'Rice Plus': Widows and Economic Survival in Rural Cambodia (New Approaches in Sociology)

New Approaches in Sociology Studies in Social Inequality, Social Change, and Social Justice

Edited by

Nancy A. Naples University of Connecticut

A Routledge Series

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New Approaches in Sociology Studies in Social Inequality, Social Change, and Social Justice

Nancy A. Naples, General Editor The Social Organization of Policy An Institutional Ethnography of UN Forest Deliberations Lauren E. Eastwood The Struggle over Gay, Lesbian, and Bisexual Rights Facing Off in Cincinnati Kimberly B. Dugan Parenting for the State An Ethnographic Analysis of Non-Profit Foster Care Teresa Toguchi Swartz Talking Back to Psychiatry The Psychiatric Consumer/Survivor/ Ex-Patient Movement Linda J. Morrison Contextualizing Homelessness Critical Theory, Homelessness, and Federal Policy Addressing the Homeless Ken Kyle

Domestic Democracy At Home in South Africa Jennifer Natalie Fish Praxis and Politics Knowledge Production in Social Movements Janet M. Conway The Suppression of Dissent How the State and Mass Media Squelch USAmerican Social Movements Jules Boykoff Are We Thinking Straight? The Politics of Straightness in a Lesbian and Gay Social Movement Organization Daniel K. Cortese “Rice Plus” Widows and Economic Survival in Rural Cambodia Susan Hagood Lee

Linking Activism Ecology, Social Justice, and Education for Social Change Morgan Gardner The Everyday Lives of Sex Workers in the Netherlands Katherine Gregory Striving and Surviving A Daily Life Analysis of Honduran Transnational Families Leah Schmalzbauer Unequal Partnerships Beyond the Rhetoric of Philanthropic Collaboration Ira Silver

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“Rice Plus” Widows and Economic Survival in Rural Cambodia

Susan Hagood Lee

Routledge New York & London

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RT002_Discl.fm Page 1 Friday, November 11, 2005 5:42 PM

Published in 2006 by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016

Published in Great Britain by Routledge Taylor & Francis Group 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxon OX14 4RN

© 2006 by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 International Standard Book Number-10: 0-415-97700-2 (Hardcover) International Standard Book Number-13: 978-0-415-97700-5 (Hardcover) Library of Congress Card Number 2005029590 No part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lee, Susan Hagood. "Rice plus" : widows and economic survival in rural Cambodia / Susan Hagood Lee. p. cm. -- (New approaches in sociology) ISBN 0-415-97700-2 1. Widows--Cambodia. 2. Widows--Cambodia--Economic conditions. 3. Rural women-Cambodia--Economic conditions. 4. Women and war--Cambodia. 5. Cambodia--Rural conditions. I. Title. II. Series. HQ1058.5.C16L44 2006 306.88'308694209596091734--dc22

2005029590

Visit the Taylor & Francis Web site at http://www.taylorandfrancis.com Taylor & Francis Group is the Academic Division of Informa plc.

and the Routledge Web site at http://www.routledge-ny.com

To my late father, Dr. Richard Dozier Lee, whose inquiring mind and adventuresome spirit set a lifelong example of curiosity about the great diverse world.

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Contents

List of Tables

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

Preface

xiii

Map of Cambodia

xvi

Chapter One Third World Widows’ Economic Vulnerability

1

Chapter Two Cambodian Social and Historical Context

23

Chapter Three “Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity

35

Chapter Four Widows’ Access to Productive Resources

79

Chapter Five Widows Surviving (Barely): Subordination and Resistance

115

Tables

129

Appendix A

131

Appendix B

139 vii

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viii

Contents

Notes

143

Bibliography

151

Index

155

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List of Tables

Table 1 Women’s Educational Achievement by Age

129

Table 2 Children’s Average Highest Grade Level Attained by Sex and Age Group

129

Table 3 Percentage of Cambodian Population Aged 7 and over Attending School by Sex and Age

130

ix

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Acknowledgments

A study involving travel to a distant and unfamiliar land does not happen without a great deal of social support. I am grateful for the intellectual guidance of Professor Susan Eckstein who first taught me about women in the developing world and encouraged me to look deeper and broader in my understanding of their circumstances. Professor John Stone was a pillar of encouragement with his ever-positive attitude of possibility and accomplishment. Professor Nancy Naples’ thoughtful comments on the manuscript helped me sharpen my thinking about gender inequality. I would like to thank the widows who took time from their arduous agricultural work to open their lives and homes to me. Their quiet, dignified cooperation was essential to the success of the project. My interpreters, Keang Ly, Samy Sok, and Srey Sraspanha, were invaluable guides into the ways of motos, Cambodian food, and village life. James Chhel Bun and Samon Phong linked me to their village and their helpful relatives, especially my hosts the Sok family. Numerous other Cambodians welcomed me and went out of their way to assist me in adapting to their country. St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Fall River, Massachusetts and the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts were most generous in providing time and funding for the journey. Finally, I would like to express my deep gratitude for the encouragement of my family, especially my late father, Dr. Richard D. Lee. His enthusiasm, example, and support were essential to the completion of the project. Thanks go also to my mother, Jeanne Davis Lee, and my dear sons, Eugene and Milton D’Andrea. I am grateful for their gentle and constant encouragement during my Cambodian adventure and in all my academic endeavors.

xi

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Preface

Widows are one of the most economically vulnerable groups in society. Women lose not only their marital partner on widowhood but also his income. Due to patriarchal traditions, women have fewer occupations available to them, and the occupations pay less than men’s work. The result is that women’s economic prospects worsen with their husband’s death and they struggle to survive. Many Third World families are poor subsistence farmers, producing only enough food to feed themselves. When the father of a poor family dies, the mother and children are left in even poorer circumstances. Many barely survive. The combination of the poverty of Third World farmers and patriarchal restrictions on women’s earning capacity means that widows are a significant constituency among the poorest of the poor. The economics of widowhood is therefore a pressing social problem in less developed countries. No studies have focused on Cambodian widows per se. Existing Cambodia studies single out widows as among the most economically vulnerable. This study explores the economic coping practices of rural widows in the aftermath of the Cambodian civil war. It begins by setting Cambodian widows in the economic context of the developing world, discussing the importance of family networks, gender role expectations, and access to resources. It considers how the economic vulnerability of widows is exacerbated by war and describes the long-term consequences of armed conflict in the lives of widows and their children. The distinctive gender patterns of Southeast Asia are introduced, with their bilateral kin networks, land inheritance traditions, customs of financial management, and gender roles. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the qualitative methods used in the study. The second chapter considers the Cambodian context of widows’ economic lives. Cambodia shares many Southeast Asian bilateral traditions, xiii

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Preface

formed and expressed in a Khmer setting. The cultural traditions of Cambodia have been deeply affected by the extensive civil turmoil of the past few decades, including American bombing incursions, the Khmer Rouge agrarian revolution, and the Vietnamese occupation. The political changes brought about by armed conflicts have had some positive effects for widows, however, especially in educational and land reforms. The third chapter describes the predominant economic strategy of the interviewed rural widows. They fed their families primarily through rice agriculture but encountered a hunger gap when their rice ran out before the following harvest. The widows filled the gap by purchasing rice with cash from microenterprises and wage labor. This “rice plus” strategy patched together enough rice for the family to have a daily supply of food the entire year. Cooperative family labor was critical to the success of this strategy, with children of all ages contributing to the family coffers. Gender role flexibility was important as well, with females “trespassing” on male gender roles and occasionally vice versa. Traditional gender roles tended to persist in the next generation, however. War had long-term consequences on the success of the “rice plus” strategy by decimating family networks, reducing the number of laborers available and thinning the social safety net. The fourth chapter discusses widows’ access to resources, critical for improving the economic choices of widows and their children. Land was the key rural resource. The interviewed widows had taken part in land collectivization under the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese and had been the beneficiaries of the 1980s land distribution. The chapter delineates the circumstances that led to widows losing their land, a process that increased village stratification. The economic resource of credit was used differently by widows depending on the extent of their poverty. The poorest widows borrowed out of necessity for food and essential medical care, risking their land if they could not repay. Widows with more economic options borrowed for productive purposes, investing in farm animals or equipment to increase their income potential. Education was another key economic resource for widows. The educated widows benefited from the capabilities their schooling gave them, including greater confidence in the marketplace and better interpersonal skills. Educated widows had resources that helped them keep their land and improve their family’s food security. Most widows had very little education, due to the lack of schools, poor health, or family poverty. Despite their meager education, the widows prioritized their children’s education which gave them hope for the future. Widows traded one child’s education off against another’s, using income from an older child to pay for the school fees of younger children. Daughters were educated as well as sons.

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xv

The study concludes that in the aftermath of war, some Third World rural widows manage to survive while others only barely survive. Age, education, health, land ownership and number of children make the difference. Cambodia’s gender expectations both subordinated and empowered Cambodian widows. The patriarchal dividing wall between men and women was only made of thatch and could be breached when necessity demanded. Women resisted patriarchal arrangements in marriage and created women’s spaces dominated by women’s values prioritizing children. Yet the devaluation of women’s labor and the losses of war handicapped widows and their children, consigning them to a deeper poverty than their fellow villagers. A thorough understanding of widows in Cambodian society must look to cultural explanations of women’s worth.

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Figure 1.  Map of Cambodia Source: National Institute of Statistics 1999. General Population Census of Cambodia 1998.

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Chapter One

Third World Widows’ Economic Vulnerability

Widows are one of the most economically vulnerable groups in society. Women lose not only their marital partner on widowhood but also his income. Since men on average earn more than women, the loss of a male earner is a double blow to a widow’s economic circumstances. Due to patriarchal traditions, women often have fewer occupations available to them, and the occupations pay less than men’s work. The result is that women’s economic prospects worsen with their husband’s death and they struggle to survive. In the developing world, most families live in rural areas and make their living from agricultural occupations. Many Third World families are poor subsistence farmers, producing only enough food to feed themselves. When the husband of a poor family dies, the widow and children are left in even poorer circumstances. Many barely survive. The combination of the poverty of Third World farmers and patriarchal restrictions on women’s earning capacity means that widows are a significant constituency among the poorest of the poor. Widows predominate among older women in most societies due to the common patriarchal practice of men marrying younger women, coupled with men’s shorter life expectancy on average. With fewer men in older age groups compared with women, widowed women are less likely to remarry than widowed men. The net result is that many women live out their elder years as single people. In the Third World, many young women become widowed due to high mortality from disease and accidents and the lack of medical care. War produces widows as well, often young widows with small children in their care. The large number of widows, together with the economic challenges facing female heads of household, means that the economics of widowhood is a significant social problem in less developed countries. 

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“Rice Plus”

This study is part of the feminist project of making women’s lives visible, and in particular, making Third World rural women’s lives visible. Feminist scholarship has engaged in a broad effort to describe women’s lives, so often left out of the historical record. Women come in many colors and live in a great diversity of social and economic situations. An important part of the feminist project is to describe this broad diversity of female humanity in both rural and urban areas, in all regions of the world, and across lines of class and ethnicity. Throughout these diverse settings, women experience similar subordination by men in their social group. Feminist scholarship aims to describe and understand this widespread subordination of women and its institutionalization in the social structures of patriarchy (Sachs 1996). Patriarchy has been defined as “the social organization of the family, the community and the state in such a way that male power is reinforced and perpetuated” (Bourque and Warren 1981:57). Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) modified the universal notion of patriarchy by noting that it must be seen in its cultural context. Patriarchy is not the same everywhere; it has cultural and local variations and presents women with distinct “rules of the game” (p. 274). Individual women live their lives within a particular cultural context and choose their behavior according to their perception of their maximum security and life chances. Kandiyoti refers to these arrangements as “patriarchal bargains” (p. 275). She saw a continuum of patriarchal bargains between “less corporate forms of householding, involving the relative autonomy of mother-child units,” as in Sub-Saharan Africa, to “more corporate male-headed entities” (p. 275) in areas labeled the “patriarchal belt” (Caldwell 1978) such as southern Asia and the Middle East. Sylvia Chant (1997) downplayed the concept of patriarchy due to its lack of attention to cultural diversity. She preferred to speak of “structural concepts of gender inequality,” an idea which acknowledges that “patriarchal relations take different forms and have different impacts in different times and places” (p. 263). Chant placed this approach to patriarchy within post-modern feminist theorizing which emphasizes differences among women’s experiences rather than universal generalizations (p. 34). In the face of persistent gender inequality, women do not submit passively to male control. In a great variety of ways, women resist patriarchal domination (Momsen 1993). Part of the feminist project is to make women’s resistance visible. When economic alternatives are available, some women “opt out of patriarchal families” (Tinker 1990:11). Rural women are often reluctant to directly oppose male authority and resist subordination in personal and practical ways (Sachs 1996:9). Rural widows focus narrowly on feeding themselves and their children and deal as best they can with structured inequality, the inevitable social and economic context for

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their lives. Their relationship to their family is critical in meeting the difficulties of widowhood.

The Economic Context of Widows’ Lives Family support networks In the absence of government assistance, Third World widows turn first to their families for help in dealing with the economic challenges of widowhood. The family networks that widows can call on in marshaling resources depend on the marriage customs of their culture. In patrilocal cultures, brides leave their parents’ home and join their husband’s family. When the husband’s village is distant from her own, the wife may have no supportive kin close by if she is widowed. The lack of a ready family support network disadvantages a widow who must compete for the rights to her late husband’s assets. In disputes with her husband’s family over land or other resources, she has no natural ally to protect her rights. If she leaves her husband’s village to return to her own, she may forfeit her sons’ rights to their father’s land. Widows in matrilocal cultures, where a new husband comes to live in the bride’s natal village or even in her mother’s household, have more family resources and more village land rights in facing the challenges of widowhood (Lopata 1996:48). Older widows can look to their adult children to help them cope economically after their husband’s death. Sons are often highly valued as economic substitutes for their late father. In patriarchal societies, a son can support his mother more capably than a daughter can, if he is willing. Sons in some cultures have the customary duty to support their mother in her old age. Indian widows, for instance, have the traditional right to be supported by whoever inherits the husband’s property, usually the son. The widow’s relationship with her son or sons is therefore critical. Older Indian widows with grown sons able to support them have an easier transition into widowhood, while young widows with small sons are in more difficult straits. Even for young widows, however, sons may provide protection and resources in patriarchal cultures. According to Hindu tradition, a widowed mother of young sons has use rights over her husband’s share of ancestral land or the right to maintenance from his ancestral estate since she is seen as the guardian of her husband’s property for her sons (Chen 2000:204, 268). Despite the traditional promise of support from sons, however, daughters are often more likely than sons to be the providers for their elderly mothers (Owen 1996:4). Young widows whose children are not yet grown are faced with more dire economic circumstances than widows with adult children. They

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“Rice Plus”

must support not only themselves but also their dependent children. When the children are very small, widows must be concerned with child care as well. Because of the financial stresses of young female-headed families, young widows may look to remarriage as a way to increase their financial resources. The sexual division of labor In every society, work roles are divided among men and women in characteristic patterns, with some work tasks considered more appropriate for men and others for women (Mead 1949). Widows have to support themselves within these gendered expectations which set the boundaries of their possible choices. In agricultural work, Ester Boserup ([1970] 1998) noted three types of gendered arrangements: (1) female farming or shifting agriculture, where women produced food with little help from men; (2) male farming or plow agriculture, where men produced food with little help from women; and (3) irrigation agriculture, where men and women produced food together. Boserup noted that the position of women differed with these three sorts of gendered work arrangement. In female farming, all women in the community worked and put in many more hours in agricultural work than men. Land was owned collectively by the tribe and polygyny was a common way for men to expand their land under cultivation. In male farming, private land ownership deprived poorer families from owning their own land and thus provided an agricultural wage labor force. Some wives whose husbands owned extensive land were exempt from agricultural labor, which was accomplished with wage laborers. In some areas, these exempt wives wore the veil when outside their home. In irrigation agriculture, which emerged with increasing population density, both men and women put in long hours in agriculture on their own land, though in different tasks, and hired landless wage laborers to help them. Men plowed and maintained the irrigation system while women did manual labor such as transplanting and weeding. In Asia, Boserup found regional differences in these gendered patterns of agricultural labor. Female farming was found in tribal areas of India and southeast Asia. Irrigation agriculture predominated in China and was found in non-tribal areas of southeast Asia due to the dense population of these regions. In areas with landless men and women available for hire, such as in India and parts of southeast Asia, women of higher status were exempt from agricultural labor. In a very few cases in southern India where female farming was practiced, women plowed. Other patterns of gendered labor involve the production of different crops, which can be divided into men’s crops and women’s crops (Sachs

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1996). The ownership of a crop does not depend on who labors to grow it but on who controls its management and disposition. Men’s crops tend to be grain or tree non-food crops grown for the market or for export, such as wheat, sugar, coffee, or tobacco. Women are likely to raise food crops, especially vegetable and root crops, for subsistence or local consumption. The closer food is to the family table, the more likely women are to produce it (Sachs 1996:72). The gendered division of labor can be seen in the care of farm animals as well. Men raise valuable large animals used for meat or draft power, while women care for less valuable small animals producing milk, eggs, or wool that feed near the home on household waste (Sachs 1996:104). In most cultures, some agricultural roles are barred to women. Susan Bourque and Kay Warren (1981) found that in Peruvian agriculture, women were not permitted to plow, clear fields, manage irrigation, or load burros. Women had other spheres to themselves, such as storing the harvest and selecting the seed potatoes. Women’s labor was not valued by the community as highly as men’s, however. Women were not in demand for agricultural work and could not earn cash income as laborers. In cultures where some women are secluded in their homes, such as India, women are strongly discouraged from working in agricultural fields. Margaret Owen (1996) noted that even in lower castes in India where women do engage in subsistence agriculture, only men may do the plowing. In some parts of Africa, women are not supposed to graze cattle, drive tractors, or do cash farming. Owen remarked that traditional female farming tasks such as hoeing and reaping have been taken over by machines, making it more difficult for women to find agricultural wage work. These difficulties in pursuing agricultural work contribute to the migration of widows to urban areas in search of employment. It is not only in agricultural production but also in market trading that work roles are divided along gender lines. Boserup ([1970] 1998) found many women traders in Africa and Southeast Asia, unlike India and the Middle East where men were the sellers and did all the shopping. Women were half the trading force in Burma, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, the Philippines, and Vietnam. Women traders in these areas sold mostly agricultural products which they had produced. In those parts of East Asia and Southeast Asia with a dominant Chinese population, such as Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore, however, a different pattern was evident, with women comprising only 10–15 percent of the trade labor force (Boserup [1970] 1998). Often women find more economic opportunities in towns than in rural areas, though their options are still limited by the gendered division of labor. Bourque and Warren (1981) reported that women in the Andes

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“Rice Plus”

engaged in various sorts of commercial and service occupations such as rooming house operators, shopkeepers, and restaurant cooks. Women’s labor was valued less than men’s, however, with women day laborers paid only two-thirds of a male worker’s pay. Townspeople justified this disparity by saying that men’s work was heavier (Bourque and Warren 1981:129). In Ahmedabad, India, women were constrained in a number of ways that made their work more difficult or less productive than men’s. For instance, women garment workers had less access to productive resources such as property and information (Kantor 2002). Productive and reproductive work The sexual division of labor which limits widows’ options is sometimes broken down into productive work and reproductive work, traditionally interpreted as men carrying out productive work and women performing reproductive tasks (Benería and Sen 1981; Moser 1989; Sachs 1996). Productive work can be defined as labor that earns an income, while reproductive work involves the maintenance and reproduction of the labor force, such as child-bearing, child-rearing, and feeding the household (Moser 1989). Karl Marx originated the distinction in his discussion of the importance of production in distinguishing humans from animals. By contrast, he saw reproduction as much less important (Marx 1978:150). Marx’s assessment of production as more valuable than reproduction is reflected in the allocation of cash rewards, since reproductive work is largely unremunerated.1 In calculations of economic activity such as the gross domestic product, reproductive work is not included despite its importance to the economy. Since women spend considerable time in reproductive work, much of women’s labor is not included in economic statistics (Boserup 1970 [1998]). In development efforts to assist poor nations, women’s reproductive labor is discounted and invisible to planners (Boserup 1970 [1989]; Benería and Sen 1981; Moser 1989). Women engage in significant productive work as well, which was also invisible to development planners until the ground-breaking work of Boserup and the scholars who followed her. Boserup’s work has been criticized, however, for neglecting the extent of women’s reproductive work (Benería and Sen 1981). Marx addressed himself mainly to the industrial situation, with production taking place outside the home and reproduction occurring in the home. In rural subsistence economies of the Third World, where most economic activity does not involve earned income, the distinction is less apt. Rural farmers grow most of their own food and sell any surplus for cash. So their agricultural labor can be seen as both productive and reproductive (Sachs 1996). Homes are sometimes used to store and process grain and

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farm animals, so one cannot separate home activity from productive activity (Benería and Sen 1981). As in most non-industrial economies, part of productive work life takes place in the home. Women care for their children, a key part of their reproductive labor, while they are engaged in productive work. A revealing image of this mixture of productive and reproductive tasks is the female farmer working her field with her infant strapped to her back (Benería and Sen 1981). Despite the uneasy fit of the productive/reproductive divide to the rural subsistence setting, the distinction continues to be useful because of the different cultural valuation of these two sorts of work. In rural economies as in urban ones, reproductive work is devalued and women do not receive remuneration for their work (Moser 1989). Since so much of women’s time is spent in reproductive work, women have a lower income-earning capacity than people not involved in domestic work (Kantor 2002), notably men. While women often step into productive roles, men very seldom take on reproductive tasks (Sachs 1983) and consequently, men’s time can be devoted to productive income-earning activity. The time that women spend in unpaid reproductive work results in a weak economic position and consequent dependency on men (Benería and Sen 1981). In development planning, so important for poor people in Third World nations, women’s reproductive work continues to be ignored and its value to the economy discounted (Moser 1989). To facilitate women’s involvement in productive income-earning work, the demands of their reproductive work must be taken into consideration in subsistence economies as in industrial ones. Widows and the sexual division of labor Widows make their economic choices within the framework of the sexual division of labor customary in their society. Some cultures may deal strictly with gender roles, forbidding women from stepping into male roles. Women may suffer ridicule or economic sanctions if they violate strict gender role expectations. Women then must find ways to recruit male labor in order to accomplish the male tasks. Other cultures may allow some crossover between gender roles or what may be called gender role trespassing.2 In these circumstances, women may be able to take up traditionally male work themselves. In all cases, widows must find ways to carry out both productive and reproductive tasks. Rural widows typically have difficulty recruiting male labor to help them with the male tasks in agriculture. In India, for instance, some widows attempt to manage their late husband’s land themselves (Chen 2000). But since most Hindu women do not do agricultural work in India, widows lack the skills to farm the land, negotiate for laborers, or market their crop.

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“Rice Plus”

Custom prohibits women from plowing in most areas of India, so widows must hire a plowman or negotiate with male relatives to plow for them. Widows in Martha Chen’s study (2000) found that it was difficult for a widow to hire a plowman. Since widows were generally poor with little ability to earn money, the plowmen demanded payment before plowing. For others hiring plowmen, more leeway was given with payment. Male relatives would not plow the widow’s land until their own fields were plowed. Since the yield of the crop depends on timely plowing and planting, widows’ fields often had a lower yield. Of the widows in Chen’s sample who managed their own land, one-half hired laborers or used male kin while the other half sharecropped out their land due to their lack of oxen and scarce plowing assistance (Chen 2000). Access to resources After becoming widowed, women may lose not only their husband’s income but access to their husband’s resources as well. In the developed world, the lost economic resources may be a pension or social security account. In the developing world, with its agricultural economy, the chief resource is land. Land Most land is owned by men, with women holding only 1 percent of the world’s land in their own name (Seager 1997). Despite the fact that women produce most of the world’s food globally, they own or control very little of the land that they farm (Sachs 1996:45). Women’s land ownership varies somewhat by region. In English-speaking areas of the Caribbean, for instance, women have equal rights with men to land inheritance (Momsen 1993). Women’s access to land typically depends on their relationship to men, usually their father or their husband. When a woman becomes widowed, her access to land depends on cultural traditions of land ownership by women. In patrilineal cultures, land is inherited through the male line only and widows may have little access to their late husband’s land. Even when women have rights to land inheritance, such as under Koranic law or modern law, they often come under pressure to turn their rights over to male relatives. Margaret Owen (1996) found that traditional African mourning customs were sometimes used to prevent the widow from gaining title to the husband’s land. For instance, the end of the widow’s mourning period entailed a ritual cleansing done by her late husband’s relatives. If the relatives refused to perform this ceremony, the widow could not participate in normal village life. In order to win the cooperation of the relatives for this ritual, the widow was constrained from pressing them on issues of support and land inheritance. Sometimes relatives claimed

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Third World Widows’ Economic Vulnerability  to be the rightful heir to the husband’s land and grabbed the property from the widow, a practice referred to as “chasing off” (Owen 1996:59). Women in some societies with matrilineal traditions of land inheritance have an easier transition to widowhood. Women in some Native American groups, for instance, control their own property, keep their assets separate from their husband’s, and retain control over cash earned. Upon widowhood the women’s control over their financial resources continues and lessens the disruption of their husband’s death (Nelson 1988:28–30). In some African matrilineal societies such as Malawi and Mozambique, however, widows have to depend on the goodwill of their male relatives for access to land (Owen 1996). Instead of the widow, it is the husband’s male relatives on his mother’s side who benefit in traditional land inheritance laws. While modern systems of law have given widows legal rights to land inheritance in many countries, these modern systems often exist side by side with traditional laws such as religious or customary law (Owen 1996). Traditional laws are sometimes unwritten or, even if written, are interpreted by the village elders, typically men. Local courts often ignore inheritance reforms passed at the national level and in some cases consider the widow herself as part of her husband’s inheritance. One Kenyan lawyer remarked concerning widows, “How can a chattel inherit a chattel?” (Owen 1996:51). Even in places where widows have modern legal rights to land, widows are often under pressure from the husband’s family to turn the land over to them. In India, where widows have land rights under the 1956 Hindu Succession Act, they must register their ownership of the land with the local (male) authorities who are typically reluctant to be seen as giving in to women (Owen 1996:57–58). Most Hindu widows in Martha Chen’s study (2000) turned their husband’s land over to the husband’s relatives to manage. Only one-quarter of the widows she interviewed had their son manage their farm land and just one-fifth of the widows managed the land themselves. She noted that Hindu women typically forfeit a share in their father’s property in exchange for the promise of support in times of distress from their parents and brothers. In her survey of Hindu widows, however, she found that only 3.5 percent of the widows lived with their parents or their brothers. Most of the widows Chen studied headed their own household while the rest lived in their son’s household or with another relative. While widows looked to their brothers for support, twice as many widows lived with their sister as with their brother. Credit In addition to the important economic resource of land, widows need access to credit. Credit is important in the rural economy for purchasing

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agricultural inputs. Widows may have access to their husband’s land but struggle to find the cash to buy fertilizer needed to produce enough food for their family (Green 1999:16–17). Widows also use credit to buy food during the hunger gap before the following harvest. Credit is needed as well to fund widows’ microenterprises to supplement their agricultural production. The Grameen Bank in Bangladesh provides a model for loaning to poor women such as rural widows. Founded in 1983 by Mohammad Yunus, the bank began by lending very small amounts of money to poor people organized in groups (Wahid 1993a). The group members guaranteed one another’s loans and could only get new loans when previous loans were paid on time. The Grameen banking scheme appealed most to female borrowers who had very poor access to the formal banking system. One investigator noted that the “women seem to be more frugal and successful than men in running small businesses” (Wahid 1993b:37). Women responded to the credit opportunities offered by the Grameen Bank despite the fact that Bangladesh is a traditional patriarchal culture and therefore men dominate activities outside the home (Wahid 1993b). The women used the loans to finance productive activities such as raising cows and poultry, processing dry fish, and weaving fishing nets. A 1993 study showed that the Grameen Bank was successful in reaching the landless poor in Bangladesh, with two-thirds of bank borrowers from this group (Rahman and Islam 1993). It generated new employment for a third of its members, mostly female, who did not previously have an occupation and expanded work for the underemployed. Over 90 percent of Grameen Bank members reported that their income had increased (Rahman and Islam 1993). Because the loans allowed rural farmers to buy improved seed and grow more productive crops, the food supply increased. A study of nutritional intake by the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies found that Grameen Bank members consumed more grams of food and more calories per day than non-Bank members, including more vegetables, milk, meat and sugar (Rahman, Wahid, and Islam 1993). The United Nations has looked at microcredit as a means to alleviate poverty in the Third World. The 1995 World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen underlined the importance of improving access to credit for small rural or urban producers with special attention to the needs of women and disadvantaged and vulnerable groups (United Nations 1998:3). A 1998 United Nations report noted the success of programs such as the Grameen Bank and Banco Solidario in Brazil in lending to the poor and creating a participatory process in which borrowers respect their obli-

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gations to repay. In addition, many microcredit programs “have targeted one of the most vulnerable groups in society—women who live in households that own little or no assets” (United Nations 1998:5). The U.N. report noted, however, that there are limits to microcredit as a program of poverty eradication. “Many people, especially the poorest of the poor, are usually not in a position to undertake an economic activity” (United Nations 1998:4). The report remarked that despite the emphasis placed on microcredit, the World Bank had only a modest $218 million invested in microcredit lending at the time and cautioned that “a certain sense of proportion regarding microcredit would seem to be in order” (p. 4). The report authors observed that microcredit is most effective when accompanied by other services to the poor including “training, information, and access to land” (p. 5). Lack of access to land was underlined as “the most critical single cause of rural poverty” (p. 5) in the lowest-income countries. “Yet, few countries have substantial land reform programmes” (p. 5). The resources of land and credit are closely intertwined for widows. Widows with land usually have access to credit through moneylenders as well as other sources such as relatives or neighbors. Those without land may be unable to interest moneylenders who are wary of being repaid by impoverished widows (Chen 2000). Microcredit organizations offer a real alternative for landless widows. However, in many areas of the Third World, such microcredit is unavailable. Widows without land in these areas must fall back for credit on relatives and friends who may be equally poor and unable to help. Education Access to education is another important economic resource for widows. Education gives widows and their children occupational alternatives in the modern economy of towns as well as rural professional service occupations such as nursing and teaching. In the agricultural economy, education provides important skills in literacy and numeracy. A literate farmer can access written materials about new agricultural products or available government services. An understanding of basic math facilitates market work and financial transactions involving interest. Even more than the actual skills, education confers confidence and status in the agricultural setting. The education widows received as girls affects their capability in providing for themselves and their children. Widows with more arithmetic skills are able to deal more confidently in the market whether buying or selling and can figure their costs and profits on microenterprises. Those who are able to read and write may have the option of a government job as a teacher or other paid position.

