter 5, for instance, Kopp explores the dream of Rev. John Sellwood to create Hopeland, an austere settlement where quar reling, dancing, and theatrical eventswould be forbidden and domestic animals were tobe strictlyconfined.Not surprisingly,the dream went nowhere. Later in the chapter,he details a desultory and futileattemptbyRalphWhite head to establish anArts and Crafts colony at Alsea inabout 1900. In chapter 6, thegrandiose plans of an early twentieth-centuryChristian cooperative community take up numerous pages, though this venture also never comes to life. These projects are intriguing,certainly, in the sense that they reflectsimilar religious, artistic, and cooperative initiatives thatwere actually taking shape elsewhere in theUnited States at roughly the same time.Readers may find it strange, though, that the author has decided to emphasize somany schemes that never came anywhere near realization. Itwas in the 1960s and 1970s thatUtopian effortstruly blossomed inOregon. Kopp iden tifies more than 250 intentional communities formed in the state since 1965, including a few ? such as Alpha Farm and Breitenbush ? that still exist today. The author devotes two chapters to developments since 1965 and wisely chooses to focusmainly on just a few distinctiveor long-lastingcommunities? and on ones that were representativeof significant or unusual social trends. His discussion of lesbian and feminist communal groups, for instance, is especially informative. Oregon, apparently, is a center for women-only communities, with ten listed in a 2007 census, more than anywhere else in the United States. While Kopp offers no specific explanation for this phenomenon, he does suggest that farsighted early land acquisitions by theOregon Women's Land Trust and the Older Women Network helped bringwomen together and foster a broad sense of com munity. Kopp also provides a brief but useful description of groups such as Crabapple and Cerro Gordo, which practiced groupmarriage or "polyfidelity,"and theHoedads, aworkers' cooperative for treeplanters that lastedmore thana decade andmay have hadmore than 500 members in 1978. Eden Within Eden's resource guide appen dix is quite extraordinary and includes both general works on Utopian experience and almost 300 community listings.Each listing provides, where available, a location, dates of operation, formernames, and complete bibli ography. Many individual listingscover several pages (especially forAlpha Farm, Aprovecho Research Center,Aurora Colony, Cerro Gordo, Lost Valley Educational Centre, New Odessa, and Rajneeshpuram). The voluminous notes section helps direct researchers tonoteworthy archival and libraryholdings. Inhis conclusion, Kopp refrainsfrom mak ing any particular judgments about Oregon's Utopian heritage. He merely notes that early newcomers to the territory saw Oregon as Eden, "and efforts continue to achieve that paradise" (p. 186). Andrew Scott Sechelt,BritishColumbia CHILDOF STEENS MOUNTAIN byEileenO'Keeffe McVicker with Barbara J.Scot forwardbyRichard W. Etulain Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, 2008. Photographs. 160 pages. $16.95 paper. "I was an outdoor child all ofmy life" is the opening forChild of SteensMountain, Eileen O'Keeffe McVicker's reminiscence of growing up in southeasternOregon's Harney County. The author's childhood home was a small cabin that only served as the center for an upbringing where the family'sdaily activities Reviews 637 and seasonal round unfolded in a landscape of rimrock and sage, and thedesert panorama from their Steens Mountain homestead encompassed a view greater than some New England states. Homesteading theAmerican West is often viewed as the rush to theGreat Plains in the years immediately after the Civil War. Less well known is the homestead era of the early twentiethcentury in the High Desert of eastern California and Nevada, eastern Oregon and southeastern Idaho. Even today,this isarguably themost remote and empty landscape in the United States outside ofAlaska. It is therefore not surprising that it still offered land and opportunity to Ben O'Keeffe and his family when they started their small sheep outfit on the southern slope of SteensMountain in 1930. McVicker's memories of her childhood are a valuable addition to the catalog of literature that chronicles the West's homestead era. At firstglance, the accounts of the chores to be done, of tending to livestock, and of the one room school and meager collection of build ings thatmade up...

One Object: Multiple Interpretations

This article develops a paper, of the same title, presented jointly by the authors at London College of Fashion's Centenary Conference in Fall 2006. It examines and explores how curatorial interventions can inform the interpretation and display of dress within the context of the museum or gallery. To do this it case-studies one garment type—the mass-produced, overall coats manufactured as part of the working uniform of Britain's Women's Land Army (WLA) during the Second World War. Initially curator and dress historian Amy de la Haye examines the processes of acquisition, object description, classification, and empirical evidence and then proposes some curatorial strategies for interpreting the coats. Then, exhibition-maker and curator Judith Clark will make suggestions as to how these garments might be further interpreted through issues of display, within the temporary space of an exhibition.

