Gender, Family and Work in Tanzania

THE PAPERS IN this collection are linked by a common concern for methods of male control and the attempts by women to evade or resist them. The book, which is a successor to the collection Gender, Family and Household in Tanzania published in 1995, has a wide scope and covers, among other issues, men and masculinity, gender relations among professionals, the position of children, the changing nature of marriage, the organization of work, the influence of law and the evolution of the urban framework.

Statistical evidence shows that women continue to be marginalized in Tanzanian society. Girls continue to be seriously disadvantaged in education and despite a considerable improvement in their rate of enrolment in secondary and tertiary education between 1981 and 1995, their representation drops significantly at the higher levels. Women's levels of representation are also low as Members of Parliament, in government, as ministers, as high-ranking civil servants at district and regional level, and in the judiciary. In rural areas, restrictions on women's rights to land are a major cause of their subordination; however, the issue of effective possession has to be addressed as well as that of formal ownership. One paper in the collection shows how access to other resources, especially to water, is crucial for effective possession. Where irrigation schemes exist, water is allocated by the village community through committees on which women are not represented. Women landowners are therefore at a severe disadvantage as men retain control over water allocation. Other papers deal with the ways in which women evade, resist or challenge male power. These are reflected in changes in marriage patterns which, although seen largely as a consequence of fluctuations in economic conditions, are also mediated by the strategies and struggles of women and men. For example, the age of marriage has gone up as young men cannot afford its financial cost, and delayed marriage has reduced parental control over it. Changes in marriage legislation can also provide women with the space to challenge paternal and elders' authority over who they are to marry, as a successful court case brought by a young Maasai woman shows.

A theme which runs through the papers concerns the ways in which the concepts of tradition and continuity are used by men and women in the course of their struggles and negotiations. Both actively create new combinations of the old and the new to reduce the tensions caused by the pull of modernity. This, in turn, creates new traditions, in which the positioning of women is a vital component. These transformations in the wider kinship context are examined in a paper which points out that, although much is known about the support and exchanges between rural-based and
urban-based kin, the ways in which gender shapes kinship patterns and exchanges between individuals remain poorly understood. While kinship tends to support male control over women, both sexes depend on it, making it difficult for women to completely withdraw from such structures.
Transforming kinship to accommodate the needs of women and children is therefore an important and urgent task.