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In the rural economy, however, girls are less likely to obtain an education than boys, and so rural widows often do not have an education to help them support their children. Bourque and Warren (1981) found that fathers in the Andes resisted educating their daughters, claiming that education “will only allow them to write love letters to other men” (p. 131). By contrast, the mothers “recognize the benefits to be garnered from their children’s education” (p. 217). If limited resources demanded that only some of a family’s children go to school, however, it was likely to be the male children. The women “feel their sons have the greatest chance of success and consequently will be most likely to provide support for the mother’s old age” (p. 217). Single mothers may be more likely to appreciate the benefits of education for girls. In a cross-national study of female heads-of-household, Sylvia Chant (1997) found that children of long-term single mothers attain comparable or greater education to their peers in male-headed households. She noted that this preference for education, compared to male-headed households, was especially marked for the daughters of the female head. Chant attributed this preference to the mothers’ concern about the daughters’ ability to survive on their own and the greater control of the female head over household decisions and finances (p. 253). The sons of female heads of household tended to acquire more education than the daughters, however, due to sons’ greater ability to get well-paid part-time jobs that helped them fund their secondary studies (p. 234). The finances needed to provide their children with education are often a stumbling block for widows. Education involves cash for fees, books and uniforms as well as the opportunity costs of the loss of children’s labor. Sometimes widows must make choices among their children. They may choose to invest in their sons’ education rather than their daughters,’ placing their hopes for a better economic future on their sons’ labor potential. The opportunity costs for girls’ education are particularly high, since girls are useful assistants at home in child care and food preparation. Because of the financial costs, the children of widows are at risk of not receiving an education and perpetuating the poverty deepened by the father’s death. Impact of war The economic vulnerability of widows is exacerbated by war which makes survival more difficult. Since war combatants are typically young men, war widows are young widows, often with small children. The consequences of war live on for decades after the formal peace treaty in the person of the war widow and her children. Women widowed by war have to pick up the pieces of their lives and their country and begin

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again. In places devastated by armed conflict, homes must be rebuilt, fields replanted, the food supply restored, and the peace-time economy restarted. The survivors who take up this work must overcome their grief for the dead and begin to look to the future, for the sake of their children and of their country. War widows face the economic vulnerability of all widowed women as well as the special challenges of an economy damaged by war and a shortage of male labor. With the loss of men in battle, widows have great difficulties recruiting men for male tasks in agriculture. Linda Green (1999) studied Mayan war widows and found that the shortage of male labor was a critical issue for the widows. There were few surviving men available to turn the land over with hoes. The remaining local men hired themselves out for $1 a day but that was too steep a price for widows with little cash income. The widows needed their cash to purchase fertilizer, critical to a good harvest. Most widows recruited male relatives to help with the farming or struggled to do the heavy work themselves. War widows may find their access to land threatened in the social disorder following war. Judith Zur (1998) found that Mayan war widows faced harassment from their late husband’s family in their efforts to acquire the title to his land. The husband’s relatives often accused widows of complicity in her husband’s death and chased the widow off the land. Widows whose father-in-law was a village jefe or military commissioner were the most vulnerable. Widows without their own male relatives to protect them were often forced to leave their homes and relocate to a town or city in search of work. They typically went to urban squatter camps increasing the feminization of poverty in these settlements (Zur 1998:129–130). Many of the Mayan war widows Linda Green (1999) interviewed had land but typically less than was needed to support their family. With only a small parcel of land widows could not afford to let their land lie fallow for a year or two between crops, reducing the fertility of the land. Because they had little cash, the widows were hard pressed to buy the fertilizer needed to produce enough food on their land to feed their family.

Southeast Asian Gender Patterns Any study of widows’ economic lives takes place within a particular cultural context. There are no generic widows. Southeast Asia has distinctive gender patterns in great contrast to gender arrangements in the neighboring regions of East and South Asia. These gender patterns affect widows’ economic lives through kin networks, land inheritance traditions, customs of financial management, and gender roles.

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Southeast Asian kinship patterns are bilateral, with lines of descent traced through both the mother’s and father’s families. Children are considered to belong equally to their mother’s and their father’s kin. Matrilocality is the common pattern for marital residence, with young couples usually residing with or near the bride’s mother. Daughters as well as sons inherit land and other goods from their parents. Women own land in their own name and can dispose of it as they choose. In the bilateral system, women control their own earned income and manage the family finances. “Instead of doling out spending money to their wives, men tend to receive it from their wives” (Errington 1990:4). Women’s management of household money is seen as evidence of the “structural importance of women” in Southeast Asia (Van Esterik 1995:249). It has given women the reputation of having a relatively high status, understood as “enjoying economic opportunities; suffering few legal restrictions or damning stereotypes; participating in cultures where the sexes are construed in terms of complementarity and balance rather than differential worth” (Michelle Rosaldo, quoted in Atkinson and Errington 1990:viii). Southeast Asian bilateralism includes ideas of gender relationships that are “flexible and fluid” (Karim 1995:26). While roles may appear hierarchical on the formal level, in informal day-to-day activities “men and women go about doing things which are important to them without asserting who are or which sets of activities are more valuable or indispensable” (Karim 1995:26). Men and women may cross over into one another’s roles without much concern in the community. These cultural role expectations affect women’s work options. Within the village and town, women have freedom of movement and take active roles in agriculture and trading. While labor in southeast Asia is organized according to sex, work roles are not rigidly segregated. Husbands and wives may substitute for one another’s work in cases of absence or disability (Errington 1990:4). In this flexible environment, the sexual division of labor seems “a way of organising tasks” rather than “a means of one group appropriating surplus from another” (Robinson 1988:71). Many work tasks in the Southeast Asian economy take place in the domestic sphere, from which women can engage in a “flexible range of productive activities” (Karim 1995:28). In the home, women have access to family financial resources and the labor input of family members as well as their own work capacity. Since women’s domestic work is valued and results in cash resources as well as food for the family, women have a source of power in their domestic base that overrides “other considerations of biology and gender” (Karim 1995:29). Women’s productive labor and reproductive labor are closely intertwined in this home-based economy.

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Since women can engage in both productive and reproductive activities, they are able to step into men’s productive roles much more easily than men are able to step into women’s domestic roles (Hildred Geertz, cited in Winzeler 1996:143). The Southeast Asian bilateral pattern offers women active and extensive involvement in economic activities. Their management of family finances in particular seems to signal a leading role in the family economy. Some scholars have pointed out, however, that while women manage family money in Southeast Asia, they do not necessarily control its expenditure. Both husbands and wives may be involved in decisions on spending (Hull 1975, cited in Wolf 1992:64). Women may make decisions concerning food but not clothing or household utensils (White and Hastuti 1980, cited in Wolf 1992:64). Others have noted that women are principally responsible for procuring and preparing food and may have trouble establishing a joint family purse. Women may be forced to rely on their own income to feed the family rather than their husband’s sporadic or unreliable income (Mather 1985:160; Wolf 1992:65–66). Women’s money management does not necessarily confer prestige or power in Southeast Asia. In most rural families, there is little money to manage. In conditions of scarcity, the family money manager’s task is to scrape together resources and stretch them to enable the family to have something to eat. “Women hold the purse strings only when the purse is empty,” according to a Thai social activist (Van Esterik 1996:ix). In addition, money management does not have the status in Southeast Asia that it has in the West. The greatest prestige is not accorded to economic power but to spiritual power. To exert force and take action “reveals a lack of spiritual power and effective potency, and consequently diminishes prestige” (Errington 1990:5). Women’s familiarity with money gains them a reputation as calculating and may lower their prestige rather than raise it. Despite these caveats about women’s economic role, the bilateral traditions of Southeast Asia suggest that widows have many resources to draw on in dealing with the challenges of widowhood compared to other developing regions. They have their own kin nearby to help when they become widowed. They have access to the key agricultural resource of land and are customarily involved in economic occupations independent of their husband. Women’s traditional money management means that widows will already be skilled in handling money and stretching small quantities to meet the family’s food needs. They may already be familiar with motivating male family members to contribute to the household budget or with managing without a steady male income. The flexibility of gendered work roles

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and the participation of women in home-based production in Southeast Asia suggest that widows will be able to adapt to male work roles without a great violation of cultural expectations. This Southeast Asian pattern of gender arrangements then can be expected to ease the economic transition to widowhood and open the way for widows to expand their work roles after their husband’s death.

This Study Cambodia is a Southeast Asian country with a preponderance of widows due to the recent wars fought on its territory. Nearly 11 percent of women are widowed and 25 percent of households are headed by women (National Institute of Statistics 1999:xii). The sex ratio is skewed towards women, with 106 women to every 100 men in 2000 (United Nations 2000:19)3 or 93 men to every 100 women (National Institute of Statistics 1999:14). Among middle aged women (40–44 years), the toll of the war years shows in a sex ratio of only 67 men to every 100 women (National Institute of Statistics 1999:14). Cambodia’s widows have faced a lifetime of economic challenges without the labor of their husband. Most widows live in rural areas, the residence of 80 percent of the Cambodian population. They feed their families in a nation that is so poor that it is often considered a “Fourth World” country. Because Cambodia shares Southeast Asian bilateral gender traditions, widows in Cambodia can be expected to have important economic skills in dealing with the challenges of widowhood. The combination of Cambodia’s large number of widows, its poverty, and women’s traditional economic strengths makes it a valuable place to study widows’ economic lives. No studies have focused on Cambodian widows per se. Despite women’s economic strengths, other Cambodia studies single out widows as among the most economically vulnerable (Ledgerwood 1992:27, 1998; Chhoy, Touch, Kham, and Prak 1995:26; Davenport, Healy and Malone 1995:17). This study investigates rural Cambodian widows’ economic coping practices4 and how they manage to survive. It considers how widows marshal resources to feed their family without a male partner. It looks at the economic reliance of widows on their relatives and their children, both boys and girls, and the interest of young widows in remarriage. It investigates how widows deal with gender role expectations to compensate for the loss of their husband’s labor and looks at widows’ access to the important economic resources of land, credit, and education. The study reflects on the consequences of war in widows’ economic lives. Finally, it devises an expla-

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nation of widows’ economic vulnerability despite Cambodian women’s traditional economic strengths. Feminist interview research in a Third World context To collect the data for this study, I used a semistructured interview approach, a favorite tool for feminist research. Feminist researchers are typically women who study women’s experiences as part of the feminist project to make women’s lives visible. Interview research is a favorite tool of feminist researchers for a variety of reasons. Interviews can be openended and flexible, unlike the classic structured survey where every question is predetermined. In an interview, questions can be unstructured, with only a general topic to guide the conversation. Or the questions can be semistructured, with a schedule of questions that can be rearranged or altered as the interview progresses. The purpose of the feminist interview is to allow the interviewed woman to talk about her life in a comfortable format without the constriction of a preconceived order of questions. Such interviews can adapt to a woman’s particular circumstances and perspective and can reveal her point of view and experience of reality. The woman may expand on answers and offer alternative perspectives to the interviewer. In response, the interviewer may take up a new line of questioning if appropriate. This flexible format gives the person interviewed greater influence over the course of the interview and provides more flexibility for the interviewer. Shulamit Reinharz notes that this type of interview “explores people’s views of reality” (Reinharz 1992:18) and is particularly useful in uncovering differences among people. The interview “offers researchers access to people’s ideas, thoughts, and memories in their own words rather than in the words of the researcher” (Reinharz 1992:19). Because of this openness to the interviewee’s perspective, the semistructured interview is an apt vehicle for the feminist aim of giving voice to women and their experiences. In the semistructured or unstructured interview, the development of rapport between the interviewer and the person interviewed is critical. A relationship of trust facilitates interviewees’ willingness to speak with candor about their experiences. Reinharz suggests that it is easier to develop this rapport with a female interviewee if the interviewer is a woman as well. The interview can then be presented as a “woman-to-woman” (Reinharz 1992:23) talk, implying trust, intimacy and self-disclosure. Reinharz notes that rapport can be developed by self-disclosure on the part of the interviewer as well. Such personal sharing can help develop a connection between interviewer and interviewee that opens up the conversation between them.

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The extent to which this connection developed in my interviews with the women in the study was modified by the fact that the interviews were largely translated by an interpreter. While I could understand small bits of the interviewees’ answers in Khmer, I relied on my interpreter to translate the responses into English. The voice of the interviewees was thus mediated by the voice of the interpreter. Because of the crucial role of the interpreter as mediator, I chose interpreters who were female. I oriented each of them to the purpose and methods of my research and gave them feedback during our time together about ways to facilitate our conversations with the interviewees. Many of the questions I asked were answered through translation without problems. These questions were straightforward and uncomplicated, such as how much land they owned, how they accomplished plowing, or if they had enough rice to last the year. With more subtle questions, however, such as their reasons for not remarrying or their experiences with education as girls, it was hard to gain a comprehensive sense of the women’s answers. I often asked the interpreter for clarification of answers on more complicated questions. As a way to overcome the language and cultural barriers and to develop a connection with the women being interviewed, I brought a small photo album to each interview to provide some information about me to the interviewees. The pictures of my son’s recent wedding were especially wellreceived by the women. Despite the differences in dress and location, they all could relate to a son’s wedding and several asked for copies of a picture of myself and my two children at the reception. While such pictures could not erase the enormous differences in social and economic situation between myself and the women, I feel the photos helped to bridge the gap between us and started the interview off on a friendly “woman-to-woman” basis. Snowball sample The women interviewed in the study were selected using a snowball sample approach in which one informant refers the researcher to other possible sources. The sample began with several initial U.S. contacts leading me to people in Cambodia who knew the widows personally. The sample was designed to find a diversity of widows whose stories would illustrate the wide variety of ways that widows support themselves and their families in Cambodia. Two separate avenues were used to connect with widows, one through personal contacts with Cambodians in Massachusetts and the other through non-governmental organizations (NGOs) in Phnom Penh. Two avenues were used to broaden the spectrum of widows interviewed and to counter any bias inherent in a particular avenue.

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Source of contacts: St. Luke’s Episcopal Church Twenty-eight of the women were contacted via three Cambodian-Americans associated with St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Fall River, Massachusetts.5 St. Luke’s Church began to resettle Cambodian refugees in 1979 under the aegis of Episcopal Migration Ministries, the refugee resettlement agency of the Episcopal Church. While the Episcopal Church was the administrative conduit for my three Cambodian-American contacts, none of them was initially Episcopalian. The villages that they came from were ordinary Cambodian villages without any connection to the Episcopal Church or other Christian organizations. Once in the United States, the three Cambodian refugees stayed in touch with the Episcopal Church as well as with their native village in Cambodia and agreed to help me contact widows in their village. One Cambodian woman who had visited her relatives in her home country the previous summer agreed to return with me and interpret for one month. She accompanied me to her native village in the S’ang6 district of Kandal province as well as one other village during her one-month stay.7 We traveled to her village southeast of Phnom Penh by motodup8 since the roads were not passable by car, a journey of about two hours. We stayed at her relative’s home in her village for one week and interviewed eight women at their homes in that village. We also interviewed one woman in a neighboring village who had lived in the interpreter’s native village originally. Our moto driver, the interpreter’s uncle, knew the village well since his wife’s mother lived there. He knew widows in the village and contacted them to see if they would be willing to be interviewed. Then he accompanied us to the interviews, often carrying resin chairs for us to sit on. My first interpreter translated for me in another Kandal village in the Angk Snoul district, the native village of another Fall River contact, a Cambodian man. That man’s three younger sisters still lived there and were our contacts in the village. We traveled to this village on three separate days by car accompanied by the younger brother-in-law of my Fall River contact. The trip to the village west of Phnom Penh took about one and one-half hours by car. Our three interviews each day were arranged by my contact’s sisters, one of whom was a widow herself and one of our interviewees. A second Cambodian woman from St. Luke’s Church met me in Cambodia during a visit to her family and interpreted for me in Kompong Chhnang province, about two hours north of Phnom Penh. We interviewed four women in her home village in the Rolea B’ier district. She also took me to a nearby village where she had some relatives and we interviewed six more women there. The interviews were arranged by this second interpreter

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and her relatives. We stayed in the provincial capital of Kompong Chhnang with some of her more affluent town relatives and traveled to the villages daily by car or motodup, a trip of about one hour. Source of contacts: Non-governmental organizations Five additional women were contacted through two non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working with widows in the area around Phnom Penh. One NGO, the Cambodian Women’s Development Agency (CWDA), was local, funded and staffed by Cambodians. The second NGO, Church World Service, was international, the relief and development agency of the Protestant churches in the United States. The funding for this NGO came from the US; however, the staff members that I dealt with were all Khmer. The two NGOs were recommended to me by a Cambodian umbrella group, Gender and Development for Cambodia. I contacted each NGO and asked if they would be willing to help me interview widows in their program. Both agencies were very cooperative and offered me their transportation vehicles (motos in one case and jeep in the other) and a staff person to travel to their sites. I hired a third interpreter for these interviews, a recent graduate of the sociology department of the Royal University of Phnom Penh.9 Church World Service had an office in the Kien Svay district of Kandal province, about an hour east of Phnom Penh. We interviewed two clients in their microcredit program at the clients’ homes in two rural villages in Kien Svay. Cambodian Women’s Development Agency worked in the rural and suburban areas of the greater Phnom Penh municipality.10 We visited two rural villages in which we interviewed three women. Funding My sources of funding for this research were two committees of the Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, the Sabbatical Committee and the Continuing Education Committee. St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Fall River, Massachusetts also assisted with a four-month paid leave of absence. None of these groups placed any restrictions or specifications on my research and I am deeply grateful for their financial assistance and moral support. Interview procedure The interviews usually took place in or near the interviewee’s home. Often we sat just outside the front door of the stilt house on an elevated porch covered with a thatch roof for shade. Sometimes we would sit on a kdaa ngeur, a wooden platform about 6’ by 6’ and elevated 2’ to 3’ off the ground, placed under a shady tree or in the cooler area under the house.

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Third World Widows’ Economic Vulnerability 21 The interviews lasted from 2 to 2–1/2 hours each. In three cases the interviews were cut short because the woman felt ill or fatigued. Each interview began with an informed consent conversation between the interpreter and the interviewee. The interpreter explained who I was, the purpose of my research, the uses that would be made of the interview, the anonymity of the information with her name and village always protected, her right to end the interview at any time, to take a break or to skip a question, and the cash donation that she would be given in appreciation of her time and cooperation. We told each interviewee that with her permission, we would tape record the conversation as well as take notes. Every woman we talked to agreed to be interviewed and most were eager to tell us about their lives. Several said that they would talk to us all day if needed and seemed very appreciative of the opportunity to speak with people from the United States. Once the woman had agreed to be interviewed, I set up my tape recorder equipment and took out my notebook and pen. During this time, I gave the woman the small book of family photos I had brought to introduce myself across the cultural barriers. I explained the photos to them in simple Khmer while I set up my equipment. Usually a crowd of people gathered around the interview at the beginning including the woman’s relatives, neighbors, and village children. For the first several interviews, I asked the woman if she would like to speak to me privately rather than have so many people gathered around. In every instance, however, the woman replied that it was fine to have people listen in and after a few interviews, I stopped asking this question. Typically, the crowd dispersed after the first few questions, leaving only the immediate family. For the NGO-facilitated interviews, the NGO staff person was often part of the interview or sitting nearby. In most cases, the relationship with the staff person seemed to be friendly and relaxed. Sometimes the staff person would leave my interpreter and me at the woman’s house and return for us later. Each interview followed a similar format covering topics listed on an interview guide . The range of questions included how the widows had rebuilt their economic lives after the Pol Pot era, including accomplishing farm work, food production and shortages, village relationships, and the refugee experience. The questions also addressed current agricultural practices, income-producing activities, access to land and credit, the impact of education, and the widows’ feelings about the future. I tailored each interview to the woman’s particular experiences focusing on things that were unique or different about her case. For instance, one woman had just begun making charcoal as an income-producing activity so we spent some time talking about what is involved in producing charcoal and who her customers would be. An older woman had built her new house virtually alone as

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well as cleared a piece of forest land, both very energetic tasks for a woman of her age. In each of these cases, I spent more time on the unique aspects of that woman’s experiences. At the end of the interview, I thanked each woman for her cooperation and gave her a gift of 20,000 Cambodian riels,11 about US $5. I also gave her a sarong and a kroma, the Cambodian multipurpose scarf worn by both women and men. If there were children around, I gave them some pencils or pens. In most cases, I took a photograph of the woman and her family members to have, with their permission, a souvenir of the occasion. In field research style, I wrote up each interview as soon as possible after it had taken place, usually within a day or two. For the S’ang and Rolea B’ier interviews, I wrote up the interviews the following week once I had returned to my base apartment in Phnom Penh. I followed the detailed notes in my notebook and used the tape recording as a backup to the notes. The photographs of the women served to refresh my memory when a week had passed between the interview and the write-up. Following the interview write-up, I put together some reflections on each interview in a “memo” (Charmaz 1990) section. This process enabled me to begin to analyze the interviews while they were still fresh in my mind and modify my questions as appropriate. By “asking questions of the data” while still in the field, I developed my thinking about gender relationships in Cambodia and about women’s family-oriented economic strategies. Data analysis In order to assess the effectiveness of various practices employed by the women, groups of women were compared to one another within the sample based on amount of land owned, years of education completed, and adequacy of rice output for the family’s needs. The results are suggestive of possible connections and relationships and provide material for future hypotheses. To reduce the extensive body of interview data to manageable proportions, the interviews were organized into uniform sections such as house, family, Pol Pot era, farming, income-producing activity, land, credit, and education. Spread sheets were then constructed around these topics, dividing each into subtopics such as marital history, residence in own village or husband’s, number of children born and how many died, plowing and transplanting practices, yield on rice land, sources of income, use of credit, women’s education, and children’s education. I gave pseudonyms to several widows to allow the reader to follow their story throughout the text. The organized interviews and the spreadsheets were the basis for the core of the data chapters that follow.

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Chapter Two

Cambodian Social and Historical Context

Cambodia shares many Southeast Asian bilateral traditions, formed and expressed in a Khmer setting. Family relationships and gender expectations Khmer-style play a significant part in Cambodian widows’ lives. The cultural traditions of Cambodia have been deeply affected by the extensive civil turmoil of the past few decades. From the colonial experience to American incursions, the Khmer Rouge revolution, Vietnamese invasion, and UN rule, Cambodian life has been pushed and shoved by international events. The cultural and historical context sets the parameters of the economic lives of rural Cambodian widows.

Cambodian Family and Economic Life Kinship patterns Like other Southeast Asian societies, Khmer kinship is bilateral, although personal surnames come from the father’s side. Matrilocal marital residence is the usual custom, with young married couples staying with or near the bride’s mother. The groom typically comes from a nearby village and continues to work land belonging to his own family in the fields surrounding the two villages. The explanation given for this matrilocal arrangement is that a young bride is shy and more reluctant than the groom to leave the parental home. Girls are taught not to go out unescorted and so learn an habitual feminine timidity, while boys are given much more freedom and are more likely to be “adventuresome and self-assured in dealing with new persons and places” (Ebihara 1968:127–8). Most young couples live in the parental home after marriage until they can afford their own house. Some married couples live with the parents permanently to provide labor and support the parents in their old age. 23

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When a parent is widowed, the resident child and spouse are in place to help with work tasks and companionship. Despite the presence of some extended families in Khmer villages, the nuclear family is the basic unit of economic production and consumption. In figuring work obligations and contributions to Buddhist ceremonies, the nuclear family is considered one single social unit rather than a collection of individuals (Ebihara 1968:111). The rights and obligations of family members towards one another are defined by Buddhist precepts, by belief in ancestral spirits who oversee their descendants’ conduct, and by general cultural norms. Legally, the husband is considered the “chef de famille” with nearly absolute powers over his wife, children and household. Buddhist doctrine grants the husband a superior position over other family members. A wife nonetheless has a number of rights and privileges. A husband owes his wife food, shelter, and respect and must get his wife’s permission to enter the monastery. A wife can initiate divorce proceedings. On her part, the wife is the primary caretaker of the household and children and a coworker with her husband in the fields. Women often undertake commercial ventures on their own to earn money for the family (Ebihara 1968:113–4). Parents have considerable legal authority over their children. They have the right to discipline or punish their children and to use their property. They may consent to or veto a child’s marriage. Parents have obligations as well, to nourish and educate their children, provide them with moral guidance, and arrange a suitable marriage. A parent has the legal right to disown or disinherit a child who has offended them, but it is extremely rare. In turn, children are expected to honor and obey their parents, support them in old age, and provide them with a proper funeral. The relationship between mothers and daughters is a close one, particularly in adolescence when the daughter works alongside the mother. In cases of divorce, children usually choose to stay with their mother. Khmer proverbs reflect traditional respect for mothers. One notes, “A father is worth a thousand friends and a mother worth a thousand fathers” (Ebihara 1968:118). Older children in the family help their parents to raise the younger children and frequently become the primary caretaker of infants and toddlers. Younger siblings give their older brothers and sisters respect and deference as if to a parent. Khmer culture encourages affection and loyalty among siblings, and serious disagreements among family members are thought to be punished by watchful ancestral spirits. Siblings commonly lend one another money at no interest and provide child care for one another (Ebihara 1968:121). When parents are deceased, widows may call for help from their older siblings as parent substitutes.

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Cambodian Social and Historical Context 25 Women widowed at a young age generally return to their parents’ or a close relative’s home and may remarry (Ebihara 1968). Widowers tend to be more self-sufficient than widows and live alone until they remarry. Older widows with grown children remain in their own home or join the household of one of their married children. They are often better off than young widows with small children who must care for them and earn the family’s living as well. All widows are pitied by the community and typically see themselves as weak and vulnerable. Widows who have lost their parents as well as their husband are referred to with sympathy as “orphaned widows” (Kusakabe, Yunxian, and Kelkar 1995:WS-89). Women who have been recently divorced, separated or deserted, however, are blamed for their situation and accused of “not being able to keep their husbands ‘on the right track’” (Kusakabe et al. 1995:WS-90). Villagers consider it a moral duty to help a close relative who needs shelter and food. Such as person may be taken into a relative’s home. The sponsor who shelters the relative is almost always a woman, a sort of mother substitute to the needy person such as an elder sister or a maternal aunt. People who are single for some reason usually live with a relative since it is seen as unnatural and lonely for people to live by themselves (Ebihara 1968:136–9). Customs of inheritance Both women and men inherit land from their parents (Ebihara 1968:351). During marriage, a woman’s land remains in her own name and she can dispose of it as she wishes. If she inherits land while married, she retains the title as well. Spouses share one another’s land and goods during marriage but neither spouse can dispose of the other’s property without their consent. In cases of divorce, the wife retains her own land and receives half of the goods and money acquired by the couple during marriage. If the husband dies, the wife assumes legal authority over the marital household (Ebihara 1968:114). Children have recognized property rights as well. Rice fields are often given to children when they marry rather than at the parents’ death. Newly-weds may receive other property as well such as a house site, fruit trees, parental home, or jewelry. Women are the ones who usually transmit and inherit village houses since widowed mothers leave the parental home to their resident daughters (Ebihara 1968:356). The child who takes care of the parents in their old age usually receives a more substantial share of the parents’ property such as the parental home and remaining rice fields. A child who has moved far away usually does not receive any rice fields in the village, while one who has moved to a neighboring village does. If one

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child has married someone affluent, they may receive very little from the parents if there are many other children. A child for whom the parents have financed a big wedding or given a house might receive only a little compared to a still-unmarried child. A child who has failed to care for a parent in their final illness, or who has not attended the parent’s funeral, may be disinherited (Ebihara 1968:357–62). Family money management As in other parts of Southeast Asia, women in Cambodia manage the family finances. Women are seen as more competent than men in handling money, a belief expressed in the Khmer saying, “Women are good with money.” The preference for women money managers in Khmer households is sometimes ascribed to men’s propensity for gambling and drinking with their friends (Smith-Hefner 1993:144). Single people in the household with wage employment are sometimes allowed to keep part of their earnings but often the entire paycheck is handed over to the mother for safekeeping and apportionment. The mother oversees all withdrawals from the family coffers and handles all purchases except the buying and selling of cattle, the husband’s personal property, or implements habitually used by males (Ebihara 1968:318). If several nuclear units live together under one roof, they typically maintain separate budgets. If the extended household is headed by poor elderly parents or a widow, however, the household members are more likely to pool their money (Ebihara 1968). Women’s responsibility for the family’s money does not imply equality with men, however. In disagreements over money, the husband’s view typically prevails (Kusakabe et al. 1995:WS-91). After divorce, ex-husbands rarely send money to support their children. Khmer brides are traditionally instructed to defer to their husband and to uphold his status in the family. The terms by which husbands and wives refer to each other reflect the hierarchical nature of the marital relationship; the wife calls her husband boong1 or older brother while the husband calls his wife qon, younger sister (Smith-Hefner 1993:143). Despite the lack of social restrictions on married women, “inside the household, the power relations seem to be quite against women,” as one study observed (Kusakabe et al. 1995: WS-90). The fear of a husband leaving the household and the attendant social and financial difficulties put pressure on married women to endure mistreatment and unfaithfulness. Gendered work roles Boserup ([1970] 1998) found the irrigation pattern of agriculture in Cambodia, with both women and men contributing to agricultural output,

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Cambodian Social and Historical Context 27 though a female farming pattern prevailed among tribal groups in the outlying regions. Throughout the country, women are heavily involved in the two types of Cambodian agriculture, rice production and chamkar cultivation of fruits, vegetables and other products2 along the rich riverbanks (Ebihara 1968). Many women raise pigs and chickens for sale as well. Rice is the staple crop. Cambodian families eat rice at every meal and it provides the bulk of their caloric intake. A sexual division of labor governs rice agriculture with men plowing, transporting rice, and maintaining the irrigation system. Women prepare the seed rice and sow it, pull up and transplant the rice seedlings, reap the mature rice stalks, winnow the harvested rice, and process rice before cooking. Traditionally, threshing was done by men but now women are likely to thresh as well. In terms of workers, women predominate in the total agricultural labor force (Boserup [1970] 1998:28). The village growing season begins when men plow the nursery beds once the yearly rains have softened the earth. At the same time, women air rice from the previous harvest and warm it in the sun on a palm mat. Then they soak the rice to germinate it and dry it again in the sun before sowing it in bunches in the nursery bed. Over several weeks, the rice seedlings sprout and grow to a height of one or two feet. Groups of women then pull (daq) the dense seedlings up and bundle them for transportation to the main field. To facilitate handling, the women trim the tops, which are fed to the oxen. The bundles of seedlings are put in a pool of water for a day to keep them moist and then left on a dike for a day to harden the roots for transplanting. While crews of women pull and bundle the rice seedlings, men plow the main fields to prepare them for transplanting. Then the men transport the seedlings by ox cart to the main rice field and the female work crews transplant (stung) the seedlings, spacing them neatly to improve the yield.3 The fields have to be newly plowed for the transplanting to take place effectively and the rice seedlings cannot remain out of the soil for more than a day or two. Consequently, the timing and coordination of these phases of rice planting are crucial. Women band together into work crews in order to accomplish this time-sensitive work rapidly. The female crews work one another’s fields in succession, pulling the rice seedlings and then replanting them quickly before they dry out and die. Rainfall is a critical element during this phase of rice agriculture. Too much will flood the fields and drown the seedlings; with too little rain, the seedlings will dry up and die.4 Once the rice has grown to maturity, women cut the rice stalks and place them on dikes alongside the rice fields. Women and men thresh the rice by beating the stalks on an angled board to loosen the rice grains. Then

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the rice is collected into baskets and men transport the baskets home. The stalks are gathered and taken home also to use as hay for the oxen. At the house, women winnow the grain by pouring the rice from baskets held over their head onto a palm mat spread on the ground. The wind carries away the chaff as the rice grains fall to the ground. The rice is then dried in the sun and stored in rice granaries inside or under the house. Sometimes the rice is placed in white bags for storage. It may also be poured into enclosures made of palm mats with the top covered loosely with another palm mat. Rice is husked bit by bit during the year as the family needs it, in a village milling machine.5 The milled husks are collected in a basket and fed to the pigs. When a village farmer becomes widowed, she must compensate for the loss of her husband’s labor in the agricultural cycle. Ebihara found that a child of the opposite sex would often live with a widowed parent to help with tasks assigned to that gender (1968:125). Without an adult child to help, widows must do the men’s agricultural tasks themselves or else arrange for someone to do them. Since women are unlikely to own oxen, they may have to pay for a village plowman and a team of oxen. Many widows may have help with their farm labor, perhaps male relatives who live nearby. Widows without male relatives are likely in more dire straits. As Ledgerwood noted, “the poorest of the poor seem to be widows with children who have no male assistance with the labor of agricultural production” (Ledgerwood 1992:27). It is the coping practices of these impoverished widows that this study aims to explore.

