Women and poverty in Bangladesh

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Abstract

The phenomenon of female-headed households is a new and emerging pattern in Bangladesh which attests to a critical decline in the position of women under ‘development’ and ‘modernization’. The proposed article will be based on field work in five villages in Bangladesh (Rangpur district) undertaken for the ILO. It treats the emergence of female heads-of-households not as a sign of increasing liberation but the social abandonment of women by husbands on the one hand, and fathers, brothers, uncles on the other who are unable or unwilling to provide for women in contexts of family based production.

The growth of households headed by abandoned, divorced, widowed women is viewed in relation to:

  • 1.

    (1) The commercialization of land use as a result of agricultural development and the subsequent marginalization of small peasants and women as producers. The objective value of women declines and the social stereotype of ‘women do not work’ intensifies to their detriment.

  • 2.

    (2) The failure of industrial development to offer economic alternatives for wage work for men, and particularly, women.

  • 3.

    (3) Critical decline in food availabilities and the quality of life since liberation.

  • 4.

    (4) The ‘modernization’ of patriarchy. Field work shows that the traditional oppression of women intensifies with modernization or the sexualization of the image of ‘woman’ whereby the sexual dimension in her role definition begins to take precedence over the dimensions of ‘mother’, ‘sister’, ‘wife’. Evidence is cited of a radical change in popular culture which is for the first time projecting women in overtly sexual terms even at the level of ‘folk’ operas which have traditionally dealt with religious, historical, and mythical themes.

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