Using rights-based and gender-analysis arguments for land rights for women: some initial reflections from Nicaragua

The purpose of this article is to revisit the issue of land, and explain why it is still critical to women's empowerment. This is done by looking at it from a rights-based approach and a gender and development perspective. The article draws on case studies of an NGO working on enhancing women's land rights in Nicaragua. It highlights why land continues to be central to women's empowerment, and makes some suggestions on what development organisations can do to ensure continued support.

Women's perceptions of land ownership: a case study from Kutch District, Gujarat, India

In August 2005, a campaign was initiated in Kutch District, Gujarat, India, to obtain government land for landless families. Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (KMVS), a grassroots collective of rural women, supported women's land and property rights in the context of the campaign. In this article, we assess the impact of this campaign on women in Kutch, given that the applications for land were filed either in their own names or along with their menfolk. Land is yet to be handed over to the families, yet the process of claiming it has, in itself, clarified women's views about the relative importance of property rights for their lives and position in society. The process of discussion that KMVS initiated has also provoked some of the women to take a first step in owning property by speaking up within their families.

Diminished Access, Diverted Exclusion: Women and Land Tenure in Sub-Saharan Africa

Increasing commercialization, population growth and concurrent increases in land value have affected women's land rights in Africa. Most of the literature concentrates on how these changes have led to an erosion of women's rights. This paper examines some of the processes by which women's rights to land are diminishing. First, we examine cases where rights previously utilized have become less important; that is, the incidence of exercising rights has decreased. Second, we investigate how women's rights to land decrease as the public meanings underlying the social interpretation and enforcement of rights are manipulated. Third, we examine women's diminishing access to land when the actual rules of access change. While this situation may sound grim, the paper also explores how women have responded to reductions in access to land. They have mounted both legal and customary challenges to inheritance laws, made use of anonymous land markets, organized formal cooperative groups to gain tenure rights, and manipulated customary rules using woman-to-woman marriages and mother-son partnerships. These actions have caused women to create new routes of access to land and in some cases new rights.

Do Women’s Land Rights Promote Empowerment and Child Health in Nepal?

Women's land rights are increasingly put forth as a means to promote development by empowering women, increasing productivity, and improving welfare. However, little empirical research has evaluated these claims. This paper uses the 2001 Nepal Demographic and Health Survey to explore whether women's land rights empower women and benefit young children's health in Nepal. The results provide support for both of these hypotheses. Women who own land are significantly more likely to have the final say in household decisions, a measure of empowerment. Similarly, children of mothers who own land are significantly less likely to be severely underweight.

The incidence of land tenure insecurity in Southern Africa: Policy implications for sustainable development

Abstract The study presented in this article used a combination of key informant interviews and a review and synthesis of existing country level literature to identify the major sources of land tenure insecurity in six Southern African countries: Botswana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, South Africa, and Zambia. Findings reveal that the main causes of land tenure insecurity experienced in Southern Africa include lack of land rights of minority groups, unclear or overlapping land rights, overcrowding, land alienation into leasehold, insecurity of farm workers and farm labour tenants, inappropriate and exploitative administrative practices, land encroachment and illegal settlers and limited women's land rights. The article presents a summary of land tenure security related initiatives that the study countries have or are in the process of adopting. Analysis of these initiatives shows that tenure reforms have focused on changing the law and rules but little has been done to translate new laws into implementable programs; capacity building; prioritization of resources to support tenure reform; provision of complementary policies and incentives; addressing HIV/AIDS‐land tenure related problems; and monitoring and evaluation. The paper contends that these policy issues should be addressed in order to ensure realization of land tenure security for all.

No Change for Thirty Years: The Renewed Question of Women's Land Rights in Rural China

ABSTRACTSince the mid‐1990s, a new land‐use rights regime has gradually come into effect in China. It follows upon a series of earlier changes — land reform, collectivization and the first wave of contracting land to households — that paid attention to women's role in publicly recognized work and provided access to land. The new regime, which has gradually come into effect as previous (usually fifteen‐year) terms expired, authorizes an adjustment in land allocation which is then normally frozen for thirty years. An apparently inadvertent effect of this policy is not only the exclusion of young people from direct access to land for up to thirty years from birth, but the de facto separation of the majority of women who marry or remarry patrilocally from allocated land. ‘No change for thirty years’ (sanshi nian bu bian) has thus become the distinctive feature for women of China's current land‐use regime. The state has renounced its potential to reallocate land periodically and there is no indication that market mechanisms are filling, or are capable of filling, the void thereby created. This article examines local conceptions, responses and practices regarding land‐use rights and their transfer within this new framework, using field evidence from three upland agricultural communities in Chongqing and Sichuan (studied in 2003, 2004 and 2005), where land allocations were fixed in 1995, 1999 and 2001 respectively. The ethnographic findings are further explored in relation to contemporary research on gender and land rights.