Cambodia’s History of Armed Conflict The lives of widows in Cambodia today are influenced not only by the cultural customs of their country but also by the many armed conflicts of the past six or seven decades. These conflicts have affected widows by killing their family members, disrupting their education, and bombing their rice fields. The political changes brought about by the armed conflicts have had some positive effects for widows, however, especially in educational and land reforms. The first conflict that affected the lives of many of the widows alive today was rural resistance to French colonial rule in Cambodia. France persuaded King Norodom to accept French protection in 1864 and dominated the country well into the twentieth century. Several resistance movements arose to French rule, in particular the Khmer Issarak in the 1940s and 1950s, a guerrilla movement with ties to Ho Chi Minh’s Indochinese Communist Party (Kiernan 1996:12–13). The Issarak staged raids into the

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Cambodian Social and Historical Context 29 Khmer countryside, disrupting rural villages and causing families to flee from threatened areas. Agriculture was hampered and children’s education was interrupted by these guerrilla incursions. Occasionally, villagers were killed in the crossfire, leaving behind widows, widowers, and orphans. One widow that I interviewed, Sokha,6 explained that she had no education because her family was always on the move to get away from the Issarak. When she was 12, her father was kidnapped by the Issarak and died shortly after his return to the family. Her mother died of shock and fright afterwards, leaving the children orphaned. As the oldest child, Sokha took care of her younger siblings. She hired herself out to tend the fire in palm sugar production and to do transplanting. In 1953, a young king installed by the French, Norodom Sihanouk, declared independence from France after an international campaign to win support for the end of colonial rule. One of Sihanouk’s first projects was to expand education into the rural areas. French colonial administrations in Cambodia had placed little value on mass education preferring instead to educate elite young Khmers as a pool of possible colonial civil servants. At the time of independence from France in 1953 there were only 215,000 primary students in the entire country of whom 30,000 or 14 percent were girls (Bilodeau 1955: 30). There were only five secondary schools in Cambodia, three in the capital Phnom Penh and one in each of the two largest provincial towns, Battambang and Kompong Cham (Bilodeau 1955:30). Under Sihanouk, education was expanded to provide primary education to a wider group of young Cambodians. For the first time, girls were admitted to the rural pagoda or wat schools taught by Buddhist monks. By 1964, 33 percent of primary school students and 22 percent of secondary students were girls (Smith-Hefner 1999:127). Several interviewed widows gained access to education for the first time due to Sihanouk’s campaign. One interviewed widow, Chantha, remembered that she attended a renovated wat school as a girl in the late 1950s. It was still unusual at that time for a girl to go to school, but her father insisted that his daughter would have an education. She continued in school until the eighth grade and eventually obtained a coveted job as a school teacher. The Vietnam conflict of the 1960s brought new fighting to Cambodia. In 1966 Sihanouk allowed north Vietnamese forces to bring military supplies from Cambodia’s port, Sihanoukville, across the country7 into north Vietnam. He also allowed Viet Cong troops escaping American searchand-destroy missions to take sanctuary in camps on the Cambodian side of the border (Shawcross 1987:64). United States Special Forces regularly crossed the Cambodian border in search of the Viet Cong bases, supported by tactical air attacks. Shortly after Richard Nixon became President in

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1969, American forces launched B-52 attacks against Cambodia, bombing an area believed to be Viet Cong headquarters. Over the next fourteen months, 3,630 B-52 missions were flown against suspected Viet Cong bases along the Cambodian border (Shawcross 1987:28).8 By June 1970, as the U.S. expanded its mission to support the new government in Phnom Penh under General Lon Nol, the area of U.S. bombing spread from the little populated northeast region south and west into more densely populated areas of Cambodia (Shawcross 1987:216). Neither U.S. forces nor the Vietnamese had accurate information about the location of civilian villages and there was little bomb damage assessment. The areas bombed were inaccessible to the Western press. When the 1973 Paris Peace Agreement forbade bombing of Vietnam and Laos, all American bombing in the area was turned onto Cambodia. According to William Shawcross (1987:219), many of the raids had dubious military usefulness and were carried out for the organizational objective of keeping bombers in use.9 As he tersely noted, “Hundreds of thousands of bombs dropped by the American, South Vietnamese and Cambodian air forces onto Cambodia fell unreported and uncontrolled on areas occupied first by the North Vietnamese and then by the Khmer Rouge” (Shawcross 1987:219). Shawcross suggests that this unrestrained and questionable use of military power was arguably a violation of international law and could be considered a war crime under the Charter of the International Military Tribunal10 (Shawcross 1987:219). Under opposition from the U.S. Congress, the bombing of Cambodia finally came to an end in August 1973. The Cambodian countryside had been bombed by the U.S. military for nearly five years. This widespread bombing for military and political purposes had a significant effect on the Cambodian rural population. Rice fields and villages were bombed for reasons unfathomable to the rural farmers. Rural residents fled areas as they came under attack from the powerful bombers. Villagers were killed, rice fields were abandoned, and ordinary rural life disrupted. One widow recalled that as a young married woman, she had left her village in central Cambodia to live with her soldier-husband in the nearby town. She was a skilled seamstress and rented a stall in the town marketplace to receive customers. When the bombing started, she fled to her home village with her small children. She tried to return to the town periodically to conduct her business, but it was hard and she couldn’t do much sewing. Concurrent with the Vietnam conflict and the Cambodia bombing campaign, a communist guerrilla organization gained strength in the rural areas of Cambodia. Sihanouk labeled them the “Khmers Rouges” or red

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Cambodian Social and Historical Context 31 Khmer (Shawcross 1987:49). They appealed to peasants burdened by debt and threatened with the loss of their land. The movement was strengthened in 1967 when the Sihanouk government brutally repressed a peasant rebellion in Battambang. The Khmer Rouge soon came to be dominated by a Paris-educated militant from a middle class background11 named Saloth Sar, better known by his nom de guerre, Pol Pot. As his movement gained control of the countryside, refugees flooded into the capital Phnom Penh, increasing the population of the city to over two million (Shawcross 1987:318). On April 17, 1975, the Khmer Rouge succeeded in capturing Phnom Penh. The youthful cadres who occupied the city immediately ordered its evacuation at gunpoint. On the credible pretext that the Americans were coming to bomb the city, they told the residents to take only enough supplies for three days. Patients in hospital beds were forced to begin marching. As the mass of humanity left the city, the sick and elderly fell by the wayside, their relatives forced to leave them. The two million people swarming out of the city found that any resistance to orders of the Khmer Rouge cadres was met by immediate execution. Other towns in Cambodia met a similar fate. For the next four years, the Khmer Rouge closed Cambodia’s borders to all but a few Chinese advisors. The communists divided the population into two classes, the “old” people, who lived in villages under early Khmer Rouge control, and the “new” people who came from the cities or from villages that fell late to the communists. Any “new” people associated with the Lon Nol government were executed. Those who wore glasses were at risk as well, since the glasses were taken as a sign of the ability to read. Anyone associated with Vietnam was killed. The method of execution was often a blow from an ax handle to the back of the neck, to save ammunition, with the body left in a distant rice field.12 Many were tortured before execution or as punishment for disobeying orders. The city of Phnom Penh lay deserted for four years, with no electricity, no telephones, no postal service, and no national currency. The only link to the outside world was a fortnightly flight to Beijing and the tales of a few refugees escaping to Thailand, discounted because they were so far-fetched. The Khmer Rouge aimed to remake Cambodia into a radical agrarian commune along Maoist lines. They abolished private property, collectivized the land, and divided people into work groups. Men and women worked in separate brigades, as did teenagers and children. Families were separated for months at a time. Beginning in January 1977, all meals were eaten communally (Shawcross 1987:378). Traditional forms of address, based on family relationships, were replaced with the universal “comrade.” Children were raised communally and encouraged to spy on their parents

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and their village. Schools were closed. Buddhism was abolished and most monks were executed. The temples became storage facilities (Shawcross 1987:377). Entire villages were uprooted and moved to another part of the country, where the villagers were distributed into work groups. Rice production suffered under Khmer Rouge administration. To bolster their international reputation, the Khmer Rouge exported rice as an indicator to the outside world of their revolution’s success. In reality, Cambodians were starving for lack of rice. It is believed that some two million people died under the Khmer Rouge, most from starvation and disease, out of a 1974 population of 7.9 million (Shawcross 1987:389). One older widow that I interviewed, Ol, lost her husband and five children during the Pol Pot era. They were desperate for food and resorted to eating bamboo. Their stomachs swelled up and they died. Ol lost four additional children to starvation in the aftermath of the Pol Pot era when food was still very scarce. Another widow, Rin, lost her husband, most of her children, her parents, and all but one of her siblings under Pol Pot. Many Cambodian families suffered similar devastating losses of spouses, children, parents, extended family, and lifelong neighbors under the cruelty and mismanagement of the Khmer Rouge. Khmer Rouge domination of Cambodia came to an end in January 1979, when Vietnamese forces captured Phnom Penh after a one-month offensive. A flood of refugees escaped across Cambodia towards Thailand. Several camps were established on the Thai side of the border to accommodate them, most notably Khao-I-Dang, a camp run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Within Cambodia, those who did not flee to Thailand made their way slowly back to their home village. The widows in this study were scattered across Cambodia in Khmer Rouge work brigades at the end of the Pol Pot era. Along with hundreds of thousands of others, they returned to their home villages to reunite with lost family members and rebuild on familiar territory. Most found their old homes destroyed and other displaced people living in their village. A number of widows went to neighboring villages that were not yet peopled by returnees or went to a relative’s village nearby. Some found family members already there. One went to her mother-in-law’s house and found her daughter, a niece, and a nephew who had returned a few days before. Her son and husband had both died under Pol Pot. Many widows, on their return to their village, found no home and few relatives. Most families in every village had lost many members, often without any knowledge of the place or circumstances of their death. The losses were hard for the families to accept. One widow, Sophea, still hoped that her husband, who had disappeared during the Pol Pot era, would one day return.

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Cambodian Social and Historical Context 33 The Pol Pot era not only depleted families but also damaged village relationships. The social solidarity that had existed among the villagers before the war was difficult to reconstitute with the shuffling of people around Cambodia. The lifelong relationships among village families were lost forever. Returning families were emotionally and physically exhausted by the Khmer Rouge devastation and had difficulty establishing relationships of trust with families unknown to them. The Vietnamese installed a former Khmer Rouge cadre, Hun Sen, as their administrator in Cambodia. The Vietnamese-led government continued the collective agriculture and land arrangements of the Khmer Rouge though with great modifications. Each village was organized into collective work groups called krom samaki13 or solidarity group. Each krom comprised ten to fifteen households. There were several different forms of collectivization that each village could choose. In the fully collectivized arrangement, all labor was undertaken collectively and the harvest was divided among the workers according to the number of days that they worked.14 Other arrangements were partially collectivized, with land divided out to krom members but with collective ownership of oxen and plows and collective labor. Part of the rationale for the krom samaki system was the lack of male workers. The arrangement was designed to help the many widows who lacked agricultural labor. Plowing, for instance, was done by male members of the collective and widows did not have to worry about paying for it. Widows had mixed feelings about the system, however. Some thought that it was unfair that everyone got the same share regardless of how hard they worked (Kusakabe et al. 1995:WS-89). Others preferred to own their own land even if it required making arrangements for plowing (Ledgerwood 1998:10). In 1989, the Vietnamese officially abandoned the krom samaki system due to popular discontent and distributed the land to private ownership (Kusakabe et al 1995). The constitution was amended guaranteeing citizens the right to own, use, and inherit land that they themselves currently lived on and farmed. Acquiring land for speculation or renting land out to others were both forbidden. In a nationwide land distribution, farm land was divided up according to the number of people in each krom samaki, including children. Families with many members got larger parcels of land than families with only one or two people. Widows with one or two children got less land than married couples with many children. Some women did not receive land, however, because their husbands were ill and could not work or because the women were away from the village trading or studying. On

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their return to the village, the land had been allocated already to others. Landless widows were hard pressed to rent land because of their lack of male manpower (Chhoy et al 1995:20). In some areas, people drew lots for the land (Kusakabe et al. 1995:WS-89). There were also charges of manipulation by the village leaders who controlled the land distribution process in each locality. One widow, Leang, reported that in her village everyone got seven ares15 a person. She had five people in her family and so she received 35 ares. She thought the distribution process was fair because everyone in the village received seven ares. Laughingly, she remembered that the village head, the mae phoum,16 received a little more than the others. Leang wanted to regain some of her family’s former land, from before the Pol Pot era, in addition to her regular distribution. She “sweet-talked” the mae phoum and he gave her the house land her family had owned in the village. She used it to grow vegetables to sell for cash income. In September 1989, the Vietnamese officially withdrew their army from Cambodia as part of geopolitical changes due to the demise of the cold war. The Soviets had supported the Vietnamese in Cambodia to counter Chinese influence with the remnants of the Khmer Rouge in the northwestern part of the country. When these communist superpower rivalries shifted, the Vietnamese lost their patron and source of funding. The United Nations supervised a national election in 1992, and the Royal Government of Cambodia was formed. The following chapters will illustrate the implications of this history of armed conflict and civil upheaval for rural widows’ economic lives. The study will explore the extent to which traditional Cambodian culture helps or hinders the economic coping practices of widows. While every culture is unique, the experience of bilateral customs of rice cultivation and the disruptions of armed conflict are found in many countries and regions. The stories of Cambodian rural widows’ economic lives can deepen our understanding of rural poverty and gender relationships.

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Chapter Three

“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity

The “Rice Plus” Economic Strategy The predominant economic strategy of the interviewed rural widows consisted of rice agriculture supplemented by a diversity of microenterprises and wage labor, an approach that may be called “rice plus.” The rural women relied mainly on subsistence rice cultivation to feed their families. Many women were not able to grow enough rice to last until the following harvest leaving a hunger gap of several months in some cases. To feed the family during this lean time, female household heads used cash income from diverse microenterprises to purchase rice. This “rice plus” strategy patched together enough rice for the family to have a daily supply of food the entire year. Sometimes the widows grew other food such as fruits and vegetables, raised chickens and pigs, or gathered wild vegetables and shellfish. In most households studied, the family did not consume these extra food items but sold them in order to purchase rice, a less expensive food. The widows relied heavily on their own labor power and carried out the bulk of the agricultural and microenterprise work. They also called on the labor of other household members. Under the female head’s direction, all members of the family household, both adults and children, worked to produce or acquire food and other goods for the family. The success of the “rice plus” strategy relied on this cooperative family labor. The work life of Dara, one widow that I interviewed, illustrates this family-based “rice plus” approach. Dara’s husband had died ten years earlier due to heart problems. Before his illness, he and Dara farmed their land together. After his death, Dara sowed, transplanted, and reaped the rice paddies each year, growing enough rice to feed her large family. Dara’s four daughters worked with her in the rice fields. She taught them transplanting and reaping skills as young teenagers. When the older daughters married 35

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and moved into their own houses in the village, they continued to work with Dara in her fields during the growing season. Under the “rice plus” arrangement, the female head of household managed the family resources and assumed responsibility for feeding the family. The various household members did not maintain separate budgets or savings. Rather, all resources acquired by family members individually or cooperatively, including the rice harvest, other agricultural produce, and income earned through microenterprises and wage labor, were turned over to the female head. She then allocated resources to the family members as needed. Widows and their family members relied on multiple sources of income to acquire cash for their family needs. Davenport et al. (1995) refer to this approach as a “portfolio” of income activities. The women did not rely on just one microenterprise but typically had several. When one did not work well, another might succeed in earning cash. The widows thus spread their economic risk through diversification. For instance, Dara earned income from producing palm thatch used to side and roof rural homes. She also made palm mats, traditionally used for eating and sleeping, and sold them to other households in the village. Dara collected fire wood in the forest near her home and always had a supply in her yard for sale to her neighbors. Dara’s youngest daughter, who was single and still lived at home, had a tiny retail business selling after-school candies to village school-children. Dara gave her daughter money to buy the snacks and the daughter turned over any proceeds to her mother for the household expenses. Before Dara’s husband died, he had a palm-sugar enterprise, collecting palm sap from his trees and selling the semi-solid syrup that Dara produced from the sap. After his death, Dara’s daughter and son-in-law carried on the palm-sugar business. While the young couple lived with Dara, they turned the income over to her for family expenses. Often, young adults in a widow’s family worked for a wage in a factory or construction project. Development efforts in Cambodia such as the export garment industry or construction projects in municipal areas provided rural families with an important source of income. If the job was close enough that the young person could commute from home, the rural household received a significant financial boost from this modern income even when transportation and food expenses were figured in. If the job was too distant for commuting, however, the young people had to live away from home with city expenses that greatly eroded the income remitted back to the rural family. Dara’s third daughter, for instance, worked at a garment factory in the capital city, Phnom Penh. She earned $20 or $30 per month and gave her mother more than half her earnings. She had to keep some of her paycheck

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 37 to pay for the apartment she shared with other young women next to the garment factory. Her remittances to her mother provided income for current family expenses and contributed to the family purse for major expenses such as weddings.

Household Variations in Strategy The form of the family-based “rice plus” strategy depended on the age of the widow, the number of children she had, and her ability to work. Ablebodied widows with adult children, like Dara, typically had several family workers to contribute to the family economy. By contrast, young widows with small children had to do much of the work themselves. Disabled widows relied on their children’s labor, while elderly widows typically lived with adult children who provided the bulk of their support. Childless widows had fewer options and looked to their own labor and help from their extended relatives. Young widows Young widows with small children managed their many economic and child care tasks mostly on their own. They put their children to work at an early age, often four or five years old. Sometimes the children assisted their mother or older sibling with farm or household tasks. At other times, they had their own task such as minding oxen, feeding chickens, or selling rice desserts made by their mother. Lim’s household illustrates the “rice plus” arrangement for a young widow and her children. Lim’s husband died of malaria after only one week of illness. He was 28 years old and they had two children ages 12 and 9. Lim carried on with rice cultivation after her husband’s death and raised pigs and chickens for sale. She wove palm thatch for house repairs and sold the sections to a town trader. She recently had learned to make charcoal for sale and had her first batch ready for a merchant from town. Children in young widows’ homes contributed their labor and any income earned to the household budget managed by their mother. Schoolage children typically went to class for part of the day, usually the morning, then worked the rest of the day at productive tasks under the supervision of their mother or an older sibling. Lim’s two children, for instance, worked at her side in the rice paddy after school, pulling rice seedlings and transplanting them under her direction. Lim’s older child, a boy, learned to climb village palm trees and collected palm nectar for his mother to cook into palm sugar. He collected enough for family consumption only due to his youth. In addition to palm

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nectar, the boy helped Lim by collecting palm fronds for weaving from wild trees in the forest. Lim carried the leaves home in a bundle on her head. The two harvested leaves from one palm tree each day. As the boy grew older, he became strong enough to plow his mother’s fields. Lim’s younger child, a girl, watched a neighbor’s cows after school and earned a small amount of cash for her mother. The involvement of children in work from an early age resulted in very different parent-child relationships than in industrialized countries. Children were seen as workers and productive assets, not costs or financial liabilities. Large families meant more workers rather than additional mouths to feed. As the children grew older, they took on more and more responsibilities and helped bear the financial burden of the household. A young widow with many children was in a better economic position over her lifetime than a widow with few children. Disabled widows Several interviewed widows had illnesses that prevented them from working on a daily basis. Medical care is spotty in rural Cambodia and is provided only on a fee-for-service basis. Poor widows without cash could not afford to pay for treatment and often did without. Their children did the necessary agricultural work to feed the family and raised income through microenterprises. Several teenagers in the sample cared for their sickly mother, producing the family’s food on their land, preparing daily meals, and raising the livestock. Vy, for instance, was a disabled widow whose husband had died from injuries he received during the Pol Pot conflict. The Khmer Rouge sent him into the mountains to collect wood and he stepped on a land mine. The shrapnel from the explosion damaged his health and eventually caused his death some fifteen years later. Vy had been sickly and nervous since her husband’s death. She got dizzy easily and would black out. Because of her health problems, she could not farm. She had four children, a son and a daughter who were already married and lived nearby in the village, and two teen children at home with her. The teens went to school in the morning and did the farm work in the afternoon. They also raised chickens to sell. Vy’s married children sent prepared food to the house several times a week. Occasionally, Vy felt well enough to produce palm mats and palm thatch to repair their house. Elderly widows The widows’ economic strategy for the future, their personal social security plan, was to take care of their children in their youth so that in their

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 39 old age, the children would take care of them. The women’s investment in their relationships with their children was their economic security rather than any money assets the mother might have saved. This sort of security was a truly “social” security because it was based on social relationships, not money. The widows trusted in this social capital to provide for their old age. Women’s expectation that their children would take care of them contrasts dramatically with industrialized countries like the United States where elders typically prize their independence, do not want to depend on their children, and rely on financial capital for their old age. The number of children was an important factor in the rural mothers’ social security plan. If the widow had several children before her husband died, she was better off than a widow with fewer children. The consequence of women being widowed in their youth was not only the loss of their husband but also the loss of children they might have had with their husband. The effectiveness of adult children in supporting their widowed mother depended on the children’s success in farming or earning money. Children who were poor subsistence farmers had less capability to help their widowed mothers than children who had a small business or a job. The reliability of children as social security for their widowed mother depended on the children’s emotional attachment to their mother and their sense of responsibility for her. Children who lived at home with their mother contributed substantially to the family upkeep. When unmarried children left home to work in construction or the garment industry, they continued to turn over most of their paycheck to their mother as long as they were unmarried. Married children who lived at a distance from their mother were less likely to be involved in their mother’s support. They visited on holidays only, bringing an occasional gift of cash or food. While welcome, these gifts did not amount to the same support that a mother could count on from a resident child. If the mother had some assets, such as a house, land or business, the child with whom she lived often took responsibility and control of the assets as the mother got older. On the mother’s death, the caretaking child was the likely heir for her assets. A widow with some assets had more leverage with her children and more capability to make choices about her care as an elderly person. Elderly widows in the study typically lived with an adult child. The older children in a family would set up their own household when they married. However, the youngest daughter and her husband often stayed in the mother’s household after marriage and took care of her as she grew older. If the mother was still able to farm, she continued to manage the household money and food resources and took responsibility for providing the family

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food. When she became too old or infirm to do substantial work, her adult daughter assumed money management and household food provision. The practice of daughters providing for their elderly mothers comprised an effective rural social security system for several interviewed widows, such as the case of Ching. Ching lived with her younger daughter, the daughter’s husband, and their five children. Ching’s husband had died shortly after the Pol Pot era at age 75 and she had survived him for over 20 years. Ching’s daughter was devoted to her and felt responsible for her elderly mother’s care. The daughter noted matter-of-factly, “After marriage, you have to support your mother.” Ching had not done agricultural work for many years. She had contributed to the household economy, however, by taking care of the grandchildren, thus freeing her daughter to work in the fields. Her daughter’s husband worked in the commune1 as a teacher in the mornings. In the afternoons, he helped his wife with rice cultivation. The family had a sturdy wooden house with Chinese good luck decorations.2 Ching had plenty of food to eat and felt optimistic for the future. She had a granddaughter about to graduate from high school and Ching hoped that she would become a teacher like her father. If an elderly widow did not have a daughter, the social security system worked less well. An elderly widow without a daughter usually lived with an unmarried son or in her own house. No widows in the sample lived under the same roof as a daughter-in-law. Sometimes the widow’s house was on the same house lot as her son and his wife.3 The widow had her own dwelling but ate with her son and his family. In other cases, the widow lived elsewhere in the village but visited her son’s or another relative’s house at mealtime. One such widow was Sokha, whose father had been kidnapped by the Issarak. She had two sons and had divided her land to them when they married. She had retained only a tiny parcel for herself. When her own rice ran out, she visited her older son’s family and ate their rice. She was worried about her future because she felt that her daughters-in-law had to support their own children. Both her sons were poor farmers with only a little land. She had little hope that their circumstances would improve. Some elderly widows, faced with their declining years, took up the religious role of daun-chi to earn merit for their next life. They took vows as lay devotees and spent most of their time in the commune temple. Their daily activities included periods of meditation and study of Buddhist scripture. They shaved their head as a sign of worldly disregard and wore distinctive garments, either white for special ceremonies or the more practical everyday black sambot (skirt) and white blouse. These elderly lay devotees no longer

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 41 engaged in productive work in child care or agriculture and in particular gave up raising pigs and chickens. They wanted to avoid killing animals so that they could acquire Buddhist merit for their next incarnation. They hoped to be reborn in a better life in which they would not be widowed. The elderly widow Ching had become a daun-chi and always wore a black skirt and white blouse. Every month, her daughter shaved her head. Ching attended tngay sel4 services at the commune temple several times a month and used donations to purchase food for the monks. If the monks needed to arrange a celebration, they often solicited her help and advice. Ching prayed every night at home for the well-being of the next generation. She hoped that the merit she earned through these activities would open a place in heaven for her when she died. By becoming daun-chi, older women left productive work for a less physically demanding role. It wasn’t considered a retirement to be enjoyed but a religious vocation to prepare for death and the next life. It allowed elderly women to give up the productive work that they were no longer physically able to do while maintaining their status in the family and the community. The virtue of attending temple ceremonies and offering prayers gave the daun-chi a new role which their families honored. Unlike Cambodian Buddhist monks, daun-chi do not confer merit on people who bring them offerings (Smith-Hefner 1999:54). While monks may rely for their daily food on donations from the local populace, the daun-chi have no such support base among worshippers and must pay for their food. Ching and other interviewed daun-chi received food from their children to support their temple attendance. Sometimes the children gave additional offerings so that the daun-chi could offer food to the monks, a traditional merit-making activity. Children’s support of their mother’s daun-chi role was considered the ideal closing chapter of the family social security system. Childless widows A widow without children had fewer choices than widows with children. They mostly relied on their own labor. Sometimes childless widows lived with extended family members, contributing their labor to a larger household and pooling their income. Sophea, for example, had lost her husband during the Pol Pot era. She was only twenty-three years old and they had not yet had children. Sophea lived with her elderly father who had helped her with the farming before his retirement. Sophea’s younger widowed sister and her son were also in the household. The sister worked at a lumber factory for a wage. Sophea earned income from selling vegetables that she grew on a large plot near a lake. The two sisters pooled their income and had just purchased a new

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wooden house. Despite her current good fortune, Sophea felt that her future was precarious. She was uncertain if her nephew would be able to support both Sophea and her sister in their old age. Cambodian tradition prescribes that a boy leaves his mother’s home to take up residence with his wife in her village. Sophea worried about her nephew leaving the household when he married. She had other brothers and sisters but they lived far away. Other childless widows lived alone but relied on nearby relatives for assistance. They also worried about who would care for them in their old age. Vanna, for instance, had lost her husband during the Pol Pot era. Her only child, a daughter, also died under the Khmer Rouge. After the war, Vanna returned to her natal village and joined her two surviving siblings. She received a small parcel of land in the 1980s land distribution and lived in a modest house of her own. Her sister moved to a distant village when she married and Vanna never saw her. Vanna’s brother was still in the village, however, and often helped her with plowing. Like Sophea, Vanna felt insecure about her future. She was on good terms with her brother and his son, but she worried about possible problems in her relationship with them. She felt that if she had children of her own, she would be in a better position.

