tunities and constraints” (Gage et al. 1997, 299).
Households are the dynamic center of female
social life. Girls are born and mature in households.
Women do most of their work and socializing, and
experience marriage, sex, and motherhood, and die
in households.
Power and interpersonal
relations
While some researchers insist that women are
categorically subordinate in the household, recent
studies reveal a far more complex reality. In prac-
tice, even in cases where a woman is the main
provider for the household, a man is often desig-
nated as its head. Even so, as noted earlier, 25 per-
cent of households in the region are female-headed
according to survey data. Five percent of female
heads live with husbands, and “high proportions of
married women are living separately from their
husbands” (Guyer 1981, 104).
Merely identifying a head reveals little about
hierarchical power relationships within house-
holds, obscuring the agency of women. Power is
complex in the household, all “participate in the
decision-making process. A patriarch rarely makes
decisions alone” (Sow 1985, 564). Households
are sites “of separable, often competing, interests,
rights, and responsibilities” (Guyer and Peters 1987,
210). Innovative terms such as “hearth-holds”
reveal that virtually all women enjoy some measure
of independence within broader households. Senior
women command respect and deference from
junior women.
Women’s money-making jobs are a source of sig-
nificant power in households. The vast majority are
self-employed; “they manage their own business
affairs, with little or no input from males other than
from those the women specifically ask for advice or
whom they employ” (Sudarkasa 1985, 56). Women
control their own incomes, which often exceed
men’s (Cooper 2001, Quimby 1979, Sudarkasa
1985). Despite Muslim family law, which stipulates
that husbands must provide food, shelter, clothing,
and medical care for all their wives and children,
women “increasingly take on the burden of feeding
themselves and their children” (Cooper 2001, 268).
Pervasive gender segregation of space and activi-
ties can be a source of great power and autonomy
for women, including wives in seclusion. Many
women value the household as a refuge from a hos-
tile world where they are fighting a difficult strug-
gle for the “right to be seen publicly without being
stigmatized morally” (Cooper 2001, 268). Only
female visitors are permitted to enter. Complex
women’s networks and voluntary associations are
sub-saharan africa 259created by systematic visiting patterns and meet-
ings in households.
Women’s interpersonal relationships in house-
holds are highly variable. Many enjoy loving, kind,
and hardworking husbands, and close relation-
ships with other women, including co-wives
(Sudarkasa 1982). In contrast, many women suffer
from domestic violence and other abuse at the
hands of men. Furthermore, tension between co-
wives is a widespread problem. In the Hausa lan-
guage, the term for co-wife is kishiya, “jealous
one.” Women’s music and dance often expresses
anger regarding all of these problems (Askew 1999,
Quimby 1979).Membership
Defining household membership is difficult.
Individuals regularly enter through marriage, birth,
adoption, and immigration, and regularly leave
through divorce, death, and emigration. Muslim
Sub-Saharan Africans experience some of the
highest rates of nuptiality, fertility, adoption, and
migration in the world, and divorce is fairly com-
mon. The hardships of living with in-laws endured
by married women with migrant husbands, includ-
ing being treated disrespectfully and facing
increased workloads, is one of the most common
themes in women’s oral literature and emerging
voice in published novels, poetry, and short stories
(Buggs-Boyd and Scott 2003).
Boundaries between household forms and par-
ticular households are often highly permeable. For
example, polygynous households are often em-
bedded in three-generational households. In some
places, polygyny is practiced non-coresidentially
(Tipple et al. 1994). Many women maintain over-
lapping memberships by spending roughly equal
amounts of time in their rural nuclear households,
their natal three-generational households, and in
urban same-sex households as migrant workers.Activities
Households are also defined by their activities.
This includes sleeping under the same roof or
within the same self-contained compound dwell-
ing. Most women, including all women in polygy-
nous households, have their own spatially separate
living and sleeping space. This can be a separate
room within one structure, or more typically a
stand-alone single-room dwelling within the com-
pound. Household members share costs and con-
tribute labor toward its maintenance. Most of the
actual labor in women’s income generating jobs –
typically as food processors, traders, crafts produc-
ers, and purveyors of cooked foods – is performed