The division of production,distribution and consumption in Saami society

The reindeer‐herding Saami, living in the Lapland regions of Sweden, Norway and Finland are an occupational minority within an ethnic one. In this article, the author demonstrates how for the Kautokeino Saami of Norway, the exigencies of contemporary housing, transportation and schooling preclude that the women invest as much time in supervisory herding and in husbandry decisions as was the case a generation ago. However, their rights to individual ownership of reindeer and influence in the management of the household's total resources continue. Despite governmental efforts to transform reindeer herding into a meat‐producing industry integrated with the overarching cash economy, the inputs of women in some families permits it to remain a diversified subsistence economy.     

The effect of paternal investment on female fertility intention in South Korea

Life history theory views reproduction as an outcome of resource allocation. The allocation of resources such as parental investments of time, energy and material resources involves trade-offs between number of offspring and timing of reproduction. Within the framework of mammalian parental investment, the outstanding feature of human reproduction is the high level of paternal care. Although empirical evidence suggests that human paternal investment may have evolved as a reproductive strategy to reduce infant and child mortality rates, the effects of actual paternal investment, including allocating time to child care, on female reproductive decisions have received relatively little attention. We examined the trade-off from two perspectives using a representative sample of married South Korean women aged 20–44 in 2005 (n=977). First, paternal investment in domestic labor, including child care and housework, was expected to be associated with women's preference regarding future reproduction. Second, relative paternal investment was expected to increase women's preference for future reproduction, especially among employed women. We found that increased paternal investment in child care and housework remarkably enhanced women's intention to have a second child, especially among employed women. In addition, although family members provide a low percentage of child care in South Korea, such help is likely to be a useful resource for second childbirth among employed women. Somewhat expectedly, older age and longer time since first birth had negative effects on women's second-child intention. There is growing evidence that, in the lowest fertility societies, paternal investment may be an essential resource for promoting future reproductive behavior of women, especially employed women.     

Economic Integration in Tanzania (1970–2011): A Biophysical Assessment

This article assesses the impact of economic integration on Tanzania's sociometabolic profile for the years 1970–2011, which witnessed an opening and further integration of Tanzania's economy through increased trade and foreign investment, through a time‐series economy‐wide material flows analysis (EW‐MFA). The EW‐MFA results show that contrary to the trade patterns of many developing countries, increased economic integration has resulted in Tanzania becoming a net importer of resources across all material categories when measured by the physical trade balance indicator. Additionally, the article discusses the conceptual and empirical challenges of measuring ecologically unequal exchange with EW‐MFAs for developing countries whose export profiles are dominated by lightweight, high‐value precious stones and metals. It also assesses the degree to which the Tanzanian economy has undergone dematerialization over the past 40 years of economic integration.     

祁连山牧区妇女社会地位及其对草地政策的认知度

牧区妇女社会地位的高低对草地生态系统健康具有重要的影响。以祁连山区的天祝藏族自治县抓喜秀龙乡为调查研究区域,随机抽取100户藏族牧户为研究对象,采用问卷、座谈和关键人物座谈等形式,对妇女在社会生产中充当的角色、日常生活中承担的家务状况、受教育程度、参与社会活动情况以及对草地政策的认知等方面进行了系统调查和分析。研究结果表明:在农村社会变革中,女性是畜牧业生产的主力军,承担着将近80%的生产管理工作,74.3%的日常家务。其在家庭经济中的决策权和农村社会中的地位也在逐渐提高,在经济方面占36.5%的支配权,拥有14.5%的决策权。但是,妇女的受教育的程度普遍较低,女性的文盲率达14.4%。因此,妇女对草地生产管理技术的接受程度较低,对草原管理方面的政策及相关的法规缺乏认识,这将会对牧区草地畜牧业的可持续发展产生潜在影响。     

A women's health shop: a unique experiment.

A women''s health shop in Edinburgh was open for 16 months to provide information and advice in a non-clinical setting and to allow an interchange between informal and formal care in the community. Staffed by nurses, it was visited by 5664 women and 400 men, an average of 24 people each working day. The most popular topics for discussion were women''s health problems, and 17% of women had a personal discussion with the nurse. The shop provided a useful and popular service and offered a practical method of furthering the concept of health promotion.     