Family Solidarity Family as the unit of production The spirit of family cooperation and mutual responsibility essential to the “rice plus” arrangement may be called family solidarity or kruosa samaki.5 Household members from young children to elderly parents worked at various tasks to support the family enterprise of obtaining sufficient food. The female household head organized family members to undertake various work tasks and served as the family treasurer as well as the primary farmer and trader. Children worked at their mother’s side while teens, and young adults took on market or wage work outside the household. The unit of production was the family household, not the individual members of the family. Under the Vietnamese during the 1980s, the unit of production was the work group or krom samaki6 consisting of ten or more families. With the return to private property, the unit of agricultural production reverted to the traditional family household. The same spirit of samaki or solidarity was an essential part of the effectiveness of the family production unit. These cooperative family relationships took place in an economy of scarcity. The widows’ families struggled each year to have enough food to eat and did not have surplus income to divide or dispute. In most of the

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 43 women’s households, the rice grown cooperatively by the family was the main source of food and was used exclusively to feed the family. It often did not last the entire year and the family earned cash to buy rice in order to survive until the new harvest. In poorer households, the widow had to borrow rice and pay it back out of the new harvest, diminishing the rice available to feed the family the following year. The motivation for family members to cooperate in the family work endeavors was the recognition on everyone’s part, including young children and teens, that if they did not work cooperatively they would not have food to last for the whole year. Children were willing workers in this economy of scarcity and eager to help their mother. While some children ate the snacks they were supposed to be selling, most children were proud to return to their home with cash for their mother. The obedience and cooperation that children accorded their mother was due to the recognition that their labor was needed to feed the family, a structural concern. The Cambodian cultural value, that it is expected, good, and proper for children to obey their parents, is likely based on or at least reinforced by this structural reality of food scarcity. Extended family safety net In times of trouble, the extended family provided a network of support, a family safety net. Widows turned to their extended family members first when they and their children needed help. If their parents were still living, widows returned to their family home and lived there with their children. If the parents had died, women turned to their siblings for assistance. Siblings often helped one another plow and transplant and assisted with school fees or other school expenses for their nieces and nephews. They provided a patch of land to put a house on or invited the widow and her children to live with them. Sometimes siblings pooled their income and lived together on a permanent basis, especially if they were sisters without husbands. Relationships with siblings were thus an important part of the family safety net. Relationships with more distant family members such as uncles or cousins also were part of the widows’ support networks. For childless widows such as Sophea and Vanna, nieces and nephews were critically important relatives, the ones they hoped would care for them in old age. The good relationships needed to mobilize family support were an important part of widows’ economic resources, the social capital they banked on to provide for them in need or in old age. Family solidarity not only provided for the widow but also worked in reverse. In some cases, the widow was the safety net for other family members in distress. Dara fed not only the children who lived with her but also

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a married daughter and her six children. The daughter’s husband had fallen from a palm tree while collecting nectar and was disabled. Chantha, the school teacher, provided a home for her grandson whose divorced mother had remarried, to help her daughter out with her new marriage. An elderly widow, Heng, had opened her home to an orphaned granddaughter who came to live with her at the age of three. When the widow later became blind, the granddaughter began to cook and by the age of ten, made all the family meals for her grandmother and her youngest uncle who still lived in the family home. Economic importance of children’s marriages: Widows’ social security The most important relationship in the widows’ lives was with their children. While living at home, children provided needed labor. In old age, children were the widows’ social security. Given the critical role of children to the widow, the marriage of her children took on great importance. A new family member of good character who brought productive skills into the household offered the promise of a good future for the widow’s child as well as her own old age. To maintain continuing contact with her married child and provide for her own future maintenance, the widow needed a good relationship with her son-in-law or daughter-in-law. Cambodians practice matrilocal residence after marriage. The groom joins the bride and her family in her village, often in her parent’s home until the young couple can afford their own home. For a widow with daughters, this custom assures her the continuing labor of family members and care in her old age. However, for widows with sons only, this matrilocal practice threatens to leave them without support. Sokha, for instance, lived alone because she had no daughters. Though she visited her son often and ate with his family when her own rice ran out, she did not have the daily companionship and nurture of a resident child. When a widow did have a daughter, she usually lived with the daughter and son-in-law in her old age. Because of the importance of the widow’s relationship with her son-in-law, the interviewed women were keen on arranging their daughters’ marriages. Some were open to allowing their sons to choose their own wife, given the changing times. But they drew the line at their daughters and planned to follow the traditional practice of arranged marriage. They looked for men of good character who respected older people. The money that the young man brought into the family was not seen as important as his willingness to be a constructive and respectful member of the extended family. The Cambodian practice of parents arranging their children’s marriage is often seen as a cultural feature. However, it may be based on the structural

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 45 need, in a subsistence economy, to find a spouse compatible with the parents who will contribute positively to the family economy and support the mother when she becomes widowed. If a widow’s relationship with her children and their spouses deteriorates, she may be left on her own, as the story of Seak illustrates. Seak had lived with her two daughters in a house she had built after returning to the village at the end of the Pol Pot time. Her older daughter moved into her own home when she married a village man. When the younger daughter married, her new husband came to live with his bride in Seak’s house. As a wedding present, Seak deeded the house over to them. Before long, Seak discovered that the son-in-law drank excessively. In one confrontation, he attempted to hit Seak. To avoid further conflicts, Seak left the home she had lived in for nearly twenty years. She didn’t want to live with her older daughter whose husband drank, too. So Seak constructed a new house on some rice land a neighbor loaned to her. She bought the wood for the frame and village neighbors helped her to erect it. She made the palm thatch sections herself and her nephew fastened them to the roof frame. She did the rest of the construction work herself. It took her five months in all to build her new house. Neither of her daughters nor her sons-in-law helped her. Seak attributed the problems with her sons-in-law to the fact that she did not arrange the marriages. Her two daughters had chosen their own husbands and Seak felt they had chosen poorly. If she had arranged the matches, she would have felt more involved in the success or failure of the marriages. While Seak did not feel responsible for the poor marriages, her life was drastically affected by them. Because of the family conflict, she lived on her own as she faced her elderly years rather than being protected and cared for in the safety of her family home. Her extended family served as a safety net in this case, providing Seak with people to help her in her misfortune. Neighbors also aided her, recognizing her predicament. Seak’s social relationships gave her alternatives to relying on her nuclear family. Nonetheless, she felt the loss of a good relationship with her two daughters was a dire and regrettable turn in her life. Widows’ disinterest in remarriage Widows may consider remarriage as a way to improve their economic circumstances. Two incomes can stretch farther than one, and a new husband would presumably help the widow with her agricultural work and her children. Despite these possible economic and personal benefits, most widows in the study were uninterested in a new marriage. Elderly Heng, Chantha the teacher, and the childless Sophea all had turned down marriage proposals.

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Many widows said that they were too old to remarry. The elderly women noted that they just wanted to go to the temple to pray. One wanted to concentrate on her next life so she wouldn’t be a widow. The widows remarked that they wanted to depend on themselves and that they were loathe to give up their independence. “Why do I need a husband?” Ching asked. Another elderly widow said, “I wanted to be independent for the sake of my children, I wanted to support them myself.” Lim and Leang, who both had young children at home, said that they only wanted to take care of the children and provide a good future for them. Marriage was equated in the widows’ minds with dependence despite the substantial economic role of women in Cambodian households. The dependence they feared was not an economic or structural one but a cultural dependence, the custom of the wife deferring to the male as the household head. As the female head of household, the widows could make their own decisions about finances, their children’s schooling and marriages, and business ventures. Under a husband as household head, they would have had a very similar workload but less authority. The women would have had to give up the headship of their own household and defer to male authority, and they rejected that change. In addition to the loss of household authority, a number of women had unhappy memories of their previous marriage. Some women had been lied to by their husband or his mother concerning other wives. In several cases, the husband had left the wife when she was pregnant or nursing their child and left them penniless with debts. Dara remembered that her husband had not been a hard worker and she had done most of the farming work herself, including the plowing. She didn’t think that things would have been better for her family if he were still alive. Other widows remarked that their husbands had spent the scarce family money on drinking and gambling with their friends. “One husband was enough!” one said. While the widows knew of some successful remarriages, most rejected the odds and preferred to remain on their own. The widows were skeptical that a new husband would be good to their children and had no faith in men’s ability to care for children. The elderly widows Heng and Sokha had worried that a second husband would look down on their children or even hurt them. Other widows reasoned that a second husband would have children of his own and worried that the two sets of children would not get along. The widow would have more work taking care of the new husband’s children as well as her own. The widows were loyal to their children and viewed a possible husband as a threat to the children rather than an asset to the family. The

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 47 women placed their hopes in their children’s future and mobilized their resources to give their children as much help as possible. They expected their children to care for them in their old age and oriented themselves to their children’s well-being. The fear of dependence that they voiced in speaking of a new husband did not seem to be a factor when thinking about their elderly dependence on their children. Enough rice? The success of rice cultivation as a rural family’s main occupation can be measured by whether the family produces enough rice to feed the household until the following harvest. Of the 18 interviewed widows who farmed their own rice land,7 only seven usually had enough rice to feed their household all year. Eleven usually ran out of rice before the next harvest. To feed their family during the hunger gap, the widows borrowed rice, borrowed money, or earned cash through various income-producing microenterprises to purchase additional rice. Leang, for instance, ran out of rice in May, only halfway through the agricultural year. She borrowed from a moneylender to buy rice until the December harvest. Leang grew vegetables in addition to rice. She felt that if she could sell her vegetable crop at a good price, she would have enough cash to pay off the moneylender. The price of vegetables was very low at the time of the interview, however, and she could barely pay the interest on her loan, much less the principal. Often widows sold their pigs, chickens, fruit or vegetables for rice in order to have enough food to last the whole year. Some widows grew a little rice on their own land and relied on their children or other relatives to make up for shortages. Oeung ran out each year and bought rice with money that her adult children gave her. Sometimes she borrowed rice from her neighbors and paid them back at harvest time. Sokha grew only a small quantity of rice because she had given most of her land to her children. When her own rice ran out, she ate at her children’s or another relative’s house. Flooding and lack of rain threatened the rice yield and affected the price that widows paid for rice. Most widows gave their rice yield as two figures, one with enough rain and one with little rain. In a bad year, everyone’s rice yield was low. Then rice was scarce, fewer people had rice to loan or sell, and the price of rice rose dramatically. When only a few households ran short of rice, due to small landholdings or isolated flooding, other households in the village had rice to lend or sell. Then the price of rice was more stable. The price always went up just before the harvest, however, when the demand for rice was highest. When a widow depleted her stores of rice before the harvest, she had to borrow or purchase rice at a high

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price. The difficulty for widows was the lack of cash income to purchase available rice and the lack of credit to borrow money to buy rice. One widow, Narin, managed during difficult years by putting together income from her adult children and her city relatives. Narin owned land near a lake that usually provided enough rice to feed her family. However, flooding the previous year had completely destroyed her crop.8 She had no rice to feed herself or her two children still at home. Her older children gave her cash from their jobs at a garment factory so that she could buy rice. At the time of our interview, Narin’s rice had run out and the garment workers had not yet gotten paid. She was preparing to go to Phnom Penh to ask her relatives for some money to tide her over until her children’s next paycheck. Three widows who usually had enough rice fed not only themselves and their single children but other relatives as well. These women had larger land holdings than most of the widows, 92 ares on average.9 Dara fed eleven people in all, including two single children at home, a married daughter who came with her six children to eat at her mother’s, and a single daughter who lived with relatives but came home occasionally to eat. Dara usually had enough rice to feed everyone from her one hectare of rice land. Khoeurn fed her own two children as well as a grandson and a niece who lived with her from her one hectare of rice land. Only in a bad year did she have to buy rice.

Microenterprises: Source of Cash Income Most widows interviewed combined their rice cultivation with incomeproducing activities which brought cash into the family economy, the “rice plus” strategy. The widows needed cash to buy rice before the harvest if the family’s own stores ran out. They bought other sorts of food such as fish and vegetables. Staples such as oil, salt and tea were purchased with cash. Widows needed cash for clothing and for ceremonial occasions such as weddings and funerals. Occasionally a widow invested in some productive equipment such as a rice mill. To raise money for these purchases, widows and their children engaged in microenterprises, small scale entrepreneurial activities which brought in modest but significant amounts of money. All cash earned by the family members was treated as collective family income in the spirit of family solidarity and was handed over to the female head of household who saved it or used it to pay for family expenses. Some of these microenterprises involved hunting and gathering wild items from the natural environment to sell them to other villagers or in an

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 49 established market. Sometimes the gathered wild item was processed before being sold. Other microenterprises concerned agricultural activities such as raising livestock or growing fruits and vegetables and selling them at maturity. Sometimes interviewees engaged in trading businesses, buying livestock, produce or processed wild materials from their neighbors and then reselling them at a small markup in the central market. Occasionally, food ingredients were purchased at a market, then processed and resold for a small profit. Finally, some microenterprises involved services to other villagers. Cambodians learn the gains and losses in village economics from an early age. Children are often given chicks to raise as a way to learn microentrepreneurship. They must attend to their animals daily and prevent them from dying, a total loss. They plan ahead for the best return on their investment and decide whether to sell the chicken’s eggs or raise them to chicks. They must learn to market their products and to find the best price. Through trial and error, under the watchful guidance of their elders, children learn the risks and rewards involved in the village marketplace. The adult women interviewed demonstrated their understanding of village economics. They showed a willingness to take calculated risks, such as invest in piglets or buy up rice when the price was low. When a vegetable crop didn’t pay, widows dropped it for another more likely to be profitable. One widow gave away produce whose price had plummeted as a way to build good customer relations. Women developed niches that became their own in the village, such as trading vegetables, producing charcoal, or weaving palm mats and thatch. They saw the forest or local streams as productive resources yielding firewood or shrimp that could be sold. Their use of the land was efficient because they had so little of it. Every bit of their rice field and often most of their house land as well was planted with food-producing plants. Hunting and gathering A number of interviewed women earned income by hunting and gathering wild flora and fauna and then selling these items to their neighbors or in a market setting. The activities that women described involved wild vegetables, fish, and wood. Some widows gathered wild vegetables and sold them. Wild vegetables could be gathered from the rice paddies during the growing season or from the forest at other times. Widows without land could earn money this way. Wild vegetables provided the main income for one widow. Bopha was a sickly widow who gathered wild vegetables when she was feeling well enough to work. She and her fourteen-year-old daughter found the vegetables in flooded rice paddies while carefully avoiding the tender rice plants.

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They collected the vegetables every afternoon and prepared them for sale in the evenings. In the morning, Bopha would leave at four or five a.m. for the Daoum Kor market in Phnom Penh. She hired a mototaxi10 for 2000 riels (about $0.50) one way and sold her vegetables at the market until they were gone, around eight or nine a.m. Then she walked home to save the moto fare, a journey of two to three hours. After she had prepared the noonday meal, Bopha and the daughter would go back to the rice paddies to gather more wild vegetables. It took them as much as an hour to walk to a new rice paddy. Several female-headed households supported themselves partially by selling fish caught by a household member. The widows reported that women rarely fished. Some households, however, included a son-in-law who fished. The family of one landless widow, Moam, was entirely supported by her son-in-law’s fishing activity. He went out on the lake in mid-afternoon and returned with his catch by early morning, in time for the widow to sell it in the village market which opened at dawn. If school was not in session, his eleven-year-old son would accompany him to help fish. Other families fished in streams or rivers. The young children of one widow, Vuth, hunted shrimp in a shallow stream near their home and sold the shrimp for 1000 to 2000 riels per day (about $0.25 to $0.50.) The proceeds paid for all the rice for this landless family. A Kompong Chhnang widow, Chan, defied convention and fished herself in a river nearby during the rainy season. Some widows collected wood to sell to their neighbors. All the households that we visited in the rural areas cooked with wood. The wood was cut with a large machete-like knife in the wild areas surrounding the village. Often this was a male task but women occasionally cut wood as well. Dara cut wood to sell from her house. Ol’s adult son cut wood for his mother’s use as well as for sale. He sold about one square meter of wood a day for 3000 riels (about $0.75) and gave most of the proceeds to his mother to buy food, keeping a little for himself. Gathering and processing Several microenterprises in the widows’ households involved gathering wild materials and then processing them into a product before selling them. The activities that interviewed women described were the production of palm thatch, palm or grass mats, palm sugar, and charcoal. Dara and many other widows had produced palm thatch or sleuk. Traditional houses in rural Cambodia are constructed of palm thatch fastened to a wooden frame. Both the sides and the roofs are made of these thatch sections. Since the thatch tends to break down after a year or two,

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 51 the roofs especially need to be replaced on a regular basis to prevent leaking. Women are the traditional producers of thatch, so this is a regular source of income for women in rural Cambodia. To produce thatch, women start with palm leaves collected by men or boys who scale the palm trees. The women weave the fresh green palm leaves into a mat around a wooden frame about one-half meter by one meter. Some are woven around larger frames, one by three meters. Then the women soak the woven sections in water for two days to make the palm leaves more durable and less brittle. The sections are then fastened, with nails or palm lashing, to the house frame, overlapping them to prevent water from entering. Sometimes a larger section on the side of the house will be hinged at the top with palm lashing. The bottom will be fastened with only one or two lashes that can be easily undone to swing the section outward for ventilation. The section will then be propped open with a stick. In addition to house siding and roofing, sections are used for internal partitions to divide the house into two or three separate areas. While women sometimes lash the frames to the house sides, it is usually only men who climb up on the roof frame to fasten the roof sections. For this reason, people say that “men do roofs” although it is women who fabricate the sections that are fastened to the roof. Sometimes women make palm thatch sections to order and at other times they keep a supply on hand for sale. A restraint on the production of thatch is the availability of fresh palm leaves. Since women and girls do not scale palm trees, widows must rely on their sons or other male relatives to collect the palm leaves. One widow, Chandaravy, made palm thatch sections whenever she could get some palm leaves and kept the sections on hand for sale. Women made the palm sections when they had some spare time once the year’s transplanting was completed. Their customers were usually other people in their own village. Thatch roofs had to be replaced every two years and one roof required 200 to 400 thatch sections. There was a steady demand for thatch as long as villagers lived in traditional thatch housing. One section of palm thatch sold for about 100 riels ($0.03). Some women made only 100–200 sections a year. Others had a regular business of thatch production, particularly in one village in Kompong Chhnang. The younger widows in the village produced 200 to 300 sections per month. Chan (age 44) made 100 sections a week and sold them to people from her own and neighboring villages, bringing in 10,000 riels weekly (about $2.50) to her household economy. Her widowed neighbor Lim (age 37) also produced 100 sections per week outside of the transplanting season. Older widows from the same village made fewer palm sections a week. Seak (age 56) made 50 and Ol (age 60) made ten per week. The widows in this village produced thatch in quantity because one village widow, Ry, had a

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small-scale wholesale business. Ry bought up her neighbors’ palm sections to resell to a construction supply business in the town. The ready market for the palm sections in the nearby town, which sold to the whole region, may explain why so many village women produced thatch in quantity. In upwardly mobile areas close to Phnom Penh, the market for palm thatch was diminishing. As families near the city gained more discretionary money, they improved their houses by installing wooden plank siding and tile or metal roofs, thus reducing the demand for women’s traditional palm thatch craft. Bopha’s income had suffered from this modernizing change. She lived in the rural areas of Phnom Penh and used to make thatch regularly with her young daughter. A person who needed a new roof put in an order and Bopha would produce 100 sections in a week. She was paid 300 riels each, a higher rate than further out in the countryside. Most of the homes in her village now had metal roofs, however. Even Bopha herself had installed a metal roof on her house. She had not produced any thatch for over a year. A related source of income from processed gathered materials came from the production of palm or reed mats, kantael, which Dara and Sokha had both produced. Palm mats were used in the processing of rice, to warm the rice seed before planting or milling and to catch falling rice during the winnowing phase. Palm mats were sometimes used to make the sides of a large round bin for storing loose rice inside or under a house. Traditionally, palm mats were used to sleep on or for the family to sit on during meals. Sokha earned 2000 riels (about $0.50) per mat, less than women in other villages, because the customer provided the palm leaves. Everyone in her village knew how to make mats and so she only made two to four mats per year. Her widowed neighbor had made mats previously, two or three a year, and had been paid about 5000 riels (about $1.25) per mat. But her eyes had deteriorated and she could no longer see well enough to weave them. She used to sell the mats to other people in her village who would see her weaving them and ask to purchase them. Woven palm mats had been largely supplanted by colored plastic mats, kantael kavsou, imported from Thailand since 1981. The widows noted that the palm mats tended to be itchy and the plastic mats were more comfortable to sleep on. One elderly widow said that the colorful plastic mats looked nice when monks or other people came to visit.11 The popularity of these commercially-produced plastic mats had reduced the demand for women’s woven palm mats. Another type of mat produced by Cambodian women was a kantael krahom or red mat, so called because the color red figured prominently in its design. This mat was made from tall grass reeds that were dyed bright

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 53 colors before weaving. This type of mat required a team effort with a minimum of two women per mat. A team of five women, the ideal number, could produce three mats a day. The women wove the mats on a loom twelve to fifteen feet long. One woman wove from each end of the loom using grasses of different colors such as green, yellow and blue. Red was always the main color because it mixed well with all the other colors. The women said that there were many different designs produced by women in Cambodia but each team of women made only one design at which they became expert. The mats were produced provas12 style with one women providing all the reeds and then owning the finished mat, made with the shared team labor. Each woman in the team provided the reeds in turn until the women had produced a mat for each team member. One mat required fifty kilos of dyed grass reeds. If there were not enough women to do provas, the team would hire women weavers and pay them 4000 riels (about $1) per day. The finished mats measured about one and one-half by two meters. One interviewed widow had previously woven kantael krahom to sell to other villagers or to exchange for rice in a nearby town. She got the reeds from her younger sister who grew them in a vacant field next to their family home. When her sister married and moved out of the house, the widow had to grow her own grass reeds. She dyed the grasses herself with purchased dye and then dried the reeds before weaving them with a team of women. She could exchange a mat for 36 kilos of rice or sell it for 15,000 to 30,000 riels (about $4 to $8). If a family didn’t have the cash to buy a mat, she accepted rice in exchange. She had stopped weaving mats several years earlier because she had become busy with the more lucrative work of growing and selling vegetables and didn’t have time to weave. It was hard to make much profit on the mats, she said, because they were so time consuming. The women weavers in her village noted that the popularity of plastic mats had not reduced the demand for the kantael krahom. Because of their lively color and smooth texture, they still sold well and were particularly desirable as wedding gifts. The production of palm sugar provided income for several widows. Palm sugar production began with village men scaling tall palm trees with the aid of a bamboo rod fastened along the length of the tree. At the top of the tree, they attached cylindrical bamboo containers under the palm flowers and squeezed each palm flower to start palm nectar flowing into the container. The following day, they scaled the tree again to collect the accumulated nectar. The men brought the collected nectar to the women in their household who then cooked it into thick sugary syrup. As the syrup cooled, it

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became semi-solid and was stored in large containers. The trees in the village were allocated to particular families by the mae phoum, the village headman. A man involved in palm sugar usually worked 15–20 trees a day. Some risk was involved in this activity because occasionally men fell from the palm trees while collecting the nectar and were injured or killed. While both men and women were involved in producing palm sugar, villagers spoke of it as men’s work because women never scaled the palm trees. Vy’s husband had collected palm nectar. After his death, Vy’s son took up nectar collecting when he was a boy and Vy processed it into sugar and sold it. When the son married, he continued to collect palm nectar and his wife processed it into sugar. The income then went to Vy’s son’s household. Dara’s husband had worked in palm sugar during his lifetime and the widow’s son-in-law had taken it up after marrying her daughter. The proceeds from the palm sugar were turned over to the widow as the head of household. The son-in-law collected the palm nectar for three years before he fell one day when the bamboo rod separated from the tree. He broke his leg and never completed recovered his mobility. He still scaled a few trees occasionally but only collected enough for the family’s own sugar consumption needs. Heng’s family collected and processed palm sugar for a short period of time in order to save money to purchase a cow after the Pol Pot era. Heng made palm thatch sections for the same purpose. Once she had saved enough money to buy two cows, the family gave up the risky palm sugar enterprise. Lim’s 17-year-old son did some palm sugar work, collecting the nectar from six palm trees on their relatives’ land. Lim then processed the nectar into sugar. The teen collected only enough for his family due to the risk involved. One widow, Lim, produced charcoal to sell. She had two children to support and was very poor, so a neighbor suggested that she make charcoal.13 From time to time, merchants came to the village to buy up charcoal and then resell it in the town. Other charcoal producers in the village showed Lim how to make it by digging a ditch and placing a cut tree in the ditch over a fire. Once the tree was very hot, she covered it with dirt and left it for two weeks. Then she uncovered the still warm charcoal and borrowed a cart from a relative free of charge to transport it back from the forest to store in her home. At the time of our interview, she was waiting for a merchant to come from the town to buy it. She didn’t know yet how much she would make on this new business. No one in her village wanted to buy it because they all used wood for cooking.

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 55 Agricultural enterprises Many rural women in the sample earned income through agricultural enterprises, raising small animals such as pigs and chickens or growing fruits and vegetables and then selling them in the town markets or to traders. Many widows had raised pigs. Some women raised a single sow and sold her piglets. Leang was the most successful of these. She had a female pig and sold her piglets for 20,000 riels (about $5) each. The sow gave birth to eight or nine piglets at a time and Leang would earn 160,000 to 180,000 riels (about $40 to $45) at once. A neighboring widow had gotten her first piglet from her older children. However, the piglet got sick and died. She later got another piglet that her sister was raising to maturity for her. It was a female pig and the two sisters planned to keep the sow and sell her piglets. They planned to charge 50,000 to 60,000 riels (about $12 to $15) per piglet and split the proceeds between them. Other widows raised pigs to maturity (about seven to twelve months) and then sold them, typically to a pig trader. It was harder to make a profit this way because the costs of feeding the pig were not covered by the income from selling the grown pig. Vanna had begun raising pigs during the krom samaki time. She had done a provas exchange to get money for her first piglets (she fed someone else’s pig until sold at maturity and then bought her own piglets with her half of the proceeds). She fed her pigs rice husks from the village rice mill machine that cost her 1250 riels per day (about $0.30) per pig. When she sold the pigs she earned 100,000 to 180,000 riels (about $25 to $45) each, depending on the size of the pig. The cost of feeding each pig was over 300,000 riels (about $75), though, so she incurred a substantial loss14 in raising pigs. Other widows reported similar costs and sale prices for their pigs. The benefit to them in raising pigs must not be in the overall profit but in the gradual accumulation of value in the pig that was cashed in all at once. Pig-raising can be seen as a savings plan, with the widow investing small amounts each week in feed and then reaping a substantial amount when she sells the pig, a sort of “piggy bank”! A widow could make a real profit, however, if she did not have to buy rice husks to feed the pig. One widow owned a rice mill and was paid for milling in rice and rice husks. She used this extra rice and the rice husks to feed her three pigs. The profit on her pigs, after deducting the expense of buying the piglets, was 70,000 to 130,000 riels (about $18 to $33) each.15 The profit in a pig depends on the daily expenses. If the pig’s food can be acquired for less (foraging, using leftovers or buying rice husks at a discount), the owner stands to make more profit. The timing of the sale

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is important, too, since the cost of raising the pig increases the longer the pig is kept. The owner has to calculate if the higher price for a larger pig is worth the increased costs. The seller’s bargaining skill with the pig trader figures in as well. A danger in pig husbandry is that the pig will get sick and die and then the owner’s investment is completely lost. Poorer women in the sample could not afford to raise a pig at all. They could not manage the initial costs of buying the pig and they did not have money for the daily feed expenses. In essence, they did not have enough cash to “save” in their “piggy bank.”16 Traditional provas exchanges require a degree of trust between villagers. The owner of the asset trusts that the borrower will care properly for the asset and return it in good shape. For instance, the owner of a sow entrusts the pig to a neighboring family to raise in exchange for half the sow’s litter. If the neighbors neglect the pig, it will die. The owner’s trust in the neighbors’ husbandry is partly based on self-interest. If the neighbors neglect the pig, they will not get any piglets. The transaction also requires familiarity with the neighboring household so as to assure the owner that they will not behave foolishly. In villages where neighbors have known one another for life, such knowledge is a given. Only those villagers with a good reputation would be able to participate in these provas arrangements. The economic possibilities of rural villagers are closely tied with their reputation with their neighbors. Since women supervise the raising of pigs in the household, their reputation for astuteness and good household management is part of their social capital, an important economic resource. Many widows in the sample had raised chickens at some point. Chickens were less expensive to raise than pigs. They ate less and grew faster and had large broods of chicks. The widows owned from a handful of chickens up to 40, including both adult hens and roosters and clutches of small chicks. As a rule, the women did not eat the eggs but raised them all as chickens. The women fed the chickens unhusked rice or leftover cooked rice, both readily available most of the year. Most of the interviewed widows did not eat the chickens themselves but sold them for cash. Female chickens were mentioned more than male ones because they produced eggs. The hens laid eggs three to six times a year, about 8 to 15 eggs each time. Sometimes they roosted in baskets inside the widow’s house or under the eaves of her porch. At maturity, the chickens were sold for about 4000 riels ($1) per kilo, or 6000 riels ($1.50) each (mature chickens weighed about 1–1/2 kilos.) Some widows sold chickens out of their home to their neighbors for family consumption. One widow sold them herself in the market two or three

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 57 times a year, transporting them alive. Usually the women sold their chickens, four or five at a time, to a trader who resold them in the market. Raising chickens was a way for impoverished widows to earn cash. Neighbors or relatives would give a gift of several chicks and the widow would raise them to maturity, feeding them leftover rice. Lim had acquired some chicks this way from a neighbor. Children were often given a chick to raise. Chandaravy’s 15-year-old son received some chicks from a neighbor. All but one died, however. The one female who survived produced 6–8 eggs five times a year. He raised the eggs to chicks and then sold them. Ching and Ol had raised chickens when they were younger but had given it up because it was incompatible with Buddhist temple participation. As they faced the end of their life, they wanted to earn merit for their next reincarnation and so did not want to kill animals. Several widows sold fruit from their own fruit trees. The trees usually were on their house land, surrounding the house or along the property border, and were tropical fruits such as coconut, mango, banana, papaya, lemons, and jackfruit. One more affluent widow, Khoeurn, also grew small quantities of sugar cane and bamboo. Fruit trees were a sort of investment or insurance for a widow since they produced fruit for years with little additional work. Widows with fruit trees had a source of income that was small but fairly reliable. Even a widow with health problems could harvest the fruit from her fruit trees and make some income, unlike most agricultural work that was labor intensive. Bopha’s husband had planted her fruit trees and the trees still gave fruit, a welcome income at times when Bopha was too sick to work. Women sold their fruit themselves at the market or to a fruit trader. Khoeurn and her daughter sold their fruit once a week at the nearby market, transporting it in a big basket on the back of a bicycle. Their neighboring widow, Dany, went to market every day, harvesting her produce at daybreak and taking it to market around 9 a.m. She stayed at the market until she had sold everything, usually two or three hours. Bopha made 200– 300 riels ($0.05–0.08) a day from her fruit trees during the harvest season, selling the fruit at a city market along with gathered wild vegetables. Lim had only one fruit tree, a mango tree that she had inherited earlier in the year when her grandparents died. She got 100 mangoes from her tree and earned about 10,000 riels in all (about $2.50). She had to rent a car for 3000 riels ($0.75) to take the mangoes to market. With the proceeds of her mango sales, she bought staples such as salt, fish sauce, and seasonings. Vanna sold her fruit at the market if she wasn’t too busy with other farm duties. In busy times, she sold them from her house, usually to a trader who resold them at the town market.

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Several widows grew vegetables either on their house land or on a chamkar plot. Vegetable crops require more water, fertilizer and pesticide than rice crops. The water must be just right to get a good crop of vegetables, as too little or too much will spoil the crop. Chamkar land is near the water’s edge and floods seasonally, increasing its fertility. Women with chamkar land were usually more affluent than other rural farmers in the sample. They grew substantial quantities of vegetables and could raise the front money to purchase seed, fertilizer and pesticide. Women without chamkar land, like Vanna and Lim, grew vegetables only on their house land, typically in small quantities or only for their own family consumption. Widows with chamkar land could produce in commercial quantities. Meseth, for instance, was a Pol Pot widow who lived near a river and grew vegetables on a chamkar plot across from her house land. She planted three crops a year on the same land, turning the land over after harvesting each crop. During the year of this study, she had planted tomatoes in November, corn in April and beans in July. Meseth hired a plow twice and bought seeds and fertilizer for each crop and stakes for the bean plants. Her total costs for the three crops were 319,500 riels (about $80), including 120,000 riels ($30) for stakes. She was worried about recouping her costs because of the possibility of inclement weather. She estimated that she took in about 85,000 riels (about $21) on her first two crops and didn’t know what the lucrative bean crop would yield. She was worried that it would be destroyed by flooding and that she would not be able to repay the NGO loan she had taken out for the seed. 17 Trading businesses Meseth, Vanna, and Dany engaged in some sort of wholesale or retail trade, buying items and then reselling them either to the consumer or to a retail store. Fruits and vegetables were the most likely items to be bought and sold but other food items such as rice, palm sugar, fish and beans were traded by the women as well. These small trading businesses involved buying the product in one location and reselling it in another, such as an established central market or a neighborhood street market. The women made their slender profits by taking their product to a place where customers were willing to pay more for it than the producers charged. The women vendors were seasoned negotiators with both seller and buyer. Their profit depended on their skill in bargaining with the store owners, their farmer neighbors, and the market customers, all of whom tried to negotiate the best price for themselves. In most cases, their business required that they have money up front to purchase

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 59 their product, and the women took the daily risk that they would not be able to recoup their expenses. Some women bought produce directly from the farmer. Meseth had traded bananas when she returned to her home village after the fall of the Khmer Rouge as a way to support herself and her seven surviving children. She bought the bananas from others in her village once a week and took them by boat to the nearby town of Prey Veaeng. She stayed overnight in Prey Veaeng, sold the bananas the next morning, and took the boat home. Other women bought their fruits and vegetables from a trader or street vendor. Dany bought vegetables from local street vendors each morning to sell in the town market along with the fruit and vegetables that she grew herself. Widows with some discretionary money could afford to buy up supplies of products that changed in value over the course of the agricultural year. Rice and palm sugar were two such products. By buying when the price was low and selling when it rose, a more affluent widow could earn money with little manual effort. Dany, for instance, bought rice during the harvest season when the price was low and then sold it during the months before the following harvest when the price was the highest. She usually bought 800 kilos of rice at 200 riels per kilo ($0.05) at the harvest in December, an investment of 160,000 riels (about $40.) The following November, she sold the rice at Kompong Chhnang market for 320 riels a kilo, yielding a profit of 96,000 riels ($24). Dany also traded in palm sugar, selling one ton per year with a profit of 300,000 riels (about $75.) Dany’s success as a trader depended heavily on the availability of capital to invest in rice and palm sugar for several months. She and her second husband had planted a number of fruit trees on her land that yielded enough produce for Dany to sell daily. She also raised a number of chickens. Although she had only 30 ares of rice land, it was enough to feed her small family of three, including her young daughter and her unmarried sister. All of these activities together with Dany’s astute management of her resources had contributed to her success. Dany felt that her six years of education had helped her business ventures. She planned to send her daughter on to secondary school in another year. Service enterprises A number of the widows had income from service enterprises in which the widow rendered a service of some sort to other villagers. The interviewed women described service work such as food preparation, rice milling, and child care.