Essaying Democracy: The Post/Modern Intertexts of Kingston, Rodriguez, and Williams

Unity is shallowest, cheapest deception of all composition. . . . [A]bility in an essay is multiplicity, infinite fracture, intercrossing of opposed forces establishing any number of opposed centres of stillness. So history of has gone. . . . -William Carlos Williams, An Essay on Virginia (I 322) In his introduction to Imaginations, Webster Schott observes that works of William Carlos Williams collected therein-Kora in Hell, Spring and All, The Great American Novel, The Descent of Winter, and A Novelette and Other Prose-enable us to witness the doctor searching for his art and testing it, artist tasting life and suffering it . . . literary heretic his and anticipating future (xi). These works, Schott suggests, offer different picture than that of the artist commanding his powers, one know [as] titan who created Paterson, as revolutionary miniaturist of 'The Red Wheelbarrow,' or as magnificent autumnal lover of 'Asphodel That Greeny Flower' (xi). But who is this we, this collective knowing subject of Williams's oeuvre? For literary scholars like me who came of professional age in 1990s on tail end of what Jeffrey Williams has dubbed generation, it cannot be presumed that we would know William Carlos Williams at all. As other Williams points out, members of posttheory generation moved through higher education's most decentralized incarnation, period when notion of canonical literary education had fractured into myriad paths of specialized inquiry guided by some localized mix of theoretical principles.1 My primary areas of study concerned ethnic and women writers, genres of autobiography and fiction, and postmodern and trauma theory; as such, study of Williams had little formal place in my graduate training (an irony given that my department was then home to Paul Mariani, Williams's biographer). This is just to say, then, that so much depends on intertextuality. Ultimately, it was postmodern writers I studied who led me to Williams, specifically via their apparent interest in his extraordinary essay collection, In American Grain (1925). In this way, Williams appeared to me as kind of textual refraction, an object in my literary sideview mirror, as it were. From this vantage point, he looks primarily like an essayist and historiographer. While this may be an offbeat construction of doctor-poet, such is value of intertextuality: new literary relations may provide fresh insight into man and his cultural productions. For contemporary ethnic writers like Maxine Hong Kingston and Richard Rodriguez, it was precisely early Williams rationalizing his schism who intrigued them as they sought forms that could capture complexities of their experiences as ethnic Americans. Schott's assessment of works assembled in Imaginations could equally describe those by Kingston and Rodriguez: theirs, too, are difficult books [not] to be wished onto desert minds. They churn with giant ideas and powerful feelings, often pursued with fragile butterfly net of intuition (xii). Like Williams, these writers are intensely interested in uses of history and hybrid forms necessary to capture truth of American experience. Kingston has often described her mythic history China Men (1989) as sequel to In American Grain, since her text picks up roughly in mid-nineteenth century where Williams's revisionist history leaves off.2 She cites Williams's final image of Abraham Lincoln as a woman in an old shawl - with great bearded face and towering black hat (AG 234) as particular inspiration. His representation of war-torn nation as a convulsion of bewilderment and pain - with woman, born somehow, aching over it, holding all fearfully together licensed Kingston's own gender- and genre-bending approach to imagining America, as seen in China Men's opening parable of Tang Ao, male immigrant captured in the Land of Women. …

Married Women's Rights to Land in China's Traditional Farming Areas

Women's land rights are one of the major issues of the rural land contract in contemporary China. Married women in relatively developed rural areas and under marriage misfortune have elicited much academic and public attention. However, less attention has been devoted to studying married women in traditional farming areas where they are still relatively poor. This paper focuses on women's land rights in their maiden village in traditional farming areas, and shows, based on an analysis of a case study combined with a questionnaire survey, that married women's land rights tend to be retained in their parent village with the implementation of new policy and land contract laws, but that they have almost no rights in their maiden families after marriage, due to the influence of traditional marriage notions and customs. Given the situation of the political and legal framework, it is necessary to further probe, by reviewing past practice and experience, how to ensure women's rights through restricted and specific land readjustment, which may be a realistic and valid approach.

Gender, Land and Local Heterogeneity

This paper aims to demonstrate that China's land policy and land law are altered in social interactions between different actors. Such social processes have led to the gendering of rural land tenure practices, but also a highly heterogeneous situation with regard to land tenure. This paper aims to demonstrate that the combined effect of marital relations, kinship, social network and low political representation of women in the community often results in the deprivation of women's land rights and many women are becoming landless. However, our field research shows that there are also cases where women are able to get access to land if they live in communities where land is still subject to redistribution or readjustment, or where women have political representation and gender-awareness training.

