The most significant economic inequalities are based on relations within the household. Discuss this claim with reference to ethnographic and theoretical material.
When one thinks of economic inequalities, income inequality comes to mind. Yet, income inequality is only a facet of what constitutes economic inequalities, as these include inequality in terms of wealth and its distribution, ownership, or opportunity to name a few. Given the pervasiveness of economic inequality throughout the world, can it be said that where there is money there is economic inequality? If so, what are they based on? How are they revealed?
This essay will assess whether the most significant economic inequalities are based on relations within the household. It will first look at how economic inequality finds its origin outside the household, in concepts and ideals. It will then focus on how, in fact, in many ways, various economic inequalities are inherently linked to relations within the household, where concepts are put into practice. Lastly, it will address the issue of how, similarly to how economic inequalities are multifaceted – the boundary between them blurry, the mutual influence important – so are their causes.
In many ways, the root of economic inequalities lies beyond the household, in socially accepted ideals and beliefs. For instance, gendered ideologies that are so deeply ingrained can create, but also perpetuate, economic inequalities. Donner (2015) notes that the concept of what constitutes a ‘household’ is very salient in Kolkata. Gender inequality and economic inequality go hand in hand, deriving from uneven property ownership in the household. In Kolkata’s middle-class families, ‘homeownership continues to reflect a powerful ideology of patrilineal joint family living … and the locally valued idiom of ‘putting the family first’’. Such norms lead to middle class women’s reality of being systematically excluded from controlling property. Here, societal beliefs and ideals are detrimental to women, notably daughters, as they see themselves constrained to ‘routinely sign away their rights in the parental property, [with] both parents and brothers [seeing] this arrangement as fair [insofar as] the natal family had already invested in their marriage and thus a sister no longer formed part of her natal household’. As such, in this case it is not so much the relations within the household that foster economic inequalities but rather that the household subscribes to societal ideals and norms dictating what a household is and what it is not.
Additionally, Donner (2015) highlights that property rights of women who ‘separated, divorced, or were widowed’ were usually ‘highly insecure’. The case of Hema, a childless and widowed woman illustrates this. In Kolkata, the norm for a married woman is to go live with her husband’s family. Yet, in her case, because her husband had passed away, although her in-laws were ‘influential players in the neighbourhood’ while she ‘struggled to make ends meet’, shortly after her husband’s death she had been told that her days in the house were ‘numbered’. Here, although her husband had been ‘coparcener in a joint family home [this did] not in any way guarantee access to legal share in the property’. However, donner points out that the experience of these women was in fact ‘the (illegal) claim that Hindu married women leave parental homes accompanied by their sole inheritance in the form of a dowry and have no right to property in their affines’ home’. This goes to show that some concepts and ideals are so insidious that they overshadow the legality of some issues. Thus, exclusion from property ownership, which provides autonomy and security, can be a result of respect of and compliance to norms and customs, regardless of relations specific to households.
However, significant economic inequalities can (and do) stem from law. Li (1998) draws our attention to the fundamentally gendered ‘Central Provident Fund in Singapore – a fund to which wage workers, on top of paying for their house or flat, must contribute up to 25% of their income. This fund can be accessed for medical or housing expenses, but most of it becomes accessible and released at the official retirement age of 55. However, naturally, non-wage workers have no funds of their own; yet these non-wage workers are mostly women. Nonetheless it is customary for Malay husbands receiving this money to ‘give their wives a share, phrased as a gift’. But women who are divorced before their husbands have access to the fund ‘stand to lose out entirely on the long-term accumulated product of her husband’s labour’. As such, the legality of this fund only serves to further embed the longstanding idea that although men and women both work, they work in separate spheres, and as a result, the valuation of their labour differs. As Li outlines, ‘the official nature of the fund, its many rules and restrictions, the inaccessibility of the cash before the appointed time, and its direct association with the labour of the individual whose wages ha[ve] been channelled there [combine] to separate the fund, both in time and in space, from women’s everyday labour in the home’.
Hence, there are many instances where economic inequalities are a result not of privately but rather publicly known and adhered to ideals. This idea can be pushed further. Arguably, economic inequality can quite literally come from outside the household. As such, perhaps it is not relations within the household that influences economic opportunity or lack thereof, but rather, it becomes a question of access. Three examples can illustrate this. First, developing the issue of divorce further, arguably, the most significant economic inequalities lie not in the relations within the household but in not having access to a household. For instance, the fact that Malay men and women work separately might make it seem like a very egalitarian society on surface level. Despite this, divorce practices reveal the vulnerability of women precisely based off this semblance of equality. Li (1998) outlines that the customary principle of ‘harta sepencarian (literally, property resulting from people working together) or harta syarikat (joint or collective property) is recognised as the legal basis for property division upon divorce’. As such, this principle is usually interpreted to mean that husband and wife are in fact entitled to ‘equal shares of the product of their joint labour’. However, matters are complicated by the fact that to determine rights of property that have been acquired during marriage in reality involve a ‘precise breakdown and calculation of the capital and labour that each partner has contributed to the acquisition of each specific material asset, such a house or an addition to the house’ (Banks 1976). As a result, many legal cases have left wives with nothing insofar as the courts found that wives had ‘no claim at all on [their] husband’s money earnings while [they were] at home’ (Ahmad, 1978) or, similarly, that they have ‘no claim to the commercial tree plantations of [their] husband unless [they had] laboured directly on the crop’ (Bowen 1988). Thus, divorce can leave women with nothing, unable to make claims on property or assets, leaving them economically stripped and in many cases unable to amend to their situation due to social barriers.