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Women made prepared food at home and often used their children to market the food door-to-door to their neighbors. They bought basic food ingredients, prepared them into a more refined food product, and resold them. The food products prepared by the widows included sour soup, rice snacks, desserts, rice porridge, noodle soup, pickles, and rice wine. The village market for such items meant that some families in the village had discretionary income to spend on prepared food. The marketing of prepared food to other villagers served to redistribute village wealth from more affluent families to poorer ones. Ol was a poor widow who profited from the availability of customers in the village. She made rice snacks throughout the year when she was not doing her agricultural work. She filled mashed rice cakes with sweets such as coconut or banana and wrapped them up in a banana leaf. She sold them for 100 riels each ($0.03) door to door in her commune. It was easy to find customers and she made about 2000 riels a day ($0.50), her main source of cash. Sometimes people would pay in rice and then she would earn two kilos of rice a day. She could not do this work when she was sick, however, and she was sick often with fatigue and aching bones. A more affluent widow, Khoeurn, owned a still in which she produced rice wine. She had acquired the still when her husband was still alive and the couple had some discretionary money. With this productive investment, Khoeurn had a steady cash income. She produced rice wine in a large open kitchen area between her pig pen and her rice fields. She and her husband had started the business in 1980 during the krom samaki era. Khoeurn had always processed the wine herself. She mixed the mash of cooked rice, water and sugar in a large covered metal drum and let it sit for three days to ferment. She then heated it in her still and the steam from the fermented rice mixture dripped down a long pipe through a cool water cistern. As the rice steam cooled, it condensed into a fluid and the rice wine dripped into a plastic thirty-liter container. Khoeurn mixed a batch of mash every three days and figured that she made a profit of 10,000 riels per week ($2.50).18 Another widow had acquired a rice milling machine as a home business. Her investment in this machine helped leverage other income for her family. Ry had purchased the rice mill two or three years earlier. She milled rice for her neighbors and was paid in rice, two cans19 of husked rice for ten kilos of milling. Ry made five kilos of rice a month from this small business. She fed the rice husks from the milling to her pigs, five kilos a day, as well as four cans of cooked rice. The income from her rice mill paid for the feed for her three pigs, increasing the profits Ry made when she sold her pigs.

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 61 After a certain age, women who had alternatives no longer did farming work or other income-producing work. Instead, they stayed at home and took care of children. It was generally older women who lived with their adult children who could afford to give up productive work outside the home. While these women did not receive cash for their services, they were housed and fed by their younger family members and their child care work was a real economic contribution to the household. Ching, for example, lived with her younger daughter, her son-in-law, and their five children. The two youngest children were too small to attend school and the widow watched these grandchildren during the day. Ching had been supported by her two daughters since her husband died in 1980 shortly after the Pol Pot era. She had supervised all five of her younger daughter’s children as they were growing up, freeing her daughter to work in the fields.

Wage work: Selling Labor Power In addition to rice agriculture and family microenterprises, widows relied on the wage labor of family members. In most rural areas, only a limited number of wage positions as field laborers were available and families depended on their own agricultural and microenterprise production. For families closer to a town or to the capital city, there were more economic options and finding a “job,” a paid position in an organization, was a more realistic possibility. The increasing availability of jobs in Cambodia reflects this impoverished country’s transition from a rural economy to an industrial economy. The sorts of wage work described by the interviewed women were agricultural labor, construction labor, factory work, and government service. Some landless women relied on agricultural labor to buy their daily rice. Bopha worked as an agricultural laborer when she was feeling well, pulling rice seedlings and transplanting them. When she was sickly, her 14year-old daughter hired herself out during the transplanting season. The girl went to school in the morning and transplanted in the afternoon. Other agricultural laborers owned land on which they produced insufficient rice to feed the family all year long. So they supplemented their rice production with rice purchased with agricultural wages. Lim transplanted for other people in order to earn money to buy food and medicine and was paid 2500 riels (about $0.65) per day of transplanting. She first transplanted her own one hectare of rice land, then hired herself out to other people. The length of the transplanting season depended on the rainfall and extended over June, July and August. Lim’s 12-year-old daughter earned income by watching the neighbor’s oxen, making sure that they did not trample the rice paddies.

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The widows gained income from construction through the labor of their adult sons. Most construction work in Cambodia is in the cities and towns. Chandaravy’s son was a construction laborer in Phnom Penh. He worked too far away from home to commute and so had to spend some of his income on living expenses. The rest of his paycheck he sent home to his mother. Bopha’s son worked as a construction laborer near the airport in Phnom Penh. He lived at home and commuted to his work site by motodup, which cost 1500 riels a day ($0.38). He earned 7000 riels per day (about $1.75) and worked about three months a year. He heard about jobs from other people in the village. On days that he had work, he began at 7 a.m. and worked nine hours with an hour out for lunch. He kept some of his income for himself and gave the rest to his mother, 20,000 to 30,000 riels ($5 to $7.50) each week that he worked. Since Bopha was a landless widow, her son’s construction work provided an important source of income for the family. Several children of the interviewed widows worked at garment export factories. Dara’s youngest daughter worked at a garment factory in Phnom Penh and was paid about $20 to $30 per month for full-time work. Vuth’s daughter worked at a garment factory near the airport in Phnom Penh. She lived at home and commuted into her job every day by truck for which she paid $7 a month. She earned $34 a month, less than the minimum wage of $45 monthly because she was still in the training period that lasted two or three years. She worked 8–1/2 hours a day, six days a week and was not yet eligible for overtime. The daughter heard about the garment job in her village and went in to take a test in arithmetic. She passed and she got the job. Vuth said that her daughter didn’t have to pay a bribe because her family was so poor. Another widow did have to pay a bribe for her children’s employment at a garment factory. Narin had two children at the same garment factory, a daughter who sewed and a son who was a guard. The two worked seven days a week, sometimes working overtime at night to have more money to give their mother. The two young people started at the factory just two months before the interview. Narin went with an interpreter to talk to the Taiwanese manager about hiring her children. She was told that she had to pay $60 each to get them a job, $120 in all.20 She sold her bottom land21 for $100 and borrowed $20 from relatives in the city and her two children were hired. Narin felt happy and hopeful that her children had jobs. It was easier work than rice farming and her children never complained about the long hours. She did not regret having sold the bottom land. She felt it was a good trade-off because she had gotten jobs for her children.

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 63 Garment factories were the most common sort of industrial work mentioned by the interviewed women. However, there were other sorts of industrial work in Cambodia, such as lumber factories that processed tropical hardwoods. Sophea’s younger sister worked at a large lumber factory near their home. The lumber came down the Mekong River from the forested mountain areas of Cambodia and was processed at the plant, the only industrial facility in their area. She had been there for four years and worked twelve hours per day, usually five or six days a week. Every other week, she worked the night shift. She got paid 500 riels per hour ($0.13) for her first eight hours, then 650 riels per hour ($0.16) for the last four hours for a daily total of 6600 riels ($1.67). Over the course of a month she earned over 132,000 riels ($33). Sophea and her sister pooled their income (Sophea’s was from her vegetable crops) and together paid the expenses of the household, which included their father and the younger sister’s son. One widow worked for the government as a primary school teacher. In the rural areas of Cambodia, the main presence of the national government is in the schools and clinics. Local villages pay for the buildings that house these institutions, and the national government pays for the salaries of the teachers and medical personnel. Chantha taught kindergarten and first grade, which included academic work such as reading and arithmetic as well as proper behavior such as how to greet a monk. Chantha had been at the school for twenty years and taught her class of fifty students single-handedly. After the krom samaki time, she realized that the land she had received, 28 ares, was not enough to support herself and her three children. She applied for a teaching position at the commune primary school, took an exam and was hired. She taught in the mornings and farmed her rice land in the afternoons. Her salary at the time of the interview was 100,000 riels per month ($25.00). She was qualified to teach school because she had finished the 8th grade as a girl. It was unusual for girls to study at that time, but her father wanted her to get an education and he sent her to the wat22 school.

Sexual Division of Labor The gender pattern of rice cultivation in Cambodia fits Ester Boserup’s ([1970] 1998) description of irrigation agriculture where both men and women contribute substantially to the cultivation of crops. In this pattern, men plow and irrigate the fields while women transplant and weed. Landless laborers are available for hire in the fields and provide assistance to the owners. Boserup refrains from labeling this pattern either male or female,

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her other two types of agriculture. Nonetheless, women provide more labor than men do in the sort of irrigation agriculture seen in Cambodia. The manual tasks of transplanting and weeding are much more time-consuming than the male tasks of plowing and irrigation. When a rural family loses male labor with the husband’s death, the widow and her children must compensate for the loss. The widows in this study engaged in a variety of tactics to fill the gap left by their husband and to accomplish the necessary work of producing the family’s food. Women’s compensation for loss of husband’s labor: plowing The ways found by the widows to compensate for the loss of their husband’s labor demonstrate the spirit of family solidarity as well as other mutually beneficial relationships within the village. Women with extensive family turned to family members first to cover their husband’s farm work. When family members were not available, women exchanged their own labor or paid a laborer to cover their husband’s tasks. In a number of cases, women themselves did the work formerly done by their husband. The most important male task was plowing. Relatives plow In some households, the widow’s son was old enough to do the plowing himself at the time of his father’s death. Ching and Heng were in their sixties when their husband died and they each had adult sons who plowed for them. In other cases, a son-in-law or other male relative did the plowing. A brother plowed for Seak and Vanna, and Sophea’s father plowed her fields. Sometimes the relative plowed for free. In other cases, the widow reciprocated the favor by pulling and transplanting the relative’s fields in return. Some families calculated the exchange of labor in a provas manner with a number of days transplanting in exchange for a half day of plowing, though usually with a better exchange rate than a non-relative.23 Other families simply worked until everyone’s fields were plowed and transplanted, no matter the time involved. If the widow was elderly, the labor typically exchanged was to watch the grandchildren. Sometimes equipment was exchanged for labor. In one family, two adult children owned one ox each and their widowed mother had a plow. The two sons plowed all their fields and their mother’s as well, using the two oxen and the plow. In some cases, the relative plowing was a teenage boy. Khoeurn’s 17year old son got up at 2 a.m. and plowed his mother’s fields by moonlight before going to school at 7 a.m. His mother had six rice fields and it took him six early mornings of labor to plow them.

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 65 Labor exchange On occasion, there was no relative available to do the male tasks. In those cases, widows exchanged transplanting labor (provas stung) with an unrelated male to get their plowing done. Leang, for instance, pulled and transplanted a neighbor’s rice seedlings for a specified period of time and he in turn plowed her fields. Often the widows had to do the transplanting exchange labor before the man plowed their fields. Then their own transplanting took place later in the growing season, delaying the progress of the rice seedlings and therefore the harvest. When the mother was sickly, her children did the labor exchange, transplanting in exchange for plowing on their mother’s field. At times, even with the offer of exchange labor, it was hard to find someone to do the plowing due to the loss of men in war. Labor exchange for plowing was calculated based on one-half day of plowing by a plowman with a team of oxen. In exchange for one-half day of plowing, women transplanted for one to three or more full days.24 Ching noted that the ratio of exchange had worsened in her S’ang village, with three or even four days of transplanting now required for a half day of plowing rather than the two days previously. She said that there were fewer men in the village to plow and so the price had gone up. Widows in the Angk Snuol village had a better exchange ratio (only one or two days of transplanting required for a half day of plowing) than the S’ang village widows with three or more days required. It usually took several mornings to plow a widow’s fields since the plow team could only complete part of the fields in a single morning. The widows interviewed needed the team for three or four mornings to plow all their land. In exchange, the women would transplant three days for every morning of plowing, nine to twelve days in all. Once the exchange transplanting was done, the women had to transplant their own rice fields. When they did not have sufficient family labor to do their transplanting expeditiously, they exchanged labor with a work crew of women. The work crew transplanted continuously until the rice fields of all the women in the crew were completed. Women usually transplanted for four weeks or more when they had to rely on labor exchange rather than family labor to do their plowing and transplanting. Some of the widows accepted the uneven male-female labor exchange as justified by the greater strength involved in plowing. They reasoned that men must manage the oxen as well as carry and assemble the heavy plow. Some women noted that the oxen’s labor had to be considered as well. Seak suggested that the exchange relationship was lopsided because one party had the plow and oxen, important assets. Other widows protested the uneven exchange. Chandaravy said that the uneven exchange rate was

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unfair but it was the only way that a person without oxen could get their plowing done. Transplanting was a backbreaking, arduous and tedious task requiring hours bent over a wet rice paddy. The women’s hours of labor were not valued as much by the community, however, as the male strength involved in plowing. The difference between the two sorts of labor was not effort but physical endowment, with male strength valued much more highly than female persistence and endurance. One widow noted that not only widows had to exchange labor for plowing but also poor people who did not own a plow or oxen. Some villagers had oxen from before the Pol Pot era, particularly if they were “old people” who had not been displaced by the Khmer Rouge.25 Many poorer families, however, had no oxen after the Pol Pot time. Paid labor If a widow could find sufficient cash, she could hire someone to do her plowing. Women resorted to this when they were sick, for example. Narin did not have an ox and so she had to hire a plowman. She was too sick to transplant and exchange labor for the plowing. So she taught her young children to transplant and they earned money to pay for the plow team. It cost 13,000 riels26 to hire a plow team for a morning. Meseth paid 10,000 riels for a morning of plowing on her chamkar land. These were the exceptional cases among the widows interviewed since most did not want to spend precious cash on plowing. Plow-women: gender role trespassing In three villages studied, women themselves plowed. The plowing activity of these widows demonstrates the flexibility of gender roles in Cambodia. In certain situations, women “trespassed” on men’s roles, taking up traditionally male tasks. The plow-women lived in two districts, Angk Snuol (Kandal province) and Rolea B’ier (Kompong Chhnang province). The character of the soil in these areas may have been a factor in allowing women to take up plowing. The soil was less clay-like than in the S’ang and Kien Svay districts and perhaps the sandier soil made plowing less arduous and more possible for women. Chandaravy was one of the Angk Snuol women who plowed. She had begun plowing before her husband’s death. He husband worked as a water-carrier and didn’t have time to plow the fields. No one had taught Chandaravy how to plow. She just did what had to be done. She felt that she didn’t have a choice since it was needed to support her family and feed her children. She admitted that most women did not plow but in her case, it was necessary. Chandaravy borrowed a plow and oxen from a neighbor

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 67 and paid with her field labor, transplanting the owner’s fields for a day in exchange for a day with the plow team. She plowed her own half-hectare field as well as other fields that she farmed provas style, surplus land that the owners could not farm personally. She did all the farm work on these fields and split the harvest 50–50 with the owners. In all she plowed 1–1/2 hectares of land, 45 to 60 days of plowing.27 She had considered buying her own plow and oxen but it was too expensive for her.28 Like Chandaravy, several widows had plowed while their husband was alive, if he was sick or involved in other more lucrative work. Dara had taken up the plow during her husband’s terminal illness. She had tried to exchange her plow-team for plowing by a neighbor, but most villagers had their own oxen. She could not find a laborer to hire, either. Ol had plowed when her husband was sick. Chan plowed because her husband was busy collecting wood to sell.29 One widow, Ry, plowed as a girl, driving one of her father’s two teams of oxen. The widows plowed because it was necessary to feed their family. Dara found the plowing difficult but felt that it was her job to get the work done. Ol commented that women plow by necessity, doing whatever was needed for the family to have food to eat. Most widows learned to plow from their father or their husband. A few like Chandaravy learned on their own. Oeung said that she learned from her mistakes. Ol learned from her mother, who plowed when Ol’s father was sick. One widow learned to plow from the Khmer Rouge. Most of the plow-women had acquired their plow and oxen while they were married. Dany and her husband had kept their oxen with them during the Khmer Rouge displacement. Sokha and her husband had left their oxen with a neighbor to watch during the four years of the Pol Pot era. When Sokha returned to the village, she reclaimed the oxen.30 Ry had found wandering oxen abandoned by the Khmer Rouge in their 1979 retreat and had appropriated them. Some widows did not own a plow team and borrowed one each season, plowing the owner’s field in exchange. None of the widows were able to purchase oxen on their own. One widow had acquired a young ox through provas, caring for the mother ox in exchange for a calf. The young ox was not yet strong enough to plow, however. The most difficult part of plowing for the widows was getting the plowshare through hard, dry earth. Dara said that it was easier when there was water on the field to soften it. She had trouble controlling the oxen that would pull the wrong way when tired. Chan found it hard to control the plow. Transporting the heavy plow31 was also difficult for the widows. It usually was carried to the field and then attached to the oxen in the field. The women would sometimes connect it in the village and have the

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oxen drag it to the fields. Once the rice seedlings had been planted, however, this could no longer be done and the women had to carry the plow. Though it was heavy, Dara, Chan, and the other women reported that they had carried it regularly, placing a kroma32 on their shoulder to cushion the plow. In study villages in the S’ang and Kien Svay districts of Kandal province, widows reported that only men plow. Sophea said that women do not plow because they are weak and cannot handle the cows. Chantha remembered that women had plowed during the Khmer Rouge era but now didn’t have the money to buy a plow or oxen. Ching thought that women preferred to exchange labor rather than plow themselves. They knew the work well, they could work in teams with other women, and no special equipment was required. Women’s plowing activity may explain the difference in the transplanting labor exchange rate. In the S’ang district where women did not plow, a morning’s plowing exchanged for three or four complete days of transplanting. In Angk Snuol where women did plow, a morning’s plowing exchanged for only two days of transplanting. The availability of plowwomen in the village may have increased competition among those looking for plow work. With a lower demand for plowing (because some women plowed their own fields) and higher supply (the availability of both female and male plowers), the value of female transplanting labor increased. A cultural explanation is that the presence of plow-women may have raised the value of female labor because everyone in the village knew that women could plow if they had the equipment. Plow-women undermined the “male mystique” of plowing as an exclusive and high-status male activity. It is also possible that the different character of the sandy soil affected the exchange ratios. The experience of plowing affected one widow’s attitude towards the uneven exchange rate. Chandaravy from Angk Snuol complained that women had to transplant for two days in exchange for one-half day of plowing. She herself usually plowed her fields but occasionally would do labor exchange. Her own experience of plowing may have emboldened her to complain about the uneven exchange rate for women’s transplanting labor since she knew the hard effort involved in both sorts of work. Her ability and experience of plowing raised her status in her own eyes, an important effect of women’s labor. Since ownership of plow teams were a significant factor in village stratification, women’s familiarity with the use of these teams lessened the degree of gender stratification in the village and provided a way for female heads of household to improve their family’s financial standing.

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 69 The difference between women’s plow activity in these districts, with women plowing in some districts and never plowing in others, could be construed as a matter of regional culture, the gendered expectations of suitable work for women. The characteristics involved in controlling a team of oxen are more stereotypically male than female. A person plowing has to pit their determination against the ox’s strength to control the ox, asserting human will over animal will in a sort of domination struggle. Cambodian men ideologically are encouraged to be strong and fearless while women are expected to be beautiful, soft, and quiet. These women’s ideals are not qualities suitable for controlling a team of oxen. Women’s agricultural tasks of transplanting and raising small animals require a less dominating attitude and lend themselves more to female nurturing activities. Nonetheless, these gender ideals did not prevent widows in Angk Snuol and Rolea B’ier from plowing. The critical factors for these women seemed to be the ownership of a plow team and the characteristics of the soil, more structural than cultural factors. When women had the plow equipment, they preferred to plow themselves rather than exchange labor. Poorer people of either sex did not plow because they did not have the equipment. Culture may enter this structural picture in men’s motivation to acquire a plow and oxen. Since it is a traditional male role to plow, the lack of a plow team deprives the men of their gendered place in the economy and underlines their poverty. To fulfill their male role, men need financial resources. The gender role expectations may motivate men to earn enough cash to acquire a plow team. In contrast, women can carry out their gendered role without expensive plow equipment. All they need is sufficient health and the knowledge of how to transplant. To acquire a plow and oxen, they need a large amount of cash and the courage to trespass on gendered roles. Women can meet village expectations without this financial, psychological, and sociological effort. The social rationality of women’s collective enterprises Women’s work in Cambodian agriculture is often accomplished collectively. Women’s agricultural role of transplanting is usually done in groups because a field must be planted quickly after plowing before the soil hardens again. Village women organize themselves into teams that include their daughters and youthful sons. They work across a field in a line, each team member transplanting one swath across the field. Women sometimes work for weeks at this collective undertaking, helping to transplant neighbor’s fields in exchange for the transplanting of their own fields. If women must exchange their transplanting labor for the plowing

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of their fields as well, they spend more time in the collective experience of a women’s transplanting team. Women also work collectively to produce one sort of woven mat, the kantael krahom or red mat. It takes a minimum of two women to make a mat. The ideal is a team of five women who work from opposite ends of the mat, weaving towards the center. The team completes as many mats as there are members of the team with the finished product going to the woman who has supplied the dyed reeds for the mat. By contrast, men’s agricultural work in rural Cambodia is typically done alone. Men plow and tend irrigation ditches by themselves. They transport bundled seedlings or harvested rice on an ox cart. They climb palm trees to collect palm nectar or collect wood in the forest on their own. They go out on a lake to fish. If they take a person with them, it is typically a younger male who is learning the skill and assisting the older man. The relationship between the older man and the younger one is a hierarchical relationship, where one is skilled and the other is the assistant. Women’s team work is much more egalitarian with the workers on the team cooperating on a peer basis. To accomplish transplanting or mat production successfully, women must work together cooperatively. The good of each individual woman is accomplished by all women working together for their mutual benefit. Their work is a social task, a group effort that requires social cooperation. The women bring to the work a social rationality, a recognition that the group working together cooperatively can accomplish a goal beyond any of them individually. Group cooperation is the means to the individual ends of transplanting or mat production. The krom samaki work arrangements under the Vietnamese in the 1980s were a similar group effort towards a common goal, informed by a social rationality. Families were assigned to a group or krom to cultivate a number of rice fields on a cooperative basis. The rice produced was divided among the krom families based on the number of people in each family. Cooperative group effort was the means to the goal of providing for individual village families. Since women traditionally participated in group work in transplanting teams, the real difference in the krom system was the work conditions of men. In a departure from their usual working conditions, men worked together cooperatively for the common good of the krom, each contributing their labor so that all the krom families would have rice. As part of their female leadership, the widows in the study emphasized cooperative effort for the common good of the family, the practices labeled in this study family solidarity or kruosa samaki. Each member of

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 71 the household contributed their labor and earnings to meet the needs of the household family. The female head adjudicated the distribution of resources that were given according to need, not equality or individual contributions. So the cash income of an older brother might go to the school fees of a younger brother, or two sisters might end their schooling to earn money for an older brother’s tuition so that he could avoid the military draft. The same collective social rationality that governed women’s transplanting teams influenced the values and practices of the female-headed households. It would be interesting to compare these female-headed households with male-headed households in Cambodia to see how this social rationality differs with both a male and a female adult distributing resources. Gendered household labor: production and reproduction Productive and reproductive tasks are closely related in an agricultural economy. The main activity of the women interviewed was rice cultivation, a productive activity, in order to provide family food, a reproductive purpose. Women household heads33 provided food for the daily meals, a reproductive task, by growing it themselves or earning the cash to buy it, productive means. For family members to work productively, they needed daily food and occasional medical care. The female head provided the labor for these reproductive tasks along with other female members of the household. Children had to be cared for in their infant and toddler years, a reproductive task. As soon as they were old enough, perhaps six or seven, they participated in family productive activities such as agricultural chores or marketing their mother’s food products. The rural household is both a place of family reproduction (eating, sleeping, and medical care) as well as a productive staging area in close proximity to fields and village consumers. The rural widows interviewed had an assortment of helpers for child care: an older sibling, an elderly relative, a neighbor. Because the women were no longer bearing children, they did not have infants or toddlers to supervise. Their youngest children were in school and older children were working or married in their own household. The mothers had time to work at productive activities. Women’s productive tasks involved both agriculture and microenterprises. The main agricultural task, rice cultivation, did not produce cash. Some women grew agricultural products that did produce cash at harvest, such as fruits and vegetables. Most of the cash earned by women was through microenterprises such as preparing food or selling wild vegetables. Most women’s time was spent in the non-cash production of rice cultivation and reproductive tasks such as preparing daily meals for the family.

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By contrast, village men spent much more time in cash-producing activities. Men’s agricultural activities were not as time-consuming as women’s. Men generally did not participate in daily meal preparation though men did have some reproductive tasks such as hauling water for the family cistern and gathering firewood. The availability of more daily time meant that men had more opportunity to earn cash as well as more leisure time than women. In the family economy, men earned more cash while women produced more food. In addition, men’s traditional income-producing activities were more lucrative than women’s. Men scale palm trees to tap the nectar for palm sugar, a commodity highly valued due to the risk involved in collecting the syrup. Men transport passengers on motos, which women seldom drive.34 Men traded in large animals such as full-grown pigs and oxen. Women tended to do their trading in smaller animals such as chickens or piglets that brought in much smaller amounts of money. The consequences of this sexual division of labor were that when the husband died, his widow had a significant drop in cash income. Especially when the children were small, the presence of only one adult earner instead of two made a big difference in the family budget. While the widow typically had the skills to earn additional income, she did not have time in her day to earn the money her husband would have brought in. Instead, she had to find time to cover the husband’s tasks in agriculture that took time and money away from her traditional roles. To deal with the loss of male income, the female head allocated household and income tasks to her children as they grew into adults. The children’s labor gradually provided some compensation for the loss of the husband’s labor. If the husband had been alive, however, the children’s labor would have been additional income to the family rather than compensatory income. The overall financial circumstances of the family were in most cases worse because of the loss of the male adult earner. The widows that weathered the loss of their husband’s income the best were those who had some productive source of cash income already in place such as Khoeurn who distilled rice wine. Those with less ample sources of cash had to expand their microenterprises or develop new ones and had a harder time adjusting to widowhood. Permeable but persistent gender roles Gender roles in rural Cambodia are permeable with both women and men able to trespass gender boundaries. Men and boys carry out female roles when family necessity demands it. When no daughter is available to help a widowed mother with cooking and child care, boys take up household

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 73 work. Meseth’s son did not go to school because he watched his six younger sisters while his mother worked in the fields. Similarly, transplanting is a female task. Yet sons often help their mothers through their teenage years and into young adulthood. In Rolea B’ier, adult males worked at transplanting if their wife was sick or involved in some other work. When asked if men resented doing women’s work, the widows retorted that if they resented it, they wouldn’t eat! The economy of scarcity and the need to feed the family trumped traditional gender roles. Women trespassed into males roles in plowing. In order to feed the family, the plowing had to be done. If a woman had access to a plow and strength enough to handle the oxen, it cost her less time to plow herself than to exchange her transplanting labor for plowing by a man. Widows said that no one ridiculed them for taking on men’s work. On the contrary, they seemed pleased with their skill at plowing and more confident because they knew this traditionally male role. The shift of plowing from male to female did not endure into the next generation, however. When the widows had a son, they turned the plowing over to him when he became a teenager. Oeung taught her sons to plow rather than her daughters. She felt that it was right for her sons to do the plowing rather than her daughters. Chan also gave the plowing to her teen sons. Despite the permeability of gender roles, traditional allocations of work by sex persisted. Even women who had plowed for years did not see plowing as a gender-neutral task. They themselves had taken up the plow out of necessity. But as soon as their sons were old enough, they expected them to do the family plowing. Dara gave her son the plowing when he turned fourteen years old. She taught an older daughter to plow, too. When the son was in school, the older daughter would do the family plowing. As soon as the son returned, however, the family expected him to be responsible for this task. A son-in-law was available to plow for the family. However, the female members of the household had to transplant his fields in exchange. This transplanting labor was time-consuming and arduous. If the brother plowed, the female members of the household were spared this lengthy labor exchange. The traditional gender roles served to distribute work tasks within the family. In some contexts, gender role permeability may be perceived as “liberation,” as women gaining access to traditionally male work that brings with it financial rewards, authority, and prestige. The ability to plow seemed to give rural Cambodian women a sense of accomplishment and empowerment and enabled them to feed their families in hard times. They did not

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want to permanently change the gender role allocation, however. Their motivation seemed to be a matter of work distribution, as Kathy Robinson (1988:71) observed. Women work longer hours than men in agriculture and household maintenance in rural Cambodia. If there are males in the household, they are expected to do their part by taking on the traditional male tasks. The gender roles were a way to distribute work between the two sexes to take advantage of superior male strength without the need for continuous family negotiation. Men plow, women transplant: this traditional and undisputed formula allocated the burden of agricultural work to both men and women.

The Long-term Consequences of War Even though the Pol Pot conflict had ended two decades before my interviews with the widows, it was clear that the war had had a substantial and enduring impact on their lives. The consequences of the war lasted many years beyond the peace treaty for these widows and their children. The loss of their husband’s labor in agricultural tasks meant that in most cases, the widows’ planting was delayed and the hunger gap extended for themselves and their children. Without the husbands’ income from traditional men’s microenterprises, families of widows had fewer resources to invest in productive equipment such as oxen and a plow. They had fewer savings to draw on in times of medical emergency. The widows had less ability to counter disabling medical conditions that reduced their work productivity. They were at greater risk of losing their land in a crisis. Their children received less schooling than they might have had their father not been killed in the war era. The lack of family financial reserves had an additional impact in the widows’ old age when they might otherwise have had some money to fall back on. Not all husbands had been good contributors to the family coffers since some gambled and drank away the family finances. Several widows saw themselves better off financially without an irresponsible husband. But for most women, the income from their husband would have made a big difference in their financial picture. Their precarious financial circumstances in their old age were a long-term consequence of war. Many war widows had been young women during the Pol Pot conflict. They lost not only their husband but also many children under the Khmer Rouge. Because they were widows, they did not have additional children to rebuild their family after the losses of war. Some war widows like Sophea had no children at all because of their youth at their husband’s

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 75 death. Vanna lost her only child during the Pol Pot era. These younger war widows could reasonably have expected to have many more children in a natural lifespan with their husband, had he survived the conflict. In a country where children are the social security system, the loss of children meant an uncertain old age. Those children who did survive to adulthood had trouble finding an appropriate spouse since so many boys and young men had died. One widow complained that she could not find a good husband for her teenage daughters at the end of the Pol Pot era because all the available men were widowers looking for someone to take care of their small children. The young women were reluctant to become stepmothers and the widow herself was guarded about taking on a batch of unrelated grandchildren. Since grandmothers often watch small children in Cambodia, the widow would have been the caretaker of the new husband’s children. She didn’t want to invest her energy in children whose loyalty and affection she was unsure of. The consequence in this family was that the two daughters never married and so did not have children of their own to care for them or their mother in old age, a multi-generational effect of war. In traditional societies, the extended family serves as an emergency network to help in times of need. In Cambodia, the civil war blew huge holes in the extended family safety net. All the war widows had lost many family members during the Pol Pot time. Grandparents and parents, aunts and uncles, cousins had all been lost in great numbers. The implications for the widows were that there were few people to help in emergencies. There were fewer family members to exchange labor for plowing or transplanting. With the loss of extended family, widows lost their support network, their cushion against the crushing effects of poverty. Rin lamented that all her brothers had been killed in the Pol Pot time, except her youngest brother who lived far away and was sick as well. When her son and daughter-inlaw died of AIDS, she had no one to turn to for assistance. She lost her land because she had no relatives to lend her money for the hospital bills. When she could no longer work, she had to rely on the charity of her neighbors. She sobbed with grief over her unfortunate circumstances and her grandchildren’s threadbare existence. The war had taken away her social safety net and there was nothing to replace it. The web of family relationships that constituted the widows’ social capital was one of the long-term casualties of war. War made rice cultivation more difficult for widows. War undermined and defeated the beneficial effects of family solidarity. In assessing the causes of rural poverty in the Third World, war must be considered one of the aggravating factors.