Women's role orientations and expected fertility: Evidence from the Detroit area, 1978

Abstract

The paper investigates whether there is empirical evidence to support the hypothesis that women's attitudes toward traditionally female family roles affect their expected fertility net of the much‐discussed link between women's employment and fertility. Along with several socio‐demographic variables, the study uses a nonwork related attitude variable comprised of a motherhood role attitude measure and a housekeeping attitude measure. The study uses a probability sample of white, fecund, once‐married women under 35 living with their husbands in the Detroit Metropolitan Area in 1978. Findings suggest that nonwork related attitudes have a significant effect on fertility expectations net of labor force participation. They also suggest that general fertility surveys could benefit from including questions on nonwork related role orientations.     

Native River Boats in ‘Irāq

The Maasai are cattle pastoralists, living on the grass savanna in southern Kenya and northern Tanzania. This article, which deals with Kenya, describes Maasai women as “heads of houses”. The house as a physical structure shelters and symbolically embodies a matrofocal unit of consumption and resource sharing which is the smallest unit of Maasai society. In terms of livestock property, such units are subordinated to larger, patriarchal units. According to the author, the relative autonomy of Maasai houses, and in particular women's control over food resources is significantly decreasing. The reason for this is the present commercialization of Maasai production.     

Journeys of patronage: moral economies of transactional sex,kinship, and female migration from Mozambique to Europe

The article explores how young Mozambican women's migratory trajectories towards Europe are shaped by sexual relationships with older white men and obligations towards female kin. Triads of exchange between young women known as curtidoras (women enjoying life) and their partners and kin in Maputo are understood through theories of patronage and exchange moralities. Searching for respect, adventure, and consumption in the sexual economy, young women at the same time struggle to ensure their families' well‐being by redistributing the money they extract from white men. Sexual‐monetary transactions, love, and desire must be understood as part of broader moralities of exchange in which migration to Europe and sending of remittances is also a kinship project. The forms of patronage available in Maputo's sexual economy become stepping stones as well as obstacles to migration northwards.     

Infidelity,jealousy, and wife abuse among Tsimane forager–farmers: testing evolutionary hypotheses of marital conflict

The role of men's jealousy over a wife's infidelity in precipitating marital conflict and wife abuse is well documented. The role of women's jealousy over a husband's infidelity has received little attention, which is puzzling given high potential costs to women of withdrawal of paternal investment. We address this gap by investigating marital conflict and wife abuse among Tsimane forager–farmers of Bolivia. We test predictions derived from male jealousy and paternal disinvestment hypotheses, which consider threats and consequences of infidelity by women (male jealousy hypothesis) and men (paternal disinvestment hypothesis). The paternal disinvestment hypothesis proposes that wife abuse is employed by husbands to limit wives' mate retention effort and maintain men's opportunities to pursue extrapair sexual relationships. Interviews were conducted among husbands and wives in the same marriages using a combination of open-ended and structured items. Spouses agree that the most frequently reported type of marital argument is women's jealousy over a husband's infidelity (N=266 arguments). Roughly 60% of abusive events occurred during arguments over men's diversion of household resources (N=124 abusive events). In multivariate analyses, likelihood of wife abuse is greater in marriages where husbands have affairs, where wives are younger, and where spouses spend more time apart (N=60 husbands, 71 wives). While we find strong support for both male jealousy and paternal disinvestment hypotheses, it is men's infidelity, not women's, that precipitates most instances of marital conflict and wife abuse. We conclude that men's aggression towards their wives facilitates men's diversion of family resources for their selfish interests.     

Women and property in Guajiro society*

This paper discusses property‐related issues and concepts among the Guajiro—a matrilineal cattle pastoralist society in Colombia and Venezuela—from a women‐oriented perspective, focusing on types of, acquisition and management of property as well as death‐ and compensation‐linked property transactions. Also considered are questions pertaining to female productivity in pastoral societies and women's significance as resources and potential property.     

Sheikhanzai women: Sisters,mothers and wives

The Sheikhanzai are goat‐and‐sheep‐herding pastoralists who migrate from winter pastures near the Iranian and Soviet borders of Afghanistan to highland summer pastures in the western Hindu Kush. The article sets out to show that among the Sheikhanzai, women's management of economic resources provides a source of power which is frequently unavailable to women in sedentary communities. The domestic work and productive activities of Sheikhanzai women will be examined in the context of their roles as power‐wielders and power‐brokers. Attention is drawn to intra‐societal variation between different categories of women.     