The question of access also arises in the context of colonial times. Land and property are contentious issues in colonialism insofar as they are very exclusive – they are passed on from generation to generation, creating an accumulation of wealth, to the detriment of the colonised, who are by way of property law, excluded from such ownership. Bhandar (2018) sets out an interesting question, asking whether ‘the prevailing and persistent idea that ownership means absolute control over a thing has somehow shed its history as a primary technique of subjugation over the bodies of black people that facilitated the massive amounts of capital accumulation by white plantation owners during the birth of the United States as a nation’ has led to the appearance of the idea of ownership as absolute control in ‘social relations structured by race and gender’. This raises the issue of whether economic inequality can be detangled from its complex history and structural nature.
Moreover, of note in regard to issues of access, is the case of homelessness. Although homelessness is variable in its degree, people who are homeless are generally in important economic uncertainty. These people do not have access to a house, do not own property, live in great insecurity. Indeed, houses enable security, they enable opportunity; when you live somewhere you have an address, and this address is an important enabler – with it you can open a bank account, you can receive letters, have Wi-Fi, in sum, be connected to the world. Without an address it is much harder to get a job. As such, in this case, it is not the relations within the household that result in economic inequality, but rather a more structural issue of having access to such a household – and all the benefits that come with it such as the possibility of accumulation of wealth through banking or ownership, or even opportunity in terms of jobs and security – at all.
Yet, the idea that significant economic inequality may come from relations within the household cannot be dismissed entirely. Gender norms and expectations may be known and respected on a social scale, but ultimately, it is within the household that they are most salient, that they are met, or not. The notion of dependence is an important one in Kolkata middle class families. Donner (2015) highlights that whilst women, once married, increasingly looked to neoliberal values such as choice and autonomy vis a vis property ownership and residence, they were met with the ‘most pervasive cultural construct that still prevented breaking up a joint family’: the co-parenting with grandparents’ expectation. Bhaswati, a mother of a two-year-old child living with both her husband and her in-laws points out that although she resents ‘her mother-in-law’s domineering attitude’ and longs for a ‘separate nuclear unit’, she is well aware that a ‘single woman could not possibly take care of a child on her own’. The question of care comes in tandem with that of dependency insofar as ideologies of ‘filial duty’ as well as concern about the care of elderly parents often ‘persuade the younger generation to stay put’ and complicates breaking free from the dependence. Also, the fact that property is seen as a consciously transmitted asset and that as a result, access to the home is ‘mediated by the perceived duty to care for the elderly’, creates another obstacle. Similarly, familial relations can have influence beyond the law in some cases. Joya, one of the women interviewed by Donner, found herself in a predicament. Due to the lack of privacy and hierarchical nature of the joint household she lived in with her husband and his parents, she convinced her husband to jointly invest in a flat. Yet, the couple could not move into their flat because they were aware of the enmeshing of property rights and familial relations and knew that they would risk losing access to the prime property of her in-laws by shifting household. Donner outlines that ‘whilst, legally, she is entitled to a share of her husband’s inheritance, and therefore his parents’ property, practically, she knew she needed to stay put in order to be able to realise such claims’. Practice outweighs legality, requiring relations within the household to be upheld in order to not lose an economically valuable prospect.
Another important way in which household relations make or break someone’s future might be held in social ideals but is enacted every day in the household. It is still not the norm for women in Kolkata, as in many parts of the world, to take up paid employment after marriage. Many Kolkatan families actively promote the ideal of the ‘stay at home mother’, favouring non-working daughters-in-law. The husband is typically seen as the ‘man of the house’, the ‘breadwinner’ and the everyday practices in the household reinforce the inherent economic inequality in terms of income.