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Chapter Summary The interviewed rural widows supported themselves and their families with a “rice plus” strategy, combining rice cultivation with a diversity of microenterprises and wage labor. The “rice plus” strategy differed from one family to another, depending on the widow’s health, age and the number of children in her family. Children played a crucial role in widows’ households, working at their mother’s side when young, carrying out most household work when the mother was disabled, and caring for her in old age. The spirit of family solidarity central to this strategy was cemented by economic necessity. Family members realized that without cooperative labor, they would not eat. Children were the widows’ social security plan. Married daughters provided more direct assistance to their elderly mothers than married sons. Because of their daughters’ important role in their future, widows were keen on arranging daughters’ marriages. Childless widows looked to extended family for assistance in need and felt insecure about their future. Widows were mostly uninterested in remarriage. They disliked the dependence they associated with marriage and feared that their children would be ill-treated by a second husband. The negatives of marriage prevented widows from accessing the male labor and income that might have helped themselves and their children. Many widows faced a hunger gap after their last crop of rice was depleted and the new crop was not yet harvested. They filled the hunger gap with income from microenterprises and wage labor. Widows were skilled in finding an economic niche in the village economy, some product that they could sell to other villagers, market in town, or sell to traders. They knew how to assess risk, consider profits and losses, and maintain good customer relationships. They used natural resources efficiently and taught their skills to their children at an early age. Some traditional women’s crafts, such as palm mats and palm thatch, had diminished in popularity with the availability of modern products and widows lost income from this change. Widows gained from development in the availability of modern sector jobs for their children. Garment factory employment for daughters and construction jobs for sons brought valuable wage income into widows’ households that helped bridge the hunger gap. Widows compensated for the loss of their husbands’ labor in agriculture by relying on family members or exchanging labor with other villagers. Labor exchange rates favored men, with male labor valued more highly than female labor. In some villages, widows took up the male task of plowing themselves, “trespassing” on male gender roles. In those villages, the

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“Rice Plus” and Family Solidarity 77 exchange rate for female labor was better than in villages where women did not plow. The variation in gender roles did not persist to the next generation. Widows who plowed expected their sons to plow once they were old enough, not their daughters. The allocation of reproductive labor to women meant that widows spent significant time in reproductive tasks rather than productive endeavors. Widows lost income from the time spent in these non-income producing reproductive tasks. Widows’ income also dropped due to the loss of their husband’s labor and his income activities, usually more lucrative than women’s income activities. War had enduring effects on widows’ economic lives. Many widows lost not only their husband but also children and extended relatives. They lost their husband’s labor and income and the future labor and income of their children. They lost the children that they might have had if their husband had lived. With the death of relatives, widows lost their extended family safety net in times of need. Widows lost both financial capital and social capital to war, effects that lasted their entire lives.

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Chapter Four

Widows’ Access To Productive Resources

Access to productive resources such as land, credit and education is a critical factor in the ability of rural widows to support themselves and their families. The most important productive resource in an agricultural economy is land, on which Cambodians grow their staple food, rice. Land is also used to grow lucrative vegetable crops. In order to plant and cultivate crops, widows need access to seed, a plow team, and fertilizer. When these inputs are not available, they need access to credit to acquire them. Microenterprises typically have inputs that must be purchased such as rice for desserts or wine-making. Sometimes rural widows run out of rice, and credit to purchase rice for food is essential to maintain the family’s productivity. Education is another productive resource that opens doors to wage jobs such as teaching, nursing and government service. Education facilitates widows’ understanding of financial transactions such as interest rates. When widows have access to these three resources, land, credit, and education, their chances of having enough to eat for themselves and their children improve. They have more choices in the present and more hope for the future. When widows lack access to these three resources, they are more likely to find themselves destitute and lacking in good choices for their family. The ways that women find to acquire and maintain these resources are an important part of rural widows’ economic coping practices.

Land Land is the most important rural resource. In Cambodia its basic utility is to grow the family’s food staple, rice. Rice provides three meals a day to Cambodian families and most of the widows interviewed grew their family rice themselves. Cambodians distinguish between rice land, rice paddies in 79

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which rice is grown, and house land, a plot in the village on which their house stands. Villagers frequently grow vegetables and fruit trees on their house land. Land is differentiated by grade into top, middle, and bottom land.1 There also is summer land along a river or lake that can only be farmed in the dry season when the water recedes. Widows usually did not include summer land in calculations of their land holdings. In the 1980s land distribution, following the collective farming of land during the Pol Pot and Vietnamese periods, female heads of household as well as most other rural villagers received an allocation of land. Some widows interviewed retained their land from this distribution and some had passed the land on to their children in the traditional practice of “dividing the land.” Some women had sold their land, many to pay family medical bills. A very few had acquired more land to farm. Ownership of rice land Most interviewed widows owned some rice land and farmed it as their chief source of food. The average land holding was 52 ares,2 with a range of 5 ares to 1.5 hectares. Oeung, Sokha, and Vanna owned less than 20 ares.3 Dara, Khoeurn, Ry, Chan, and Lim owned and farmed a hectare or more. Most elderly widows, including Ching, Vy and Heng, had turned the care of their land over to their children who farmed it and provided the family’s rice. Bopha had no land of her own and worked as a daily wage farm laborer. Moam, Vuth and Rin also had no rice land and supported themselves some other way. Collective land ownership: beneficial for widows? All widows in the study had participated in the 1980s krom samaki collective farming system. While part of the purpose of this collective system was to help war widows, the widows interviewed had mixed feelings about the arrangement. They appreciated the spirit of group cooperation and help with plowing but disliked the food shortages that were associated with collective farming. In each village under the krom samaki system, the head or mae phoum assigned residents to a group or krom with a parcel of land to farm together. Each krom had ten to fifteen families who worked together cooperatively under the group leader, the mae krom. Work was allocated following the traditional Cambodian sexual division of labor. Men in the krom handled the male tasks of plowing, threshing, water management and transportation of rice. Women carried out the female tasks of sowing, pulling the seedlings, transplanting, weeding, and winnowing the rice.

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Benefits of collective farming Some widows remembered good things about collective farming, especially the spirit of cooperation and mutual assistance. Chantha liked the krom arrangement because the men did the plowing and the widows didn’t have to pay anyone for it. Oeung remembered the mutual assistance of group members, how the group helped her and she helped them. Dany liked the arrangement because “everyone helped each other, they were happy together, not jealous of one another.” Lim recalled that if she was short of rice, the krom would help. People took responsibility for doing the plowing without being asked. Once the krom ended, everyone had to solve their own problems. If a widow didn’t have enough rice, she had to figure it out herself. If she needed plowing done, she had to go around and ask people to help her. Drawbacks of collective farming Other widows complained about the rules associated with the krom samaki time. Narin said that “everyone had to follow the rules or they would not get any food.” She didn’t like it and wanted her own land so that she could have “freedom, not rules.” She felt that she could support her children better on her own land rather than rely on the group. She complained that she couldn’t get enough salt in the krom period. Chantha and Leang noted that many people resented the fact that they worked more hours in the fields than other workers and they argued among themselves. Several women said that the krom samaki system did not produce enough rice to feed their family all year. They went along with the system because they had no choice but they were glad when it came to an end. Chandaravy had only two people in her family so she didn’t get very much from the harvest that was distributed on a per capita basis.4 She felt that it was easier for large families with many children. During the krom time, some widows found entrepreneurial ways to supplement their rice to deal with the food shortages. One krom gave its members time off from the collective work to engage in other endeavors. Vanna raised pigs and chickens and traded palm sugar to get extra rice. In her krom, everyone worked at rice agriculture only every other day. On the off day, they worked in their own microenterprises to earn extra rice. It was the mae krom’s idea and only their krom did this. She thought it was a good idea and the krom members had more rice because of it. The time krom members spent away from the fields didn’t diminish their collective rice harvest. The elderly received a smaller allotment of rice than the active agricultural workers. One elderly widow, Sib, complained about the lack of

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food in her case. She was not expected to farm because of her age. Instead, she took care of the small children in a nursery arrangement. Sib had ten children under her care at one point. They cried a lot, she said, and had to be fed. Sib didn’t like the arrangement because she only got five thang from the harvest, less than the agricultural workers. Her sons didn’t get enough rice, either. They were married with one child each and if there wasn’t enough rain, none of them got enough rice to last the year. Sib had an ox and plow that she shared with the krom during this time, but she didn’t get any additional rice for this contribution. She thought that the krom was a good arrangement for widows because it helped them with the plowing and everyone helped one another to survive. Nonetheless, she didn’t like the krom samaki arrangement and was glad when it was changed. Land distribution In the 1980s, the Vietnamese regime decided to privatize the land due to food shortages and popular discontent with the system. The ensuing land distribution put Cambodia’s farm land back into the hands of farmers. Because land is the key agricultural resource, the land distribution deeply affected Cambodia’s rural villages and their residents. The widows in the study had all received land in the distribution. In most cases, their current economic capability was directly related to the amount of land they had received. The land distribution was a very important event in the widows’ economic lives, second only to the death of their husband. Rice land was divided up by the village head or mae phoum. The decision to distribute the land and the basic rules of the distribution were established by the national government although the interviewed women attributed the decisions to the mae phoum, their local official. The exact method varied from village to village but the process usually involved allocating a certain number of ares per person. The number depended on how much land the village owned and how many people were in the village. In some villages, the land was divided up by household instead of by person. Widows in another village than their own were sent back to their home village before the land was distributed and they received land in their original village. The land was allocated with regard to the work capabilities of the household. Elderly people who could not farm received less land. Large households with many workers or with oxen received more land. The intent appears to have been to cultivate all available land and to give uncleared land to families able to clear it. So the governing values of the land distribution concerned productivity and rice output rather than equal treatment.

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The Angk Snuol village studied had a considerable amount of land and few villagers, so each person received an ample allocation. Dara and Chandaravy received land in Angk Snuol. Dara’s husband was living when the land was distributed and they had four children. The family received nearly one hectare of land in several different fields. It was about 15 ares per person for the six people in her family and Dara thought it was a fair distribution. Chandaravy and her husband had married shortly before the land distribution and the young couple received 50 ares of rice land. Chandaravy was upset that she did not receive more because she wanted enough land to grow some rice to sell. She said that she wasn’t smart or out-going enough to challenge the mae phoum on the land she was given. Chandaravy just accepted it even though she really wanted more. In the S’ang village, the allocations per person were less than in Angk Snuol, about seven ares per person. The land in S’ang was less sandy and more fertile, however. One widow negotiated with the mae phoum for extra land. Leang received 49 ares of middle land for her seven family members. She wanted more for her large family, however, and so she “sweet-talked” the mae phoum into allocating her old house land from before the civil war as well as the 49 ares. She used the extra field to grow vegetables to sell. The quality of the land and the proximity to water were factors in the land distribution that affected widows’ satisfaction with their allocation. Ching had eight people in her family and received 64 ares. She was happy because it was good land, close to the village and to a source of water and didn’t need a lot of chemicals to produce a good yield. Ching was relieved to have her own land after the krom samaki period and the freedom to decide her own work hours. “If I didn’t want to go to work one morning, it wasn’t a problem.” The private ownership of land gave widows more privacy and control over their own lives, though it also gave them more responsibility and less help with plowing. In a Rolea B’ier village, land was distributed by household, not by person. The village had large landholdings and the parcels were generous, averaging 1.2 hectares per household. Some of the land was undeveloped forest land that had to be cleared before cultivation. Chan received two hectares of bottom land near the river with good access to water, some of it still forest land. Her husband was living at the time of the distribution and the couple cleared the forest land. Ol received one hectare for her family of four. Ol was already widowed and did not have a husband to clear forest land, so in consideration of her circumstances, the mae phoum gave her land that was already cleared. The land distribution changed village stratification based on family size, work ability, and the decisions of the mae phoum. The landholdings

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were not so disparate, however, as to affect village relationships, according to one widow. Lim and her husband received one hectare of rice land. Lim reflected that with the distribution of land, people in the village were no longer equal as they had been during the krom time. Some were richer now and some were poorer. She said that it did not affect their relationships, however. They all knew one another and treated each other as friends. Land near a river was the most fertile and could support fruit and vegetable production, profitable crops. If the river flooded, however, the land could be lost. Farmers near a river usually received long narrow strips of land to distribute the best land more evenly and to minimize the risk of losing land to flooding. Meseth and Sophea, for instance, lived near a river in Kien Svay and received long narrow strips of land in the distribution. Some of the land in their area had too much water and could not be plowed, so to be fair to everyone the mae phoum decided to give each farmer a little wet land and a little good land. Meseth had a long narrow strip of rice land, 4 meters by 400 meters. Her house land was also a long strip 13 meters by 200 meters, large enough for her home as well as a field of vegetables. Sophea received one hectare of land along the river, fertile chamkar land on which she lived with her father and younger siblings. The river flooded the chamkar land often, however, and gradually reclaimed it, leaving only 50 ares, half a hectare, that could be planted. Widows with smaller families received less ample parcels of land. Sokha and Chantha had small families and received portions of land too small to feed their family adequately. Sokha received 45 ares, 15 ares each for three people. It was middle land but was not enough to feed her children as they grew. Chantha received only 28 ares and realized that she would not be able to feed her family with the rice from the land. She decided to apply to teach school as a way to supplement her rice, and she was hired as a primary school teacher. Despite the small allocations to Sokha and Chantha, both these widows received more land than they had had before the Pol Pot era. Sokha had been orphaned as a girl and had no family land. Chantha had lived in Phnom Penh where her husband worked for the municipal government and had no village land. In several other cases, the interviewed widows received more land than they had had before the Pol Pot era ten years earlier, the last time that land had been owned privately. One widow had been landless as a young married woman and received 30 ares in the distribution. It was already cleared and in production when she received it. Nonetheless, it was insufficient to feed her family of three and she hired herself out as a wage laborer to buy more rice.

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Disabled people or those with health problems did not receive as much land as able-bodied workers. The disparity in land allocations underscores productivity as the guiding principle of the land distribution rather than equal treatment. Vy and Seak received little land due to their health. Vy received only 25 ares of land, five ares each for the five members of her family. She was disabled with several health problems and her husband, who was living at the time of the land distribution, had been disabled with a shrapnel wound from the Pol Pot era. Neither was able to do much farm work. Seak got only 20 ares of land, much less than others in her krom who received 1–1/2 hectares. She was sick at the time of the distribution with a swollen abdomen and no money to buy medicine from the pharmacy. She felt it wasn’t fair but she didn’t complain to the mae phoum whom she knew from childhood. To recover from her illness, Seak took herbal medicine prepared for her by a village neighbor and it helped her regain her health. Once well, she was able to clear 30 ares of forest land herself despite her age of 56. People whose families had had more land before the Pol Pot era thought that the land distribution was not fair. Narin, Khoeurn, Vanna and Sib received less land than they owned before the Khmer Rouge takeover. In Sib’s case, it was due to her elderly age. Ironically, the language of equality was used to justify the unequal treatment of the elderly. Sib received only five ares of rice land and was unhappy with her portion because she had had one hectare before the Pol Pot time. She complained but the mae phoum told her that five ares was the allotment for elderly people and that he had to treat everyone equally. The elderly widow said that the land distribution created hard feelings in the village because people resented the new owners on their old land. One widow resented the amount of land she received despite its relatively ample size. She felt that the mae phoum had taken advantage of his authority in the distribution. Narin had had three hectares of land before the civil war. During the krom samaki distribution, she received only 90 ares of land, 15 ares per person for the six members of her large family. Despite the fact that her allocation was larger than that of other members of her village, she thought it was unfair and wanted her family’s original village land back. But she said that she had to follow the rules because “they wanted everyone to be equal.” She felt that she was treated equally with everyone else in the village despite being a widow because she had many relatives in the village to protect her. She noted pointedly that the village mae phoum, who drew up the distribution plan, had gotten the best land in the village.

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Dividing the land per person meant that families with many members (children or others living with the family) got a larger allocation of land than smaller and younger families. They had more mouths to feed as well but it seems that the larger amount of rice produced from their land meant that these large families had more discretionary rice. Perhaps the younger and elderly members of the family ate less rice than could be grown on their allocation of land. Over time the difference (measured in rice produced per person) increased between the families that received more land and those that received less. This increased inequality in land ownership was due to the fact that the smaller and younger families often subsequently had several children. Their small parcel of land then had to be divided, as the children became adults, into more and more parcels. Widows whose husbands were living at the time of the distribution and who subsequently had children were in this category of small landholders. When the children married, the mother gave them smaller parcels of land than other village newlyweds received because the younger children had not gotten an allocation in the land distribution. So the differential in land ownership in the village grew over time. The women interviewed did not consider this unfair, however, or resent the differences in land ownership. Most of them saw the land distribution as a just process. They acknowledged that some families had more land than others but they saw this as an inevitable result of some families having been larger at the time of the distribution. An important drawback of collective farming expressed by the widows was the chronic shortage of food under the krom samaki system. Several women reported that once the land was distributed and privately owned, they were able to grow enough rice to feed their family. Narin said that under her own management, her land usually produced enough food for the family, though sometimes she had to purchase rice. Chandaravy received 50 ares of land and she could grow enough rice to feed her family on this land. She had never received enough rice for her small family during the krom time. Division of land to children A number of women in the sample no longer held the land that they had received in the land distribution. They had given some or all of their land to their children, which they referred to as “dividing” their land. Often the women divided their land at the time of the child’s marriage and the amount of land given was typically the per-person allocation from the krom samaki land distribution. Chantha gave her children seven ares when the children married since the widows in her village had received

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seven ares for each child at the land distribution. The widows distributed their land piece by piece as the children married, keeping the remainder for their unmarried children and themselves. The land was typically divided to the new owners at the beginning of the first growing season following the wedding. Land record keeping in rural Cambodia has traditionally been accomplished through collective village memory. A process of land registration has been underway for several years in Cambodia, however, and in some villages widows had a written certificate of ownership for their land. In those villages, when land was divided to children, the land certificate was marked by the commune authorities, the mae khoum and the mae phoum. In other villages, there was no written record of ownership and families relied on their common memory in determining who owned which field. As one widow said, “I pointed to each field and told each child which one was theirs.” When the parent divided the land to the children, the younger generation then took complete responsibility for farming and maintaining the land. Land was divided to both male and female children though sometimes a child would not receive any land if they had moved far away from the village or had another occupation. Chantha gave seven ares of rice land to her daughter when she married a rice farmer from a neighboring village. Her two other children had married as well but had other means of support. Her second daughter had moved to Phnom Penh where her husband was a policeman, and a son had become a nurse in the village. She retained their allotment of land from the distribution as well as her own and farmed them herself in the afternoon after teaching school. If one of her employed children had to return to rice farming in the village, Chantha still had their land as a fall-back resource for them. When a widow divided her rice land to her children and so produced less rice herself, she could expect to be welcomed at meals at her children’s house. Sokha’s son lived in her village and farmed the land she had divided to him. Sokha lived in her own house and grew rice on five ares of land that she had kept for herself. It wasn’t enough to feed herself all year, however. When she ran out of rice, she went to her son’s or another relative’s to eat. Cooperative family work arrangements continued after the widows divided their land to their children. Ry gave her son his share of land, one-half hectare, when he married. She still helped him with the transplanting, however, and he still did the plowing on his mother’s land. Land stayed with the owner despite changes in marital status. Ol had given her sons one or two fields when they married, keeping two fields for herself. When one of her sons got divorced and came back to live with her,

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he brought the possession of his field back to his mother’s household. His ex-wife kept his ox, however. Sometimes a widow deeded over her land before her children’s marriage, if she were sick and unsure how long she might live. Oeung was sickly and she wasn’t sure how much longer she would live. She didn’t want any jealousy among her children after her death so she divided all her land, including her own allotment from the land distribution, to both her married and unmarried children. She lived with her younger daughter and relied on her for her rice. Some elderly widows had not deeded their land over to their children at marriage. In some cases, the widow had only one child who would inherit the mother’s land at her death. When a widow, such as Ching and Heng, lived with one of several children, it was likely that the resident child would inherit the land. In other cases, elderly widows may not have divided their land as a sort of insurance policy against future problems. Retaining legal control over their chief asset gave them resources to help their other children if they were in need. It also gave the widows leverage in the event of a falling out between them and the child with whom they lived. Seak had divided her land to her children and deeded her house over to her resident daughter only to have problems arise with the son-in-law. In response, Seak left her home and started a new one in her middle age. Such cases, however rare, may have encouraged widows to keep their land in their legal possession as long as possible. The Cambodian practice of dividing land among several children rather than giving it intact to one child has resulted in the parcellization of rural lands, with family holdings broken up into smaller and smaller pieces. Because these small parcels often did not produce enough rice to support the children and their family, the younger generation was under increasing pressure to find other means of income generation. Younger people often combined agriculture and modern employment. They stayed in the city temporarily while working in construction or garment production and then returned to the village until their next job, a sort of intermittent urbanization. Young people’s departure from the village threatened to leave their widowed mothers without immediate support. So land pressure from increasing population threatened widows’ social security network. Threats to land ownership Several widows lost their land through medical emergencies. Unlike the customary passing on of family land to the next generation, loss of land due to medical emergency was seen as an ominous development. Several widows sold all their rice land to pay for medical treatment for their husband or

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children. Often, the treatment did not cure their family member and the husband or child died. The result was that the widows lost not only their rice land but also an important worker in their household. The significance of the loss of rice land, for a widow who depends on agriculture for her livelihood, cannot be overestimated. Without rice land, a widow must purchase all her rice in a market where the price fluctuates dramatically with the agricultural cycle. She needs a daily source of cash income and the health to work each day. These were significant challenges to elderly or disabled widows. Vuth had lost her land when her husband fell ill with malaria. He was treated in the village for eight months without improvement. Then Vuth took him to a hospital in Phnom Penh for treatment where he stayed for two weeks. He did not get better at the hospital and Vuth brought him home again to be seen by a private doctor. In order to pay for the hospital and the private doctor, Vuth sold all 85 ares of their rice land. Three days after the sale, her husband died. Other widows sold their land to pay for medical treatment for their adult children. In some of these cases, the child died, leaving the widow with medical bills and grandchildren to care for in her old age. Rin’s son contracted AIDS and communicated it to his wife. Rin relied on her son heavily because she had lost her other children and most of her relatives during the Khmer Rouge era. She sold her 75 ares of rice land to pay for expensive medical treatment for her son and daughter-in-law. It cost Rin $2000 in all. After months of treatment, the daughter-in-law died. The following day, Rin’s son died. After paying for the medical and funeral costs, Rin had some money left and bought a sturdy house for herself and the two orphaned grandchildren. She supported the family by working as an agricultural laborer until she became too old and sick herself. The bereft family then had to depend on the charity of their neighbors. Sometimes widows sold their rice land for some other reason than medical emergencies. Narin sold 30 ares, about one-half of her land, to obtain jobs for her children. She had to pay for a bribe to a garment factory manager so that he would hire her two older children. She sold the ares for $100 to neighbors who wanted more land to graze their ox. The garment factory manager told her that the bribe cost $120 for the two children. Narin used $100 from the land sale and borrowed $20 from a relative. She felt it was a good trade-off because her children got paying jobs. Acquisitions of land Only one widow in the sample, Khoeurn, had purchased rice land since the krom samaki land distribution. Her neighbors wanted to sell 50 ares to buy

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an ox and she had some extra money from her rice wine business. When Khoeurn’s husband had been ill, she had used her savings to pay for her husband’s medical treatment and so did not have to sell any land. Khoeurn’s case illustrates the value of a productive microenterprise in building savings. Khoeurn’s savings helped her prevent loss of land during her husband’s illness and allowed her to acquire additional land. An important part of this positive picture was Khoeurn’s ownership of a rice still which she acquired while her husband was living. His labor and additional income were no doubt key to the household’s ability to acquire this important asset.

Credit The use of credit varied according to the financial circumstances of the widows. Those with more resources in terms of land and working adults could afford to borrow for productive purposes such as investing in a microbusiness or buying fertilizer for a more abundant crop. For these widows, credit was an valuable option. This group could also afford to choose not to borrow. They could save up small surpluses so that they had a financial cushion in case of medical emergency. They could invest in new business ventures or purchase a more substantial house for their family out of their savings and did not need to borrow. Poorer families borrowed out of necessity. They borrowed because they had no rice to eat and needed food for the family. They borrowed to cover debts that had become unmanageable or because they needed money to pay for medical expenses. These families ran the risk of losing their land, their chief productive asset, if they could not repay their debts. They teetered on the edge of hunger and abject poverty. The widows borrowed in small amounts, too small to be profitable for commercial banks. The widows’ loans came from relatives, neighbors, moneylenders or microcredit organizations. Interest rates varied widely from no interest to over 800 percent per year. Most women repaid their loans within a short period of time thus capping the amount of interest they paid. Others could not repay quickly and paid interest for many years. Besides their inability to pay down the principal, these indebted widows lost their ability to borrow new money and were threatened with the loss of their land. Borrowing and saving was often done in rice rather than in cash. For the poorer families, cash was extremely scarce and hard to find to pay back a debt. Borrowing in rice was safer, especially just before the harvest when rice would soon be plentiful. Families saved in rice as well, selling small

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amounts when they needed cash. The price of rice varied depending on the season so this strategy was not aimed at increasing a family’s total worth. Rather, it was aimed at safety since rice was harder to steal than cash. And in a bad harvest year, the family could always eat the rice. Borrowing from relatives, neighbors and friends A number of widows in the sample borrowed only when their family was totally out of food, usually just before the new harvest. They borrowed from more affluent relatives with rice or money to spare and they repaid when the harvest came in. If the relatives were too poor to make loans, the women turned to a more prosperous neighbor. Often the relatives or neighbors did not charge interest under these circumstances. In many cases, the loan was in rice and it was repaid in rice. If the loan was in cash, the woman sold some rice at the time of the harvest and repaid in cash.5 By being careful to repay, the borrower maintained her credit with her relative or neighbor against the next food shortage. Chandaravy was willing to borrow rice from a neighbor but reluctant to borrow money, worried that then she would be dependent on someone else. “I want to be independent,” she emphasized. Other widows were willing to borrow for various purposes but only from relatives. They knew that if they could not repay, relatives would be lenient with them. At times the relatives said outright that the loan did not have to be repaid. Often these loans were given to buy rice or medicine and were in the range of 10,000 to 40,000 riels ($2.50 to $10). Lim, for example, borrowed money for medicine from her relatives. When her sick children recovered from their illness, they earned the money to repay the debt. She had borrowed from her relatives for her late husband’s medical treatment also and couldn’t repay for three years. Her relatives didn’t charge her any interest because she was so poor. Some relatives did charge interest on loans. Seak borrowed from her brothers and sisters when she ran out of rice. If she borrowed two tau6 of rice, she repaid them three tau at the harvest, a 50 percent interest rate. She didn’t want to borrow from non-profit community banks because she had no way to earn cash to pay them back. Ol borrowed from family members at 10 percent monthly interest. She had to borrow every year to buy rice before the harvest came in and once it took her as long as five months to repay. She had heard about better interest rates at community banks but she was worried about losing her land and so would only borrow from family. When relatives charged interest to a family borrower, they interjected a commercial element into family relationships and made money off their

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poor relative. Some interviewed women rejected this commercial approach and noted that their families did not operate that way. They repaid family loans but not with interest. The women were reluctant to turn to relatives too often particularly when the relatives were much more affluent. The women did not want to bother their relatives or be seen as poor country cousins always asking for money. Narin received regular gifts from her city relatives in the form of clothing and mosquito nets. When she was short of rice, she borrowed small amounts of money from them (40,000 to 50,000 riels, $10 to $12) that she did not have to repay. On the day of our interview, she planned to go to the city the following day to ask her relatives for money because she was out of rice. She was going with a gift of her own, rice snacks wrapped up in banana leaves that she made from the last of her rice. She said that she did not want to borrow larger amounts from her relatives, afraid that they would see her as a nuisance. For agricultural purchases such as oxen or fertilizer, she hoped that her children would give her the money from their garment factory jobs. One of the long-term consequences of war was that there were fewer family members to extend a widow credit. Family members would loan money for productive items such as oxen or fertilizer. Families helped with emergency medical needs and staved off the loss of land in a crisis. When loans could not be repaid, family members were lenient. People outside the family often required interest payments to extend credit. With the loss of extended family due to war, widows’ access to credit was significantly reduced. Borrowing from moneylenders for food and medical care Sometimes women did not have any relatives to borrow from because in addition to losses in war, their surviving relatives were too poor. If there were no neighbors that could be called on, women borrowed from moneylenders. Moneylenders were often village residents, perhaps a married couple with assets to lend. The wife typically handled financial transactions with village women. In some cases, the moneylenders lived in substantial village houses next door to the impoverished people that they loaned to. Ten percent per month was the typical rate though at times it was higher. Borrowers usually repaid in a short time frame, two or three months. If they could repay the loan quickly, the interest was manageable. Problems arose when the widow could not repay quickly. Most of the widows who were forced to borrow for purposes such as food and medical care were too poor to repay these loans. They paid the high interest for months or

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years. Vy, for instance, borrowed from a moneylender in a neighboring village when her husband was sick. In the ten years since her husband’s death, she had never been able to pay the principal. Each year the moneylender came to her house when the interest was due and each year she begged for a reprieve until her son could give her the money. She paid interest of $10 per month on every $100 borrowed, a 120 percent annual rate. She had paid the original loan many times over but still owed the entire principal amount. The drawback of high-interest loans was the difficulty poor people had to repay them. The benefit was that money was always available to a person with land and good credit. For a person with a good reputation, moneylenders provided an important safety net in hard times. It was a safety net with a sharp hook, however, the possibility that the borrower would not be able to repay quickly. The practice of charging high interest to poor people increased village stratification. Affluent villagers got richer and poor villagers got poorer. Sometimes moneylenders demanded that poor borrowers pledge their land as collateral. Poor widows ran the risk of losing their land, their most precious asset, if they could not repay the moneylender. Leang was facing this possibility. When her husband was sick in the hospital before his death three years earlier, she had borrowed from a Phnom Penh moneylender who charged her $6 on $100 borrowed, a 72 percent annual rate, better than the village money-lenders. She paid the interest on the loan every month but had not been able to repay the principal. In the year of our interview, she needed to borrow again to buy rice for her family. The second time she went to the moneylender, she had to give him the title to her land in order to get the loan. She had two years to pay back the loan before she lost her land. If widows lost their land, moneylenders often refused to lend them money and an important source of credit was no longer available to them. Rin had borrowed from a money lender when she was out of food for her family. She had trouble coming up with the money to repay and could hardly manage the 10 percent monthly interest, much less the principal. Then she sold her land to pay for her son’s and daughter-in-law’s extensive medical treatment. After that, the moneylender would not lend to her anymore. Rin’s relatives were poor and landless and could barely support themselves much less lend her money. Rin noted that many people in her village had lost the land that they had acquired during the krom samaki land distribution. They couldn’t feed themselves on the rice they could grow on their small parcels of land and they borrowed from moneylenders to buy rice. When they couldn’t repay

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the debt, they were forced to sell their land. If someone owed a lot of money to the moneylender and couldn’t repay, they would run away from the village and disappear. Borrowing from microcredit organizations for food and medical care Some women borrowed from microcredit organizations to pay for food or medicine. Microcredit organizations offered loans at a much better interest rate than moneylenders. Dara borrowed from a community bank when her husband was sick and he needed some shots. The bank representative came to her village and processed the loan for her. She borrowed 150,000 riels ($38) and over two years paid back 200,000 riels ($50), an interest rate of 17 percent annually. In order to pay the debt, she sold a baby ox when her female ox gave birth. Her children contributed some money too. The community bank gave her a much better rate than the moneylender who charged 10 percent per month when she needed to borrow money for rice. Microcredit non-governmental organizations (NGOs) usually quoted their rates as a repayment amount per month. The repayments often included a small amount for a savings account. Several widows planned to repay the loan with a household member’s employment income. Vuth borrowed from a microcredit organization to repay the debt she incurred purchasing medicine. She had borrowed the money little by little from several of her neighbors who didn’t charge interest. She wanted to repay her neighbors, however, and so she borrowed from the microcredit NGO and paid them all back. The NGO charged interest of 500 riels per month on 10,000 riels borrowed, an annual rate of 60 percent. The widow borrowed 100,000 riels ($25) and paid on a ten-month schedule of payments that included principal, interest, and 1000 riels ($0.25) savings per month. As long as she kept to the schedule of payments, she would repay the loan in ten months and save 10,000 riels ($2.50) as well. Vuth planned to repay the loan with her daughter’s garment factory income. Some widows who borrowed from microcredit organizations were still repaying moneylenders. They paid a substantial amount in interest on their loans each month. Bopha borrowed from a microcredit NGO to buy rice and medicine. She borrowed 100,000 riels and was repaying 40,000 riels for three months, including 20,000 riels in interest (an 80 percent annual rate). Previously Bopha borrowed from a neighbor, but they charged her 20 percent per month. So she went to moneylenders instead who charged only 10 percent per month. Bopha had borrowed repeatedly for food and medicine and had difficulty paying off the debts. She paid only the interest for month after month. She estimated that her total debt was around $100. She paid $10 to $20 per month in interest.