The House on Sant Pere Street: Four Generations of Women's Land Holding in Thirteenth-Century Barcelona

AbstractThe house on Sant Pere Street on the outskirts of Barcelona, leased from the Monastery of Sant Pere de les Puelles in the early thirteenth century by the widow Ermessenda Montserrat and subsequently passed through three generations of her female decendents, provides a case study for exploring larger issues of women's land holding in the neighborhood of Barcelona dominated by the Monastery. An important landowner during the thirteenth century, the Monastery maintained archives holding over 500 parchments from the period. The majority of these documents concern the Monastery's exploitation of its land holdings through a complex network of leases and subleases. Women appear often as lessees acting both individually and in concert with other family members. A systematic study of this documentation reveals the vital role women played in the management of both urban buildings and agricultural lands. This study shows that the Montserrat women were representative rather than exceptional examples of women's participation in property holding in thirteenth-century Barcelona.

Women's Land Rights in Tanzania and South Africa: A Human Rights Based Perspective on Formalisation

One of the critical issues in current debates on land policies in Africa is how to balance equity considerations with the quest for potentially more effective and productive uses of land. In this article, we explore the strengths and weaknesses of a human rights based approach (HRBA) to development in securing women's land rights—using Tanzania and South Africa as examples. We analyse the relationship between gender-neutral laws and policies aiming to provide secure tenure through titling and registration and the highly gendered land uses and productive activities on the ground. An overall theme is how women may be effectively protected against the direct and indirect discrimination that is often a consequence of gender-insensitive land laws and policies. We conclude that HBRA offers a critical corrective and counterbalance to the neoliberal approaches that tend to dominate current policy formulation. It applies in contestations over formalisation of land rights. And as a policy tool it offers a set of binding standards that require the taking of measures preventing discrimination in relation to access and control of land and ensuring women's participation in registration processes. The article calls for a closer scrutiny of current fomalisation programmes and initiatives in the light of human rights standards.

Women, Gender Policy and land reform in South Africa

This article examines the gender policy of the Department of Land Affairs (DLA) and progress since 1994 in giving content to women's land rights in practice in two major sub-programmes of land reform: land redistribution and communal tenure reform. The article reviews the constitutional negotiations around gender equality and cultural rights between 1993 and 1996. It then summarizes the extent to which the DLA's land redistribution programme has formally targeted women since 1994. It further examines the effectiveness of the DLA's formal Gender Policy in practice, using the KwaZulu Natal provincial office and three of its land redistribution projects as case studies, and considers the treatment of women's land rights in the struggle around the enactment of the Communal Land Rights Act in 2004. Although serious shortcomings in the management and conceptualization of the DLA's Gender Policy are evident, alongside a lack of consensus in society more broadly on the content of gender equality in social policy, it concludes that comparing the current conjuncture to that prevailing in 1993/94 illuminates certain gains. Significant here is the consolidation of the legitimacy of the principle of gender equality, which is not without effect on social relations on the ground.

No (Wo)Man's Land: The Post-Socialist Purgatory of Czech Female Factory Workers

Why did the “losers” of Eastern Europe's post-socialist market transition—most notably, workers and women— seemingly accept their economic marginalization rather than respond with massive social unrest? Prevailing explanations generally focus on the dissent-constraining nature of institutional and ideological legacies of the past. I argue that we should look beyond such legacies to consider the role of a “metanarrative” about the market in fostering compliance with marketization. Drawing upon the personal narratives of Czech female factory workers, I show how their appropriation of this metanarrative renders them acutely aware of their marginalized identity. Simultaneously this inhibits their ability to fully comprehend the causes of their exploitation or to envision an alternative future to capitalism. This analysis reveals how social actors can adopt such metanarratives despite considerable contradictions between their personal experiences and the metanarratives' ideological claims. In addition, it demonstrates how metanarratives can subvert social action.

Questioning Women's Solidarity: The Case of Land Rights, Santal Parganas, Jharkhand, India

Women's land rights have been on the policy agenda in India for at least the last 20 years. Yet not much has happened on the ground. Why have not women mobilised to claim rights to land? What have been the limits to collective action by women around land rights? Through fieldwork in the Santal Parganas, Jharkhand, India, this article explores these questions. Firstly, the socially embedded nature of land as a resource and the mutuality and interdependence between men and women in the productive use of land needs to be recognised. Consequently, more than gender identities, it is other cross-cutting identities of ethnicity, education, kinship relations and marital status that both motivate women to stake their claims to land as well as oppose the claims of other women and men. Secondly, women's land claims seem to have a chance of becoming effective only if they have some male support, hence rather than aligning with other women, those who are serious in their claims seek to build alliances with men, particularly those able to influence the argument in their favour. Just as amongst women, there is considerable evidence to show that men too adopt different subject-positions depending on their own experience and context. Finally, by attempting to present women's land claims as a gender issue, not only is it found that women are unwilling to mobilise around this issue, but there is also an enhanced resistance from men.