Latin American Peasant Women: Household and Work

 As all the cases of women's activities, rural and indigenous women work was

traditionally invisible to western understanding. National governments, multilateral

organizations, and development agencies have assumed that peasant women were not

productive agents of the economic cycle. This assumption is true to the extent that

women's work in general is not recognized either. As in other aspects, the role of peasant

and indigenous women tends to be analyzed with the same lens used to view urban

societies.

 Rural families' production was traditionally more oriented to household survival

than to surplus accumulation. The type of activities peasants do are in the realm of

subsistence agriculture, which has supported rural culture for hundreds of years. As

noted by Mandel (cited in Benston 1969), this subsistence economic system has been

ignored by capitalist society or at least not taken as "real work" because it is not an

exchange value activity. It is for self-consumption. In this way, subsistence agriculture

and women's work at home share exactly the same situation in capitalist society: both

play important social roles, but are deemed irrelevant by the official economy.

 In a comprehensive understanding of rural socioeconomic reality, the family's

production was an important economic support to national economies in the sense that

such production maintained a whole social group, without significant state participation.




1 Indeed, the subjugation of peasant and indigenous people in Latin America is broadly accepted. As
discussed in Chapter 3, Hardman (1979) explains that these comments respond to distortions due to the
theoretical frame used, which employs European patterns to conceptualize social situations involving
women. Observers tend to utilize patterns values and prejudices from their own cultural background, and
as a result, what women have preserved from their own culture has been obscured by a foreign framework
for analysis or simply ignored (Hardman 1979). Jelin (1990) also critiques the "opposition between the
domestic / females / powerless domain and the public / male / powerful as fundamentally cultural and
ideological" which is commonly accepted for Latin America.