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Some widows had heard of microcredit NGOs but were reluctant to borrow from them. They knew about group loans but were worried that if they could not repay their loan, everyone in their group would be angry with them. Several women said that the NGOs required their land as collateral and they were reluctant to do this. The daughter of one widow was in an NGO loan group and she had to pledge her land to get a loan. A member of the daughter’s group didn’t pay and everyone else had to cover the payments, so the daughter didn’t want to do it again. Borrowing from microcredit organizations for business purposes Some women borrowed from microcredit organizations to invest in a small business. Typically, the borrowers were part of a peer loan group and went through a period of training before receiving their loan. Borrowers made their payments to the loan group that managed a group savings fund. In one microcredit organization, borrowers’ interest payments went directly to the loan group savings fund as the microcredit organization only required payment of the loan principal. The result was that the loan group built up a pool of capital that they could draw on under their own rules. It was a sort of mini-bank controlled by the loan group members that gave them flexibility in borrowing and a sense of control over their finances. The interest that the loan group took in each month was loaned out immediately to group members. Sophea was the treasurer of her loan group of seventeen widows. She borrowed 100,000 riels for fertilizer and pesticide for her vegetable business when she joined the group. Since then she had paid off her original loan and had taken out another loan of 205,000 riels to pay for part of her new house.7 She paid 3 percent a month on the house loan and had one year to pay it back. All the interest payments went to the loan group that had accumulated a significant savings account from their collective payments. Sophea noted that everyone in her group had always paid their monthly portion without fail and the group had never had to cover someone’s payment. Before Sophea joined the loan group, she used to borrow from money-lenders who charged 10 percent per month. It took her a long time to pay off the debt she owed the moneylender. She had also borrowed from her relatives and from neighbors. Her relatives did not take interest but the neighbors charged her 10 percent per month like the moneylender. Microcredit loan groups offered a credit option to widows who could not borrow from moneylenders. Even though Meseth had 42 ares of rice land, moneylenders thought her too poor for a loan. She had joined a microcredit loan group two years earlier and the loans allowed her to purchase inputs for her chamkar vegetable business at the beginning of the growing season. She

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planned to pay her debt off at harvest time as long as floods did not ruin her crop. Until then, she paid 10,600 riels ($2.70) a month that included 2000 riels in savings. Meseth still had to borrow from relatives occasionally for food. They did not charge her interest and she paid them back at the harvest. Last year, a relative loaned her $50 to pay for the birth of her grandson. It was a difficult delivery and the widow’s daughter had to give birth at the hospital. The widow hadn’t yet been able to repay her relative. Women in peer loan groups were keenly aware that their personal reputation was at stake in their repayment history. Everyone in the group knew whether they had made their payments. Village reputation was a powerful motivator. Since widows lived in one location for most of their lives, their personal standing with other villagers was very important to them. Some were reluctant to join a peer loan group because they were afraid they wouldn’t be able to repay and it would create tension and illfeeling in the village. Defaulting on a loan was seen as a disastrous outcome which damaged the borrower’s reputation and ruined her credit. For these reasons, women were careful about borrowing and keen to repay promptly. Those who were unable to repay recognized the gravity of the situation and feared losing their land and good standing in the village. Borrowing government money Occasionally, some government money was available through the village mae phoum. Dany borrowed from a government fund administered by the mae phoum to buy a female cow. To apply, she filled out an application that the mae phoum gave her and put her thumbprint on it. She paid 40,000 per year on 100,000 borrowed, a 40 percent annual interest rate. The cow had had two calves and was pregnant for a third time. Dany sold one calf for 1 million riels ($250) so she felt her investment was worthwhile. Widows who did not borrow Some widows in the sample did not borrow at all. Some, like Rin, could not get credit. Others were worried about being able to repay the loan. If they didn’t have money, they did without. “If my rice is low, I make porridge,” one widow said. Sokha observed that if she didn’t have food, she went to eat with her son or other relatives. The fear of losing land was the chief reason that people did not want to borrow. Ry said that a government agent had offered her a loan but she had to turn over her land deed. She was worried she would not be able to repay and would lose her land, so she didn’t borrow the money. She disliked group borrowing for the same reason. Some widows had heard of government loans but were reluctant to make a deal that might cost them

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their land. Narin was offered credit by the government to buy oxen that would have reduced her farming expenses. She would have had to sign a five-year contract, however, and she was afraid of not being able to repay. Worried about losing her land, Narin refused the loan. Other widows had enough land and income that they did not need to borrow money. Heng reported that she never needed to borrow. She said that she always had enough rice to feed her family and did not want to borrow money. Widows with sufficient assets could afford to save money and had some resources to draw on in difficult times. Khoeurn had savings to use when her husband became ill and had to be hospitalized. She did not have to borrow or put her land in jeopardy.

Education Cambodian education is organized in tiers loosely based on the French system. Primary education consists of six grades (first through sixth). Secondary school has two levels, lower secondary8 (seventh, eighth and ninth grades) and upper secondary9 (tenth, eleventh, and twelfth grades). Comprehensive examinations are given at the end of the lower secondary level (grade nine) and during upper secondary school.10 Until the Pol Pot era and the abolition of education, Cambodian grade levels were numbered beginning with twelve, the lowest grade (first grade in the current system). Primary school extended for six years, from the twelfth through the seventh grade and secondary education began in the sixth grade. Older respondents reported their education using these numbers.11 Education entered the lives of the interviewed widows in two ways: the education that the women had received as girls and the education that they provided for their children. The amount of education that the women themselves received determined the skill level that they brought to their economic life. The education that they arranged for their children reflected their current financial situation and their strategies and hopes for the future. Widows’ education The amount of childhood schooling that the widows in the study received varied widely from no schooling at all to eight years of school, with an average highest grade attained of 1.6. Older women had received less education while younger women had received more education (see Table 1). No schooling Fourteen women in the sample with an average age of 64 years had received no schooling at all. They gave a number of reasons for not going to school

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including their poor family’s need for their labor, civil unrest, the lack of a nearby school, and parents’ fears concerning coeducation. All but one of these women could not read or write. The exception, Meseth, had learned to read as an adult. Most women reported that they did not go to school because their parents were too poor and needed their daughter’s labor at home. Chandaravy had watched the family ox. Vy had taken care of younger siblings, and Vanna had watched her sick father. Other widows had collected firewood for cooking rice or for producing palm sugar. Some widows mentioned civil unrest as a factor in their lack of education. Chandaravy noted that in her teen years there were no schools because of the Khmer Rouge anti-education policy. Sokha said that her family was always on the move during her childhood out of fear of the insurgency group, the Khmer Issarak. Their constant movements considerably aggravated the family’s poverty and contributed to her lack of schooling. When she was 12 years old, Sokha’s father died after being captured by the Issarak guerrillas, and her mother died soon after of illness. Sokha had to work to support her younger siblings and school was out of the question. Some widows did not attend school due to the lack of a suitable school nearby. Ching and Heng did not attend school because there was no school close to their home when they were small for either girls or boys. Another widow didn’t want to attend the wat school as some girls did because she was afraid of the monks.12 Several widows mentioned that their parents’ fears about coeducation restricted their schooling. Ching said that in addition to the lack of a school nearby, her parents feared that if she went to school and learned to read and write, she would write love letters to boyfriends.13 The two concerns may have been related. The love-letter reason may have been a teasing parental explanation for the girl’s lack of education when the real reason was the lack of a school nearby. By attributing the lack of education to a parental decision, the parents presented themselves as if in control of a situation over which they actually had little control, the lack of a suitable school. In the process, they shifted responsibility to the girl, blaming her alleged future behavior (writing illicit love letters to a boyfriend) as the reason that she could not go to school. In this way the parents were able to hide their poverty and insignificance in the political system and maintain an illusion of power and authority in the family, so important in the hierarchical Cambodian social arrangement. In this manner of reasoning, the parents’ explanation about the girl writing love letters, which appears to be a cultural matter of patriarchy, is actually a structural issue, the availability of schools. Culture, how-

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ever, is involved in the parents’ response to the structural situation, the cultural values that see parents as much more important than children, especially girls. Some widows had considered attending adult literacy classes. Meseth attended adult classes for 1–1/2 years and learned to read and write. Heng had tried adult classes but did not succeed in learning. She had trouble remembering new things and used to fall asleep in class. Moam didn’t even try adult classes because she thought that it was hopeless. Schooling up to the third grade Thirteen widows had received some schooling up to the third grade, the first level of primary education. The average age of these women at the time of the interview was 53 years, younger than the widows with no education. They gave similar reasons for stopping school as the group that had no schooling, their poor family’s need for their labor, civil unrest, and parents’ fears about love letters. In addition, they cited recurring illnesses and school fees as reasons for not continuing their education. All the widows in this group had learned to read and write except Leang and Oeung. Oeung had subsequently learned to read in an adult class taught by her husband when he was a volunteer literacy teacher. She had never learned to write, however. Most of the widows stopped their schooling due to their impoverished parents’ need for their labor. Leang and Bopha stopped school to help with the farming when they got old enough to transplant. Leang’s father died when she was ten and her mother pulled her out of school to cope with the increased work load. Oeung stopped school after only fifteen days and spent her time grazing the family ox. She lived with her grandparents who told her that it was a waste of time to educate a girl because she would never do anything with an education. As with the love-letters issue, the waste-of-time explanation shifts blame to the girl for her lack of education. Oeung’s alleged future shiftlessness was given as the reason for not allowing her to go to school. The implication that the girl was somehow morally deficient seems to be a cultural explanation for her lack of schooling, a patriarchal belief that education is unsuitable for girls. There was a structural context, however, for the grandparents’ decision, the lack of opportunities for girls in rural areas where marriage and agricultural field-work were the typical options. Perhaps the grandparents balanced the lack of employment for women against the school-fees that they had to pay for their granddaughter and their need for her labor at home, missed after her fifteen days in school, all structural issues. By blaming the girl for her lack of education,

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the grandparents minimized their own poverty and need for the girl’s labor and reasserted their authority in the household. Narin’s education was interrupted by the love-letter concern. Narin had attended primary school in Phnom Penh, staying with a cousin and watching the cousin’s children after school in return for her school fees. When she was ready to advance to fourth grade, however, her parents raised the love letter issue and pulled her out of school, bringing her home to the village. Since Narin had already learned how to write, the parents’ behavior suggests a fear of the contacts in school more than literacy itself. Perhaps they felt that the danger to their daughter’s reputation, so important for a good marriage, was greater than the benefit to be gained from more years of education. By bringing the girl home to the village, the parents reestablished their control over their daughter and gained her youthful labor power, as well as safeguarding her reputation for marriage. Illness affected the school career of other widows. Ol missed school often due to headaches and bouts of malaria. She attended school for ten years but had to repeat every class and only attained the third grade. Because of her frequent absences it was hard for her to do the schoolwork and she kept falling behind. Chan had had an illness that interfered with her mental ability and made her hair fall out. She had trouble remembering and couldn’t keep up with the class. By age 13 she was only in the second grade and decided to stop. Her parents wanted her to continue but she was too discouraged and gave up. She never learned to read or write although she could do a little arithmetic. The expense of school fees affected one widow’s education. Ry dropped out of school after three years because her family could no longer afford the school fees. She had learned to read and write simple phrases as well as some arithmetic. Fourth to sixth grades Several widows had advanced beyond the third grade. Some finished primary school but did not enter secondary school. These women were younger, with an average age of 47 years at the time of the interview. All of these women were able to read and write and several had studied French as well. The older widows in this more educated group, Khoeurn, Dany, and Sophea, finished their education before the start of the Pol Pot era in 1975. The reasons they gave for stopping their studies were somewhat different than the women who had had three years or less of schooling. Only Sophea cited poverty as a reason that she left school. She finished fourth grade and then went to work to help her impoverished family.

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Other widows mentioned the illness or death of a parent as the reason that they stopped studying. Dany finished primary school just before her mother died. Her father was already deceased and there was no one to pay the high secondary school fees, so she gave up her studies and farmed with her older sister. Several widows said that once they had finished their primary education, they left to work with their family. They implied that a young rural woman’s education was complete with primary school and it was time for them to work. After Khoeurn finished primary school at age 15, her parents needed her labor in the fields. By that time she could read and write Khmer, had studied French, and could do arithmetic. She noted that it was not unusual in her village for girls to stop their studies at the end of primary school. Lim had her education interrupted by the Pol Pot era. When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia, Lim was 11 and in the second grade. When the regime fell, she resumed her education in the third grade and studied for five more years until the fifth grade. At that point, she was 22 years old and she left school to get married. Rewards of primary education Women who had completed a few years of primary schooling reported that their education had helped them as adults with skills that went beyond reading, writing, and arithmetic. Narin said that her schooling had helped her to think about her farming and her family problems. She had married a difficult man who abused her, and her education had helped her cope with his abuse. Another benefit was that she could help her children with their school work. She felt that she was treated with more respect in the village because she had some education. Khoeurn felt more confident with financial transactions in the market because of her years of schooling. “I can add things up and I don’t get cheated,” she said. She felt that arithmetic had been more useful to her than her reading skills. Dany felt that her education had helped with farming and other tasks. At one point, she was asked to be a teacher but her eyes were bad and she couldn’t do it. She was a successful trader of rice and palm sugar, however, and understood the value of buying low and selling high. The lack of education, in contrast, undermines women’s ability to take part in community life. Chantha’s mother, also interviewed in the study, noted that women did not participate in the political leadership of the village because they were shy and uncomfortable talking to people. Because of their lack of education, they didn’t feel that they could take

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initiative in the village or assert themselves. In her commune, there were only male political leaders. Secondary school One widow, Chantha, had entered secondary school and completed eighth grade. She finished her education before the Pol Pot era. Khoeurn said that it was unusual for girls in her age group to study past the primary level. Her father had insisted that she continue her education. As a girl, Chantha studied at a renovated wat school. With her father’s encouragement, she went to secondary school for two years and finished the eighth grade. Chantha’s secondary education qualified her to be a teacher following the Pol Pot era when her husband was killed. She taught in the mornings and tended her rice field in the afternoons. She had an apartment at the school in a modern building and was paid a monthly salary by the government. Chantha used her earnings to pay the school costs for her three children who all went to secondary school. Her son continued on to nursing school in Phnom Penh and was the nurse in the commune clinic. Chantha’s experiences underline the importance of education as a gateway resource, opening up future possibilities not only for the woman educated but for her children as well. Women’s educational attainment and land status In an agricultural community, land ownership can be viewed as a causative factor in education with children of more landed families acquiring more education than children from families with less land. More affluent families can afford to send their children to school for a longer period of time than less affluent families. In the Cambodian context, however, land ownership turned over nearly completely in the 1970s and 1980s. The education of women in the study with average age in their fifties cannot be linked to present-day land ownership since the women all acquired land during or since the land distribution of the 1980s. The amount of land their families owned when they were girls may have made a difference in the amount of education they received as children, but that ancestral land was no longer in the possession of their families due to the land distribution. The landholdings of women in the study are therefore due to the land distribution itself and to events in the lives of the women since the land distribution. Education in this context affects a woman’s ability to earn income, to manage her money well, and to safeguard her productive resources such as land. For the widows interviewed, education may have been a factor in their ability to increase their land productivity. The landowning widows

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who produced enough rice for their household had more education (grade 3.0) than the landowners who did not produce enough rice (grade 2.4). In contrast to these widows who had retained their land, the widows who lost their land had much less education (grade 0.6). Widows lost their land mostly in medical emergencies when they did not have cash resources to fall back on. Those who did have cash reserves were able to weather these crises and retain their land. Education may have played a role in the rural landowners’ ability to earn and manage income and thus safeguard their land in emergencies. Khoeurn, for instance, had a sixth grade education and ran a rice wine business out of her home kitchen. Pooling the proceeds with her husband’s income, Khoeurn had been able to acquire an extra half hectare of land from a neighbor, bringing her holdings to one hectare. When her husband fell ill with malaria, Khoeurn had sufficient cash reserves to pay for his medical treatment and preserve the land assets they had acquired together. The fact that Khoeurn had been widowed only recently was an important part of her more affluent circumstances. However, her own productivity in the rice-wine business and her money-management skills were an essential part of the picture as well. Her sixth-grade education was no doubt instrumental in her business acumen and her confidence in managing her household finances. Children’s schooling The education that the children of the interviewed widows received can be viewed as an outcome of their mothers’ economic coping abilities. Mothers in general value their children and use their resources for their children’s benefit. Education is a key benefit for children, a way to develop skills that become a resource for the future. In addition, mothers who see their own future as tied to their children’s economic endeavors will invest in their children as liberally as they can. So mothers’ motivation to invest in children’s education is twofold: they wish their children to do as well as possible for the sake of the children themselves, and they see their own future social security as dependent on the children’s success. When the mother’s economic situation changes with the death or loss of a husband, the ability of the mother to cope with her changed financial circumstances is crucial for her children’s future. For her children to be educated, the mother must accumulate resources for the children’s school fees and manage to accomplish her work without the children’s full-time labor. The amount of education that the children receive is therefore an indicator of the mother’s resourcefulness in dealing with her financial and personal situation.

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Most widows in the sample prioritized their children’s education. Widows who had received no education themselves wanted their children and grandchildren to read, write, and learn arithmetic. Cash income from family microenterprises and wage work was used to pay the school costs of the widows’ children. Mothers valued education as a way to open doors for their children and provide resilient skills in a changing world. The priority the widows placed on education reflected their strategy for the future, for both their children and their own elderly years. Children’s highest grade attained The interviewed women gave complete education information14 on 75 children, 36 daughters and 39 sons. The average highest grade attained by the children was grade 4.2 (see Table 2). Overall, older children had higher educational achievement than younger children. Daughters had reached a somewhat higher grade (4.3) than sons (4.0), unlike the Cambodian population as a whole (Table 3). Restraints on children’s schooling While nearly all the children of widows in the study obtained some education, several conditions restrained the amount of education that these rural children received. Mothers were challenged financially and hard pressed to pay school costs. Sometimes mothers needed their children’s labor at home, particularly if the mothers were sick and unable to work. The distance to school was an important rural restraint as well. Some children skipped school, oblivious to their mother’s instructions and lacking a father’s discipline. For the older children, the civil unrest of the 1970s impeded their education significantly. In many cases, these constraints interacted with one another, boxing rural children into a low level of education. School fees and other cash costs Schooling at all levels in Cambodia is officially tuition-free. In practice, there are various costs and informal fees that parents must pay to send their children to school. At the beginning of the school year, parents must pay an annual enrollment fee as well as purchase uniforms, textbooks and other supplies for their children. Some parents have transportation costs such as purchasing a bicycle for their child to attend a distant primary or secondary school. In addition to these annual costs, teachers require a daily fee in order for the student to be admitted to class that day. Some teachers charge an absentee fee as well if parents do not notify the teacher of the student’s absence due to illness or other cause. Teachers supplement their rudimentary state pay with these extra fees and make exceptions only for extremely

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poor students. Besides the annual costs and the daily school fees, parents sometimes pay additional charges related to erecting or repairing the school building itself. All of these informal fees vary by school locality. The expenses of sending a child to school were a challenge to most of the rural families in the study. Many widows mentioned lack of money as the chief reason that their children stopped their schooling. Some mothers had difficulty paying for school fees for all their children at once and traded off one child’s education against another’s. Chan could not send her oldest child to school because she was too poor but managed to come up with the fees later for her younger children. When her second child completed fifth grade, she pulled him out of school so that she could continue to send the youngest children. Other mothers called on the older children to help pay for the younger children’s expenses. Chandaravy sent her older son to school until he was twelve years old and had reached the third grade. Then she had no more money for the school fees and he left school to farm his mother’s land. When he eventually began work as a construction laborer, some of his earnings went to pay for the school fees for his younger brother. In a similar case, Bopha paid for her son’s school fees until he was 20 years old and had reached fourth grade. When she ran out of money and her son went to work as a construction laborer, his income covered the school fees for his younger sister, age 14, in the fifth grade. A related tactic widows used to cope with school costs was to delay the children’s entrance into school. Many children in the study did not start school at the usual age of six but waited two or three years to begin first grade. Lim waited until her daughter was ten years old to start her in school because there was no money for the school fees and supplies for both the girl and her older brother. Another way that rural widows coped with school costs was to marshal their relatives to pay for some of the expenses. Narin asked her Phnom Penh relatives to send school supplies for her children. On rare occasion, children did not have to pay school fees. An elderly widow, Rin, cared for two grandchildren whose parents had both died of AIDS. Because the children were orphans, the teacher excused them from the school fees. A neighbor paid for the children’s uniforms and the elderly widow scraped together the money for their books. Opportunity cost of children’s education The opportunity cost of a child’s education is the cost of losing the child’s labor or income while the child is in school. Poor families often rely on their children’s labor to support the family. If the children are in school for part of the day, the work they might be doing for the family during those hours is lost.

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Several widows pulled their children out of school because they needed their labor to support the family. Dara sent her two older daughters through the fourth and sixth grades before taking them out to work on the family land. The girls then earned cash that paid for the schooling of their younger siblings who continued into secondary school. Ry pulled her first son out of school after the eighth grade. She felt that she was getting older and she wanted him to take on more of the workload. He had fallen behind his classmates anyway because he had missed a lot of school to help her with the farm work. Meseth’s oldest boy never went to school because by the time he was six years old, his mother needed his help with his younger sisters. All Meseth’s younger children went to school, however. Illness Illness interfered with children’s education. If the widowed mother became sick and could not work, her children missed school or dropped out altogether to care for her and support the family. In other cases, the children themselves became sick and missed school. In both cases, the children ran the risk of falling behind in their studies because of the missed classes. Many children repeated classes because of their spotty attendance and some dropped out because it was so hard for them to learn under the circumstances. Narin fell ill and needed her older children to work and care for her. When she recovered her health, she was able to send her younger children to school. Vuth’s older children stopped school because their father had died and their mother was sick. The oldest girl took care of the young children, a boy hired himself out as a laborer, and another girl went to work at a garment factory. The four younger children in Vuth’s family were still in school thanks to the efforts of their older siblings. Another widow had chronic illnesses and needed her children’s labor to grow the family’s rice and earn money. The daughter watched the smaller children and then at age thirteen started doing the farming. The son collected palm sap and made palm sugar to sell for cash. Because the daughter’s work was more time-consuming, she only went to the third grade. The son could do the palm sugar work after school and so he continued to the seventh grade. Distance to school Some older children delayed their schooling because there were no schools in their area. Lim’s older child did not start school until age twelve due to the lack of school in her village. In some rural communities the lower primary school (grades 1–3) was within walking distance but the upper primary school (grades 4–6) was

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further away, making attendance difficult without a bicycle. Ry sent her thirteen-year-old son to the fifth grade at the upper primary school about eight kilos (five miles) away. The boy left home at 6 a.m., walked to school for the 7:30 a.m. starting time, then walked home when school ended at 11 a.m. After the midday meal at home, he worked with his mother in the rice fields the rest of the day, transplanting and watching the cow. His mother was trying to find an old bicycle for him to ride to school. Children’s truancy Some children skipped school with their friends. One widow sent her two boys to school but they often would skip classes and play instead. Neither learned to read and as an adult the one surviving boy regretted his youthful foolishness. Another widow said that her sons were lazy and played truant with their friends. She was off in the fields and didn’t know that they skipped school. When she found out about it, she punished them but they still didn’t change. She thought it would have been easier with their father present in the household. Her daughters were more manageable and the oldest girl finished lower secondary school. Despite her sons’ misbehavior, they nonetheless did learn to read. Heng felt that her children skipped school because they were not treated fairly by the teacher. They didn’t have money to give to the teacher to get good grades and were failing. Finally, they got discouraged and dropped out. Armed conflicts Another important restraint on rural children’s schooling was Cambodia’s many armed conflicts, first the civil war and American bombing campaign and then the abolition of formal education by the Khmer Rouge. The children of some widows missed five or six years of education because of these civil disruptions. After the Khmer Rouge era, the smallest children resumed their education under the reconstituted educational system. But children in their teenage years often felt uncomfortable beginning school again in a classroom with young children. These older students typically did not stay in school for long and consequently missed out on a primary education. Some did not learn to read or write and so their adult work options were greatly restricted. Their adult illiteracy was a direct consequence of the war era, a loss in human capital that was never recouped. In Leang’s case, her older children started school late because of the Pol Pot era. The oldest child was eleven when she entered second grade in the reopened schools. She was embarrassed at being so much older than the other students and only studied for one year. Her younger brothers didn’t feel so odd and continued into secondary school.

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The interruptions of war continued into the Vietnamese era due to an on-going guerrilla war with the retrenched Khmer Rouge. In addition, the country was heavily mined and rural people were drafted to remove the mines. One widow schemed to protect her teenage sons from the draft. Sokha pulled her sons out of school during the 1980s because the government needed young men in the army to fight the Khmer Rouge and do dangerous de-mining work. The commune chief, the mae khoum, went door-to-door looking for boys to draft. When the widow heard that he was making the rounds in her village, she told her sons to hide by going from one house to another as the chief came through. When the chief called at her house, she told him that her sons were away in another village visiting relatives. The family’s ruse succeeded in keeping the boys out of the army but it also meant they could not return to school. An indirect effect of war on children’s education was widows’ reduced income due to the loss of their husband. Without her husband’s income, a widow had fewer resources to invest in her children’s education. She had to rely on herself or on cooperative relatives to come up with the school fees and money for uniforms and books. With the loss of their adult coworker, women relied more on the labor of their children when they were sick or disabled or in rice planting season. The mother’s need for the children’s help then interrupted the children’s education. Had the husband not died in wartime, the children might have had a smoother and more successful school experience. Children’s secondary schooling Despite the constraints on education in rural areas, a number of widowed mothers managed to send their children, both male and female, to secondary school. Chantha acquired a small house near the distant secondary school for her three children, a boy and two girls, while they were students. They came home on the weekend to see their mother and she gave them money and rice. She wanted to send them to upper secondary school but couldn’t afford the expenses for all three. At that time, young men were being drafted into hazardous de-mining work and the family collectively decided to send the boy to nursing school to protect him from the draft. The mother and her two daughters pooled their cash resources with the son’s earnings to pay for the school. After graduation, the son became one of the clinic nurses in the commune where the mother lived. Oeung sent her five children to school and they all completed at least the fifth grade. Three went on to secondary school and one completed the diplôme certificate at the end of ninth grade. They stopped studying because Oeung could no longer afford the high secondary school fees.