To ask whether ‘the most significant economic inequalities are based on relations within the household’ is in itself slightly misleading given that surely if there are multiple economic inequalities, to suggest a unique cause is restrictive. What becomes apparent when one tries to find ‘the origin’ of economic inequality is the innate nuance and variability as well as the mutual influence the cause and consequence exert over each other. Arguably, economic inequality is conceptual; we know what is economically valuable or beneficial because we are taught believe it so. As such, precisely because of this conceptual nature, it is a decision to ascribe value to one thing over another. Thus, since value is constantly assessed, negotiated, re-assessed, it is all at once through concepts and ideals but also through everyday practice that x becomes valuable while y does not. To take a more concrete example, focus can be brought to Li’s analysis (1998) of prescription of meaning and value to labour in Malaysian societies. Interestingly, Southeast Asia is believed to be relatively egalitarian due to distinctive cultural features such as the ‘bilateral kinship system’, ‘hierarchy based primarily on age and rank’, matrilocal residence patterns as well as equal inheritance between brothers and sisters but also husbands and wives. Women and men seem to stand on equal footing. But Li contends that ‘men’s advantage does not [lie] in concepts of personhood as such’, instead, as Errington (1990) suggests ‘differential male-female access to power tends to be located, in local theory, not at the level of the person’s gendered characteristics or anatomy analogue, but in practices … [Women] and men are basically the same, but because of the activities women engage in or fail to do, they tend not to become prominent and powerful’. Banks (1983) characterises marriage as a ‘contract based on voluntary agreement (muafakat) if two adults to live and work together. Yet, tension is quick to rise in conjugal contracts because they are built on the willingness of individuals to enter ‘relationships of cooperation and exchange’, suggesting that men and women ‘stand to gain or lose differentially from specific forms of the division of labour’. Li claims that ‘implicit in daily practices are struggles over the meaning and value of the different labour processes in which men and women engage and the significance of the exchange between them’. Thus, behind the semblance of equality of men and women working separately, in different spheres, opportunities for work are gendered and the value of contribution has to constantly be negotiated. This is especially true of the huge amount of unrewarded labour that is domestic work. While men typically ‘receive the reward for their labour as wages, an obvious and direct outcome of their individual effort … Women working in the home can claim their “pay” only indirectly, as a share of their husband’s income’, although they are acutely aware of the market price of the domestic services performed without pay in the home. Surprisingly, the economic inequality is actually concealed within the household, with women coating their unrewarded labour in a layer of morality, presenting it to their husband as a voluntary gift. This, however, is a double-edged sword, because while on the one hand it may create a form of moral indebtedness, it can also devalue the labour, make it seem like it is not ‘real work’. This vulnerability is made abundantly clear in divorce when the ‘equivalence of women’s unpaid domestic services and men’s wages exchanged within the conjugal contract breaks apart’. This form of economic inequality expresses itself at different levels; the domestic level, where relations are carefully maintained and the illusory equality is acted out in daily practices (gift giving, wage exchange), but also at the societal level, where meaning and value are conceptualised and can be legalised (divorce).
Babb also develops this idea by taking the example of Peru and arguing that ‘while men find the support in families that permits them to devote themselves to work outside the home, women must generally provide that support’. This reproductive labour, which women must provide within the household so that men may work outside it, is necessary to productivity but overshadowed by valuation of different forms of labour and the meanings they carry. Babb claims that ‘we must disaggregate the household to view the structural inequality present within it’.
Of note is the western bias of analysis inherent to the question. Similarly to the case described above, Brenner (1998), in Java, there is a seeming economic equality, and if anything, an economic inequality in favour of women, the prevailing stereotype being that ‘while the Solonese woman goes to the marketplace to earn a living, her husband stays at home, amusing himself by whistling to his songbirds’. Atmowiloto (1986) highlights the extent to which women seem to dominate the marketplace by claiming that ‘Pasar Klewer is a woman’s market. Just look, where do you see a husband-and-wife team that’s successful [?] Count them! If there are more than ten, cut my throat … [A] team like that will never work. Because it’ll always be the woman who runs the show’. A parallel can be drawn between the relationship to money in the marketplace and the one in the home insofar as, ‘regardless of social standing or occupation, it is the wife who handles household finances’, to the extent that ‘husbands are expected to turn over most or all of their income to their wives, who in turn allocate it as they see fit for household expenditures, sometimes giving their husbands only pocket money’. Further, women often are property owners, separately from their husbands, for example in the form of property brought into the marriage or inherited from their parents and may do with it what they please. Additionally, ‘property that has been acquired during the marriage and owned jointly by both partners is usually divided evenly between them if they are divorced’. Laweyan women are very influential as a result of their roles both in running their businesses as well as they households. Brenner remarks that given women’s dominance in the household, in combination with their ‘economic strength and autonomy’, it would appear natural that Javanese women would have a ‘degree of social and economic status … comparable to that of men’. Yet, the reality is that while women have ‘economic power and a considerable control over household affairs, in the realm of prestige they fall far short of men’ and ironically, the main factor hindering their prestige is precisely their economic prowess. In fact, in Javanese ideology, ‘excessive attention to financial matters and to the pursuit of wealth … is said to be a sign of low status [and] lack of refinement’. Hence, this challenges the western point of view of equal standing insofar as upon closer inspection, this ‘equal standing’ is merely a façade concealing powerful societal ideologies that while women may appear economically more proficient, this is not what they should be worrying about. Again, it comes down to the valuation of things, to the meaning behind things and how they make sense within a societal narrative.
To conclude, economic inequalities cannot be tied to a single origin. Their causes are multiple and dependent on one another. Relations within the household do foster economic inequalities by creating vicious cycles of dependency as well as obstructing opportunity, but such relations make sense within a broader societal context within which various conceptions and beliefs are created, perpetuated but also negotiated.
Bibliography
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Li, TM. 1998 “Working Separately But Eating Together: Personhood, Property, and Power in Conjugal Relations” American Ethnologist 25: 675-94
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