Mobility,white bodies and desire: Euro‐American women in Jakarta

This paper illustrates how cultural logics of desire are being transformed in the context of the global economy refashioning intimate lives. Exploring the experiences of Euro‐American female professionals in Jakarta, it suggests that they become uncomfortably visible as ‘white bodies’; their desirability appears compromised, especially given Orientalist discourses which valorise Asian women's bodies. At the same time, women's position as well‐paid employees generates a contradictory logic of desire: the ‘ego‐boost’ they experience at work may intensify their demands on the masculinity and enlightened views of potential partners, thus rendering Indonesian men, with their perceived bodily effeminacy and ‘traditional values’ unattractive. As one response to the lack of desirability, some women engage in a moral discourse that casts Indonesian women whom they consider ‘bargirls’, as well as the Euro‐American men they attract, as morally deficient. The paper thus provides an alternative perspective on reconfigurations of desire in the context of global gendered mobility.     

Formula feeding can help illuminate long-term consequences of full ectogenesis

Breastfeeding is analogous to pregnancy as an experience, in its exclusiveness to women, and in its cost and the effects it has on equitable share of labor. Therefore, the history of formula feeding provides useful insights into the future of full ectogenesis, which could evolve into a more severe version of what formula feeding is today: simplify life for some women and provide couples with a more equitable share of work at the cost of stigma, guilt and a daily diet of studies purporting to show the benefits of natural pregnancy. Making pregnancy an optional route to motherhood would make women's life trajectory more similar to men's and thus put pressure on women to compete with men on the ground shaped by men's preferences. Despite being a treasured experience of many women today, bearing children could become the luxury of the few, the province of the very poor and a choice working women will pay a high price for as women who choose pregnancy become stigmatized as self-indulgent or unprofessional and penalized for it in the workplace. At the same time, scarce societal resources that could be used to support pregnant women and working mothers would instead be directed toward proving to women or even forcing them to gestate children “the right way.” While not necessarily threatening on its own, when added to formula feeding, IVF, stem-cell produced ova and sex robots, full ectogenesis could diminish men's stake in women's wellbeing and even existence.     

The evolutionary psychology of women's aggression

Evolutionary researchers have identified age, operational sex ratio and high variance in male resources as factors that intensify female competition. These are discussed in relation to escalated intrasexual competition for men and their resources between young women in deprived neighbourhoods. For these women, fighting is not seen as antithetical to cultural conceptions of femininity, and female weakness is disparaged. Nonetheless, even where competitive pressures are high, young women''s aggression is less injurious and frequent than young men''s. From an evolutionary perspective, I argue that the intensity of female aggression is constrained by the greater centrality of mothers, rather than fathers, to offspring survival. This selection pressure is realized psychologically through a lower threshold for fear among women. Neuropsychological evidence is not yet conclusive but suggests that women show heightened amygdala reactivity to threatening stimuli, may be better able to exert prefrontal cortical control over emotional behaviour and may consciously register fear more strongly via anterior cingulate activity. The impact of testosterone and oxytocin on the neural circuitry of emotion is also considered.     

Determinants of current use of contraception and children ever born in Nepal

Abstract

This paper explores the extent to which women's work for earnings, education and couple communication over family planning influence current contraceptive use and children ever born in Nepal. Data came from the 1996 Nepal Family Health Survey. The findings indicate that education has a significant positive influence on current use of contraception and a significant negative influence on children ever born. There was virtually no relationship between women working and current use of contraception. However, in full models, there was a significant positive relationship for women who earn cash for work on current use and a significant negative relationship for children ever born. Working alone does not increase contraceptive use or reduce the number of children ever born in Nepal, but earning cash for work does. The husband/couple variables also proved to be important determinants of current use of contraception and children ever born.     

Just Choices: Representations of Choice and Coercion in Sex Work in Cambodia

In global discourses about sex work, the image of the ‘sex slave’ has been influential in constructing the view of women working in the sex industry in developing countries as ‘victims’. This paper examines the perpetuation of such discourses through powerful lobbying groups and socially conservative governments. It argues that frameworks that situate women working in the Cambodian sex industry through a singular identity of ‘victim’ or ‘agent’ are inadequate in informing our understandings of sex work in the country. Based on ethnographic research and interviews with sex workers in the port city of Sihanoukville, Cambodia, this paper questions prevailing stereotypes of ‘trafficking victims' and the image of ‘defiled’ or ‘duped’ women and girls central to such frameworks. It examines the intricate intertwining of elements of individual choice and coercion in women's lives and illuminates how, in the transition to a market economy, women's choices are constrained by hierarchal structures such as gender, class and socio‐cultural obligations and poor employment opportunities.     

Hormonal influences on women's extra-pair sexual interests: The moderating impact of partner attractiveness

Based on the idea that women are especially attracted to ancestral markers of male genetic quality when conceptive in their cycle, scholars have conjectured that increases in women's extra-pair sexual interests during the conceptive phase of the cycle are moderated by their primary partners' sexual attractiveness. Multiple studies have examined this prediction, with largely supportive but mixed results. The current study is the first to examine whether hormonal influences—thought to mediate cycle shifts—on women's extra-pair sexual interests are moderated by partner attractiveness. 213 naturally cycling, romantically involved women (181 attending multiple sessions) participated in up to four sessions over about a month. Estrogen and progesterone levels were measured multiple times across women's cycles. Male partner attractiveness moderated associations between progesterone levels (though not estrogen levels) and women's extra-pair sexual interests. A negative association between progesterone levels and extra-pair sexual interests, a composite measure, was observed for women with relatively unattractive partners. For women with relatively attractive partners, no clear association emerged. The interaction between progesterone and partner attractiveness was robust for women's interest in extra-pair sex, a component preregistered as exploratory. The interaction effect was also significant for the absolute intensity of women's extra-pair attraction (a component item referenced in the preregistration) but was non-significant for the frequency of women's extra-pair attraction relative to typical days (a composite component specified in the preregistration). These findings inform theoretical understandings of women's sexuality.     

Everyday Politics of (In)formal Marital Dissolution in Cambodia and Indonesia

Placing contemporary marriage and its dissolution at its heart, this paper explores rural women's experiences of customary and legal unions in Cambodia and Indonesia. We contend that women's navigation in-between ‘informal’ ethics and morals versus ‘formal’ state-sponsored legal doctrine constitute a form of ‘everyday politics’ that has been unduly neglected. Critiquing the taken-for-granted nature of marriage in academic scholarship, we show how the axiomatic notion that marriage registration is inherently beneficial to women is complicated by the nonlinear and mobile trajectories of conjugality in our two case study communities. In turn, we call for marriage and its breakdown to receive more sustained and nuanced analysis as the primary unit of Southeast Asian life.     

Gender and performance in athletics

Abstract

A comparison of women's and men's performance in swimming, running, and skating is made based on available world record data. The ratio of women's to men's record times is analyzed as a time series, and the asymptotic value of this ratio is discussed in the context of a model. “Rate of improvement curves” are defined over time and by event in a given sport and are compared across gender. The relationship of record time to event distance is estimated and also analyzed across event and gender boundaries. We make three conclusions: 1. The rate of improvement for women has been extraordinary and is larger for longer distance vents. 2. Law‐like relations emerge for record times and event lengths. These relations have interesting physical interpretations when examined for various sports. 3. The male physiology is more suited to anaerobic strength events while, given increased access and participation, women can be expected to be more on a par with men in some long‐distance aerobic events.     

Outside the Moral Economy? Single Female Migrants and the Changing Bangladeshi Family

Unmarried female migrants, travelling overseas for work, form a small proportion of Bangladeshi overseas migrants. Their situation is anomalous and suspect, since unmarried women should remain at home under male protection and control. The stories of Dipti, a single woman who migrated to Australia in the 1980s, and of two other single women from her native village, demonstrate clearly some of the contradictions of these women's lives. Like other single female migrants I knew, Dipti retained close links to kin in Bangladesh, contributing significantly to the income of parents and siblings back home. Indeed, her constant and generous gift‐giving can be understood as an attempt to counter her anomalous position and remain part of the moral economy of the village. However, Dipti's longing to remain part of an ‘ideal’ extended family conflicted with her relatives' desire for autonomy. This is because families in Bangladesh were themselves changing over this period, due to the intersection of the developmental cycles of domestic groups, dispositions towards the autonomy of children from their parents and each other, and through the economic pressures of contemporary Bangladeshi society, which provide a strong further impetus towards the financial autonomy of the nuclear family. These changes within the structure of their families result in alienating further these single female migrants. Thus, ultimately, both Dipti's attempts to maintain her extended family in Bangladesh and her efforts to recreate it in Australia were doomed to failure. The brief stories of the other two single women I use in the article are parallel to that of Dipti's.