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The widows whose children had attained secondary school were somewhat older (56 years) on average than widows whose children had not attained secondary school (52 years). They had somewhat more land on average (48 ares compared to 32 ares) and had more education themselves (grade 2.3 compared with grade 1.6). A study comparing these factors might provide more insight into how these rural mothers managed to provide their children with so many years of education despite their own limited resources. Sometimes widows increased their resources by remarrying, and the resources helped the widow to provide education for her children. Dany remarried twice. Her first husband was killed by the Khmer Rouge and she remarried at the end of the Pol Pot era. Her second husband built her a sturdy house in which she still lived. He died of an illness after three years of marriage. Dany remarried again and during the land distribution of 1986, received an allocation of rice land for her husband as well as herself and a maiden sister in her household. When her husband left her three years later for another woman, she retained the rice land. She was pregnant with their daughter, her only child. The extra rice land that Dany and her sister farmed helped them acquire sufficient resources to pay for the daughter’s school fees. Dany wanted the fifth-grade girl to continue on to secondary school and had purchased a bicycle to enable her to get to school easily. Mother’s education and children’s education The mothers of over 40 percent of the children had no education whatsoever, yet their children had reached grade 3.5 on average. Children of mothers who had attended lower primary school had progressed into upper primary school themselves. Children whose mother had attended upper primary school had reached grade 4.9 on average. These children were seventeen years old on average and many were still enrolled in school, so their eventual grade attainment could be expected to be higher than their mother’s. The children whose mother had gone to secondary school had attained grade 8.3. Chantha had sent her three children through lower secondary school and one to nursing school. She commented regretfully that she did not have the money to send them all to high school. Several elderly widows, including Ching and Moam, sent their children as far as secondary school despite their own complete lack of education. Ching remembered that her parents did not let her go to school because they were afraid that she would write love letters. But she started her two daughters in school at age seven and supported one to the sixth grade and the other through the seventh grade. It was around the time of Cambodia’s independence from France, when King Sihanouk placed great emphasis on

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education. Ching still valued education for the female members of her family and talked with pride about her granddaughter in upper secondary school. The elderly widow hoped that she would see her graduation and expressed the desire to have her granddaughter become a teacher. Moam recalled how disappointed she felt as a girl when her parents would not let her go to school because she was too skinny. She regretted never learning to read or write. As soon as the Pol Pot time ended, she started her two children in school. The widow put them through school as long as she could and her daughter finished sixth grade and her son eighth grade. She regretted that she didn’t have the money to send the children on to the higher grades and said wistfully that she would have liked them to study more. Chantha’s mother, also a widow, sent all seven of her children to school despite her own complete lack of education. The children’s schooling began when a relative from Phnom Penh came to visit and Chantha’s father was embarrassed that his children were not in school. The relative encouraged the parents to send the children to school in the hopes of eventually having a business of their own in the city. The parents wanted their children to have a better life than their own so they decided to send the children to school. Chantha continued into lower secondary school and became a teacher. At the time of the interview, four of Chantha’s siblings had moved to the city and were working for the government or in a small business, so Chantha’s mother felt that the plan had worked out well. Dara, who had little education herself, had sent her five children to the fourth grade, and the younger children had entered secondary school. Dara was very supportive of education for her children, including her daughters. She realized, however, that there were limits to education and commented, “Education is not so important as money in acquiring a job. But it’s not a waste, because you don’t know what the future will bring.” Dara’s observation reflected the widely held view that to get a job a bribe was always necessary. Mother’s land status and children’s education Children whose mother owned one hectare of land or more had more education on average (grade 4.7) than children whose mother owned 20 ares or less of land (grade 3.5). Children in families with one hectare of land were more likely to go on to secondary school. Families with a hectare of land were typically large families, and often the older siblings earned money to pay for the younger siblings’ school fees. Dara’s older children, for instance, had less education than their younger siblings. Dara and Khoeurn’s children had the most education of any family in the sample, attaining grade 7.25.

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In both these families, the mother was committed to education for her children, juggling the farming duties among the school children and their older siblings. Several of the children in these two families continued to study through secondary school. Some mothers educated their children even though they had no land. Vuth had sold her land to pay for her husband’s medical treatment before his death two years earlier. Once widowed, she managed to continue sending her four younger children to school. The older children stopped school when the father died to help the mother who had become sick herself. The older children earned money for food and school fees and handled child care responsibilities.

Chapter Summary Most interviewed widows owned land acquired during the 1980s land distribution. They had all taken part in the krom samaki period when land was owned and farmed collectively. The widows liked the group cooperation but disliked the rules and chronic food shortages of collective farming. At the end of the krom period, the land was distributed by the village head on a per-person basis. Large families received larger parcels than small families. Several widows received more land in the distribution than they had owned before the collective era, though some received less. Since the village head took productive capability into consideration, elderly and sick widows received less land than other villagers. Widows with small families received so little land in the distribution that they could not support their family and had to find other sources of income. Some elderly widows interviewed had divided most of their land to their children and relied on them for food. Other widows had lost their land due to medical emergencies. Several sold all their land during their husband’s terminal illness to obtain medical treatment for him. When he died, they found themselves without their work partner and without land. The use of credit varied according to widows’ economic circumstances. Poor widows borrowed by necessity for food and medical care. When they could not repay their loans, they risked the loss of their land, their chief asset. Other widows had more resources and borrowed for productive purposes, to purchase an ox and to buy a rice mill. Widows preferred to borrow from relatives who often did not charge interest and were lenient with repayment. If the widows’ relatives had been killed in the war or were too poor to lend, widows turned to moneylenders. They had to pay high interest on these loans, 10 percent per month or more, and sometimes had to sign over their land as collateral. Some widows paid interest

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on loans for months, unable to repay the principal. Widows without land typically could not get loans from moneylenders. In some villages, widows had access to loans from NGO microcredit organizations. They borrowed in groups and accumulated savings in a group fund. NGO loans carried much lower interest rates. Some widows did not want to borrow in groups, however, afraid that if they could not repay, they would ruin their village reputation. Most interviewed widows had very little education. Older widows had less education than younger widows. Elderly widows had no education due to the lack of schools for girls in their youth or their parents’ need for their labor. Several widows reported that their parents had taken them out of school, fearful that their daughters would write love-letters if they were educated. Some widows had left school due to chronic illnesses or lack of school fees. A few widows had finished primary school and felt that their education had given them confidence in the marketplace and better interpersonal skills. One completed eighth grade and became a schoolteacher and managed to send all three of her children to secondary school. The widows with more education were better able to farm productively and to keep their land. The widows who usually had enough rice for their families had more education than widows without enough rice. The widows who had lost their land to medical emergencies had much less education than widows who had not lost their land. Education helped the widows manage their money better and earn enough to have some cash in reserve for emergencies. The education of the widows’ children can be seen as a measure of the widows’ economic coping skills. The widows prioritized their children’s education. While the widows themselves had very little education on average, their children had reached the fourth grade. Even widows with no education at all were eager for their children and grandchildren to be educated. In order to pay for school costs, widows traded one child’s education off against another’s. Widows delayed the entrance of younger children into school until older children had received several years of education. Then the older children earned income to pay for the school fees of their younger siblings. Widows also marshaled resources from relatives to pay for school costs. Widows educated their daughters on an equal basis with their sons, unlike the prevailing practice in Cambodian society where sons receive more education than daughters. Widows pulled their children out of school when they were too sick to work and needed their children’s labor to feed the family. Sometimes children stopped school due to their own illnesses or the lack of a village school. The civil war and Khmer Rouge era interrupted the education

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of some children. When peace returned, older children were reluctant to return to a classroom with young children. The result was a permanent loss of education for these young people. Mothers with more land were able to give their children more education. Mothers with a hectare of land typically sent their children into secondary school. Even with land, they relied on income from older children to pay the school fees. Widows’ access to productive resources was facilitated by the land distribution of the 1980s, when widows received land on an equal basis with men and married women. Widows’ access to credit was contingent on land ownership. Widows’ access to education as girls increased the chances of retaining their land. Many widows had not had access to education, however, due to family poverty and war. Widows with more land were able to provide more education for their children, increasing their family economic capacity. For the interviewed widows, then, land was the crucial rural resource, followed closely by education. Land was an imperiled resource, however, for those widows without cash resources to deal with emergencies.

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Chapter Five

Widows Surviving (Barely): Subordination and Resistance

The economic coping practices of rural Cambodian widows give insight into how impoverished women survive. Poor women engage in a patchwork approach1 to their economic life, patching together bits and pieces of economic resources to feed their family. In a patchwork quilt, small pieces of seemingly valueless leftover cloth are stitched together in a painstaking and time-consuming way to create an enduring, useful, and comforting product for the family. Poor people likewise take small bits of ordinary resources and work them with careful skill to create assets for their family. They farm tiny patches of land with great efficiency, transplanting rice seedlings with backbreaking labor to increase the yield of their crop. They forage edible weeds in rice paddies and sell them for valuable cash, or collect wild palm fronds to weave into house roofing for sale. They stuff rice into banana-leaf cases to sell in the village as snacks. The poor work long hours in resourceful and careful endeavors to produce small but significant returns for their family. The interviewed widows brought creative entrepreneurial skills and robust work attitudes to their economic life that were critical to the success of the “rice plus” approach. Wage employment in the modern economy is part of rural widows’ patchwork subsistence. The availability of factory and construction jobs in expanding urban areas reduces the importance of agriculture in rural areas close to towns and cities. However, most interviewed widows did not live near the modern industrial economy with its enticing options for their children. Their patchwork economy was restricted to the land and its agricultural produce. Widows with access to resources such as land, credit, and education survived better in the rural environment than widows without these resources, who often found themselves in an economic downward spiral.

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Surviving or Barely Surviving? Widows differ in their economic circumstances (Kusakabe et al. 1995: WS-89). Some widows are more secure economically, while others are in desperate economic straits. The difference relates to the widow’s age, education, health, land ownership and number of children. In this study, educated, able-bodied widows with land and several children were in the most hopeful situation, managing to survive, even perhaps in an upward spiral. Widows who were elderly, uneducated, disabled, landless or childless were the most vulnerable and were barely surviving, in a downward spiral. Widows surviving: an upward spiral Some widows managed to support themselves and their families on the strength of their own earnings and labor. The most successful widows were those with ample land, education, and good entrepreneurial skills. These widows leveraged their education to obtain a paid position or developed a steady source of income from a microenterprise such as rice wine or palm sugar trading. They grew enough rice for family consumption and used cash income to increase their productive capacity or to pay for their children’s education. Some older rural widows managed to support themselves reasonably well in conjunction with family members. They lived with their adult children and had enough land to provide the family’s rice. They had little education themselves due to their age but had invested in their children’s and grandchildren’s education. The size of their land holdings and the number of adult workers were their important economic resources. They augmented their rice production with cash from microenterprise activities. Guided by the family solidarity ethic, these rural families pooled their resources and managed a lifestyle with adequate food and decent living accommodations. Proximity to the city for marketing and job opportunities was an advantage. Several families had a member in the modern economy working in the garment industry, construction, or in government service such as teaching or nursing. The additional income from these overlapping economies, agricultural and modern, gave families a cash cushion and allowed them to make lifestyle improvements such as better housing. More financially secure widows could afford to borrow and used credit to increase their productive capacity. The availability of microcredit through NGOs was an important advantage, giving access to credit at a lower rate than moneylenders. The women who participated in peer loan groups had a reliable source of credit in a supportive environment that encouraged entrepreneurship.

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Educated widows had greater agricultural productivity, more land, and more food security than uneducated widows. They managed their money better and were able to weather individual crises such as illnesses. Education had a multiplier effect as educated mothers emphasized education for their children, sending them through primary school and sometimes into secondary school. Education, land, and family workers contributed to these more secure families’ upward spiral. Widows barely surviving: a downward spiral The widows in the greatest distress were those who had sold their land, usually for a family medical emergency. Often the sick person was the husband but in some cases, it was a child. The sale of rice land sent the widows into an economic downward spiral and they were barely surviving. Without a supply of their own rice, the widows had to find cash to buy all their family food. If they were healthy, they engaged in a microenterprise such as trading vegetables or preparing food. Their financial problems were compounded when they became ill themselves. Then they had to fall back on the earning power of their children. The adult children of these sickly widows sometimes found jobs in the industrial wage sector. Young women could be hired in the garment industry, while young men were more likely to find work in construction. But often the adult children of sickly widows were rice farmers and had little extra to offer to their mother. Some adult children hired themselves out as agricultural laborers but could only find seasonal work. Widows lost access to credit when they lost their land. The poorest women who had sold their land and had little microenterprise income were most in need of credit and least able to get it. Some owed debts to moneylenders and paid 10 percent interest monthly, absorbing their meager cash income. The downward spiral of decreasing assets and increasing debt is what Mohammed Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, termed the “process of poverty” (Hossein 1993:10). Most widows had no access to microcredit programs designed for the very poor. The poorest widows in this study were elderly landless widows without children nearby to support them. For these elderly women, a parcel of land that they could sharecrop out would have been an economic lifeline. Microcredit at low rates to fund microenterprise activity could have helped these women develop a cash cushion to prevent the loss of land in emergencies.

Theoretical Implications A number of theoretical conclusions can be drawn from this case study for advancing our understanding of widows, poverty, and gender inequality in

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rural areas of the Third World. First, it must be emphasized that the poverty of rural widows is due largely to the difficulty of making a living by subsistence agriculture. Land is often divided up into small parcels which provide only a modest harvest, even in a good year. Credit is expensive, available mostly from high-priced money-lenders. The weather is unpredictable, and crops fail through flooding, drought, and pests. Most rural areas are far from the economic life of an urban center. Since nearly everyone in rural villages is an impoverished subsistence farmer, little money circulates to stimulate economic growth. As one widow plaintively noted, “We are all poor farmers in this village.” Even with two adult earners, life is hard in rural areas of the Third World. With the loss of their husband, women struggle to support their household alone. Widows call on their children’s labor because it is so essential to helping the family survive. Patriarchal walls It is not only the difficulties of subsistence agriculture which impoverish widows, however. They are additionally hampered by patriarchal values which subordinate women and their labor, exacerbating female poverty. Patriarchy takes a particular shape in each locality (Kandiyoti 1988). Women are subordinated in distinctive ways from one region to another. In some areas, patriarchy is strong and highly oppressive to women. In other areas, patriarchy is weaker and women have more choices and some freedom from male domination. One may think of patriarchy as a wall dividing men and women, which in some places is made of stone and heavily fortified, hard to scale and impossible to see through. In other places, the wall is lower and with effort, one may climb it and peer over. Elsewhere, the wall may be a picket fence that one can slip through easily and perhaps even dismantle in places. Patriarchy varies from one culture to another, and women adapt to the particular expectations of their own culture. The economic options available to women depend on the shape of patriarchy in their region. In the case of rural Cambodia, patriarchy is like a thatch wall, a divider between men and women that is distinct but thin and impermanent, allowing some movement from one side to the other. Women are subordinate to men overall but have economic options that empower them and facilitate some freedom from domination. Both the subordination of women and their economic empowerment are institutionalized in cultural customs and practices. Institutionalized subordination of women The subordination of women is institutionalized in such cultural features as women’s responsibility for reproductive work and the devaluation of

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women’s labor. Women in rural Cambodia engage in reproductive tasks each day in addition to their productive work. As in the developed world, women work a double day or a second shift (Bourque and Warren 1981; Hochschild 1989). Their responsibility for reproductive tasks is added to the work hours spent in productive work such as rice cultivation. Men and women both engage in productive work, while reproductive work is the exclusive domain of women (Sachs 1983). Allocating daily reproductive tasks disproportionately to women absorbs their time and prevents them from engaging in additional productive work to accumulate money for school fees and medical care. Food preparation in particular requires hours of work each day. Reproductive work is not rewarded with cash remuneration and it is less valued than productive work which produces a crop or earns income. The expectation that women alone will carry out reproductive tasks is a structural practice of gender inequality (Chant 1997), a custom that maintains male dominance. Widows by definition do not have a male partner in the household to share domestic responsibilities, but they often have male household members such as sons, sons-in-law, grandsons or nephews. A more equitable distribution of the daily requirements of food preparation among the male and female members of widows’ households would free up time for widows to spend in income-earning activities. With sons as well as daughters cooking and participating in child care, a widow’s family would have more flexibility in allocating work tasks and more cash reserves in the family coffers. Women’s subordination is institutionalized in the devaluation of women’s productive labor as well. As this case reiterates, women’s labor is typically valued less than men’s labor (Bourque and Warren 1981; Lorber 1994). Widows had to work long days in transplanting to pay for one morning of male plowing. In Cambodia, male strength is valued above female endurance and persistence. The differential valuation of male and female labor must be seen as part of a cultural structure of inequality, a structure of inequality maintained by values privileging men (Chant 1997:263). Such differences cannot be seen merely as a complementary difference as Karim (1995:16) suggests. In view of the devaluation of women’s labor, the sexual division of labor itself must be seen as part of women’s institutionalized subordination. It is theoretically possible for women and men to work at different tasks that are similarly valued. In actuality, however, male tasks are typically valued more highly than female tasks (Bourque and Warren 1981; Lorber 1994). The division of work into male and female roles inevitably lends itself, in patriarchal culture, to the devaluation of women’s work. The low exchange value of women’s transplanting labor, in Cambodia, created

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a difficult challenge for widows without resident male labor. Since most lacked a plow and oxen, their only alternative was to negotiate with relatives or neighbors in the village for plowing services. The result for most widows was that their plowing took place late in the planting season, after the relative or neighbor had finished their own planting. The later start for widows meant a later harvest with a lower yield and a longer hunger gap. In view of the narrow margin in rural Cambodia between having enough rice to last the year and going weeks or months with very little food, a lower yield on the rice crop was a critical situation. If both men and women ordinarily plowed in Cambodia, widows would have had a better chance of feeding themselves and their children throughout the year. The devaluation of female labor had many other consequences for widows. They earned less income and had fewer savings than if their labor were valued more equitably. With less cash in reserve, they found it more difficult to raise school fees for their children. With less food security, they were more anxious for the future. They were less able to deal with family medical emergencies and more likely to lose their land. These factors all distinguish widows’ households from other households with adult male labor. In the institutionalization of women’s subordination in Cambodia, women have more work than men, and the work is valued less than men’s. Women have less time to engage in productive income-producing work, and the work that they do is paid less than men’s work. This double blow helps explain the relative poverty of female-headed households and their chronic food insecurity and sheds light on the process of the feminization of poverty. Institutionalized empowerment of women It is not only the subordination of women that can be institutionalized. As Carolyn Sachs notes, “Social structures not only constrain; they also enable” (1996:25). In rural Cambodia, cultural practices which empower women are also institutionalized. The patriarchal thatch wall is thin and impermanent and allows for movement back and forth. Women’s empowerment is seen in the involvement of women in economic activity from an early age in Cambodia. They gain important skills in transplanting and microentrepreneurship that give them economic capability throughout their lives. They learn how to manage household money, to stretch thin resources carefully, and to save for the future. They buy and sell in the village or town market and develop small enterprises that bring cash income into the household. They manage their own land and negotiate credit from family members and commercial money-lenders. Matrilocal customs provide for

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relatives nearby who can help in times of trouble. These traditional female capabilities do not mean that women are equal to men in the household or village. As Van Esterik observed (1996), women manage the household money only when there is little to manage. Nonetheless, these skills give women confidence in their economic endeavors and a foundation for selfesteem and active participation in village life. The institutionalization of women’s empowerment helps widows manage economically. Women’s habitual participation in economic activities helps women cope with the challenges of widowhood with more assurance than women who have not been economically active. They are used to engaging in economic activities and handling money. They have the means to produce resources for themselves and their children. They do not have to change their economic behavior drastically on top of the personal emotional adjustments of widowhood. Their ordinary economic routine helps them make the transition to single head of household with less disruption then an economically inactive woman. They are more likely to be able to provide food and schooling for their children and to prevent a downward slide into dependency and poverty. Women’s right to land ownership is a particularly important aspect of the institutionalization of women’s empowerment in Cambodia, as in other Southeast Asia societies. Land provides widows with access to the key agricultural resource. Even when the land owned is small, it allows widows to produce a basic amount of food for their family, a crucial bulwark against hunger. Outside Southeast Asia, some Caribbean islands with traditions of female farming such as Barbados also allow female land ownership (Barrow 1993). These societies contrast sharply with the experience of Mayan women whose land ownership was threatened after their husband’s death (Zur 1998) or African widows who were chased off their land by their late husband’s relatives (Owen 1996). Those widows’ lives were greatly complicated by their tenuous rights to marital land holdings. Widows benefit from cultures which allow land inheritance by women, smoothing the difficult transition to widowhood. State-enforced systems of land distribution can help widows and other female heads of household to acquire this crucial agricultural resource, their own piece of land. Women’s resistance to patriarchal marriage In the face of patriarchal institutionalized subordination, women are not passive victims. Women resist male domination in a variety of ways (Momsen 1993). Resistance can occur as organized political action, such as the Chipko movement in India (Sachs 1996:167). It can also take place in the daily activities and decisions of women (Sachs 1996:26) concerning their

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family lives. When patriarchal domination is weak, as in places like Cambodia, women are able to “opt out” (Tinker 1990:11) of the patriarchal family by heading their own households. Widows who decline to remarry can be seen as choosing this option. Widows choose to head their own household as a positive alternative to remarrying. As household head, they can make decisions, control their income, and create the home they choose without the necessity of negotiating with a husband. Rather than haggle for a “patriarchal bargain” (Kandiyoti 1988), they decide to leave the patriarchal store outright and shop elsewhere, on their own. A key factor in widows’ decisions to remain unmarried is the wellbeing of their children. As head of their own household, women can safeguard their children’s interests and make decisions unfettered by the influence of a man unrelated to the children. The women in this study were very reluctant to relinquish control over their children’s lives. Implicitly, they rejected the hierarchical relationship of Cambodian married life in which men are the head of the household and women defer to their judgment as if to an older brother. When women reject marriage as against their best interests, they turn down the economic and practical advantages that a male adult worker might bring to their household in favor of the freedom and control of their own female headship. In patriarchal marriage, men head the household and women defer to them. For widows used to managing their own household, remarriage would mean a loss of authority and control over their own life and the lives of their children. If women’s position in a married household had been one of difference but not subordination, as Karim (1995:16) suggests, surely widows would have been more interested in the economic resources, labor assistance, and companionship that marriage might bring. The Cambodian widows’ experience of marriage must have been one of gender inequality that worked to their disadvantage. The women’s rejection of marriage speaks not only of gender inequality but also gives testimony to the economic alternatives available to women in Cambodian society. If women could not survive economically without a male partner, they would have no choice but to remarry if possible. For women to reject patriarchy, it must already be weak. If women can choose to opt out of patriarchal households, the structures of gender inequality must be flexible enough to allow for economic alternatives. In Cambodia, the institutionalized economic empowerment of women makes it possible for them to resist patriarchal marriage. Scholars of other regions have found a similar resistance of widows to remarriage. Martha Chen found that Indian widows often did not remarry and noted a relationship with children (Chen 2000:82, 88). The older the

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widow and the more children she had, the less likely she was to remarry. A widow without children was more likely to remarry than a widow who already had children. Like the Cambodian widows, Indian widows cited their children’s well-being as a chief reason they were reluctant to remarry. They were worried about the care of their children in a second marriage. Chen (2000) observed that children did not easily gain legitimacy in their stepfather’s home and they lost the legitimacy they had in their own late father’s home. Caribbean women historically have been resistant to marriage (Momsen 1993). During the slave era in the region, marriage was forbidden for African slaves. After the emancipation of slaves, women were encouraged by the state to marry as the “morally superior and prestigious avenue” (Momsen 1993:2). The newly freed women were reluctant to adopt marriage, however, citing their fear of male violence and the risk of losing parental rights to their children with whom they had the strongest bond. The women were used to hard work as slaves and did not see marriage as a valuable economic or social choice. Linda Green found older Mayan widows reluctant to remarry due to concerns about the quality of the married relationship. The widows pointed out that “it is better to be alone than be with a man who drinks and who hits his wife and children” (Green 1999:83). Margaret Owen found a disinterest in remarriage in parts of Africa where, like Cambodia, wives are economically active. With their own economic base, the widows could afford to be independent. As one African widow remarked, “I have my house; my garden; I grow my vegetables; I sell in the market. Everything I make is mine. Why should I have a man take it from me, spend my money on drink and other women, or tell me now what to do? I am the boss now” (Owen 1996:108). For economically active women, widowhood ironically ushers in more power than they have ever known (Sachs 1996) and they are reluctant to relinquish it. Sylvia Chant suggested three factors that influence the formation of female-headed households, and the Cambodian case supports her theory (Chant 1997:257). First, women must be able to survive economically without a male partner. Second, they must be able to cope with the social pressures of being a single woman. And third, the financial or psychological gains of living with men must not outweigh those of living alone, with other women, or with their adult children. The widows in this study met all three of Chant’s conditions. They had the means of surviving economically without a male partner. They traditionally performed much of the agricultural work even when married and they were able to recruit male labor for roles such as plowing. While a man might have added to

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the family income, the women nonetheless were surviving without a male partner. Second, the widows were able to cope with the social pressures of being a single woman. The widows did not complain about a loss of status due to their unmarried state. They had a role in the village as mothers and as farmers and usually had a network of relatives and contacts for assistance and support. Third, the financial or psychological gains of living with men did not outweigh those of living alone, with other women, or with their adult children. On the contrary, many women expressed apprehension about the psychological cost of marriage in the loss of female household authority. Several felt that their financial circumstances were improved without a husband since their late husband had spent scarce family resources on gambling or alcohol. Plowing as resistance Another instance of women’s resistance to patriarchy, in addition to remaining unmarried, was the practice of plowing by women. As noted above, when widows have to do extensive transplanting to pay for their plowing in advance, their planting and their harvest are delayed, decreasing their crop’s yield and exacerbating the hunger gap (Chen 2000). Some Cambodian widows dealt with this problem by doing the plowing themselves. They found it difficult to plow due to the physical strength needed to carry the plow to the field and to manage the large oxen. Widows overcame these barriers when they had access to a plow team, however. The widows who plowed delighted in being able to carry out this task by themselves. They knew that they were stepping into a traditional male role and defying cultural stereotypes. Plowing gave them a new perspective on themselves and their villages’ beliefs about gendered roles. The plow-women gained confidence in their ability to support themselves and rejected the idea that only men could plow. They came to value their own labor more highly, including their traditional role of transplanting. In villages where women plowed, the exchange rate for female transplanting labor rose in relationship to plowing labor, traditionally carried out by men. The poorer women in the village, who could not afford to own a plow team, were able to put in fewer days of transplanting to pay for their plowing. The plowing capability of women with oxen thus benefited not only their own families but poorer village families as well. When women trespass on men’s work roles, the value of women’s labor increases in that community. The increased value benefits not only the women who have crossed the gender line but also other women in the community. For the women who plowed, plowing represented a sort of “declaration of independence” from men. It was a valuable symbol of their self-reliance and autonomy.

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Plowing is a sort of technology. Like so much technology, past and present, it is traditionally appropriated by men rather than women. The habitual assignment of plowing to men is ancient, dating perhaps to the beginnings of irrigation agriculture in time immemorial. Patricia Stamp (1990) notes that technology is not just hardware or a material object, but a social construct, a set of social relationships governed by cultural expectations. Technology has a dialectical character. It originates from an historical context but then changes that historical setting as it develops (Stamp 1990). We can only dimly view the origins of assigning plowing to men due to the ancient nature of this practice. However, we can see how the practice affects the social setting as women are excluded from the highly valued plowing role. When women appropriate plowing, they initiate a technical change, in Stamp’s way of thinking. They bring about a new set of social relationships around the task of plowing. These new relationships then affect the women and their social setting in a dialectical process. The joy with which women reported that they had plowed underlines the significance of this role for altering their social setting. They experienced plowing as welcome empowerment, an important change in their social relationships. It helped them view themselves as equals with men and not as dependents. It challenged the institutional subordination of women and contributed to the empowerment of women. When women step into men’s roles, they gain access to resources and change their social environment. They take a step towards equality and autonomy and an increased range of choices for women. This declaration of independence was available only to widows with a plow team, however. The poorest widows owned neither plow nor oxen. They had no choice but to recruit men to do their plowing. Households headed by poor men also had to recruit plowing assistance from men with a plow team. Access to technology usually requires capital which the poorest households lack. The very poor female heads of household had difficulty resisting the constraints of gender inequality and had no choice but to go along with the devaluation of their labor in purchasing plowing assistance. Women’s capability to resist patriarchal values is conditional on access to the means of production. The Cambodia case demonstrates that even in cultures where women do not ordinarily plow, exceptions can be made when the situation demands it. These exceptions probably are most common in societies with flexible gender roles such as in Southeast Asia. Others have reported that women do not plow at all, even in places where women are actively involved in subsistence agriculture (Owen 1996). More study is needed of these exceptional cases of plowing by women and the effects of plowing on women’s attitudes and the local valuation of women’s labor.

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Women’s spaces, women’s values When women head their own household, they establish customs and principles by which they govern their home. The widows in this study often cited the well-being of their children as their first priority. In order to feed the children all year, they earned income through microenterprises to purchase extra rice. They turned down marriage proposals because they worried about the status of their children in a second marriage. To pay the school fees of their children, they raised money through family loans. They strategized about good marriages for their children and grieved over children who had married poorly. They spent their meager assets on medical care for their children and sold their land to pay a bribe for a good factory position for their daughter or son. Their children’s well-being was the widows’ highest priority. We can view a woman-headed household as women’s space, governed by women’s values. Cambodian widows established their homes as women’s space and used it to nurture their children. They controlled their household and land and used the resources to benefit their children. By passing land along to daughters, they preserved control in women’s hands. They expected to be cared for in old age by their youngest daughter and leveraged their house and land to retain women’s space for as long as possible. The female values that widows espoused can be seen in their attitudes towards education for their children. The women educated their daughters equally with their sons. Rural families in general favor sons’ education, since sons are seen as most likely to provide support for their mother’s old age (Bourque and Warren 1981:217). The practice in Cambodian society as a whole conformed to this practice of educating sons more than daughters (see Table 3). The interviewed rural widows did not favor their sons, however. They gave their daughters as much education as their sons (see Table 2). This case reinforces Sylvia Chant’s findings that children of longterm single parents attain comparable or greater education to their peers in male-headed households, especially daughters (1997:253). Chant attributed the effect to the mothers’ concerns about their daughters’ ability to survive on their own and the greater control of the female head over household decisions and finances. Cambodian widows certainly knew from their own experience that daughters needed economic resources for the future. The control they had over their children’s education, especially their daughters,’ was one of the benefits of remaining unmarried. The widows also invested in their own future by improving the economic capabilities of their daughters. The widows’ advocacy for their daughters’ education demonstrates their commitment to women’s empowerment and reflects the character of their homes as women’s space.

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Janet Momsen (1993) found a similar tradition of women’s space in the Caribbean institution of the houseyard. The typical houseyard was centered on the mother and was attached to her house which she often headed. Within the houseyard, women could combine their productive and reproductive work, watching the children as they attended to productive tasks. Both men and women took part in child care and other domestic duties in the houseyard. Girls were confined to the yard under their mother’s supervision, while boys were allowed to come and go. Consequently, most of the houseyard’s inhabitants at any time were female. The yard was dominated by the most senior woman. Since the Caribbean is a region with traditions of female economic activity and land ownership, like Cambodia, we can suggest that the phenomenon of women’s spaces relies on the possibility of women’s economic autonomy. Recent reports of a Kenyan women’s village, Umojo, founded and maintained by women in flight from domestic conflict (Lacey 2004), support this suggestion since sub-Saharan Africa has long and well-established traditions of female economic participation. The women of Umojo support themselves by selling tourists elaborate bead necklaces characteristic of their region and traditionally produced by women.2 Battered women’s shelters and the women’s land movement (Sachs 1996:51–52) can be seen as analogous women’s spaces in the developed world. It would be interesting to discover under what conditions widows and other sorts of single women are able to establish women’s spaces and how these spaces affect women’s values and the attitudes of the surrounding community towards them. Culture holds the key The view of Southeast Asian gender relations as consisting of “complementarity and balance” (Michelle Rosaldo, quoted in Atkinson and Errington 1990:viii) cannot stand up to the scrutiny of rural widows who disdain marriage and struggle to feed their children in a tilted labor market. It is not a “compliment” to women when their labor is devalued and they must spend week after week hunched over in a rice paddy to purchase plowing for their fields. Despite the real instances of women’s institutionalized empowerment, patriarchy still rules in rural Cambodia. The bias against women increases the depths of their poverty and results in insecurity and anxiety. While widowhood is not a cause for village stigma, poverty is. As one widow plaintively explained, “People don’t look down on me because I am a widow, they look down on me because I am poor.” And widowhood increases the likelihood of poverty. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen observed, “The economic hardship of woman-headed households is a problem both of female deprivation and of family poverty” (Sen 1990:123–4).

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To address the poverty of rural widows, the cultural beliefs that underlie the low valuation of women and their labor must be better understood. Only by making patriarchy visible can it be dismantled. The patriarchal beliefs that shape Cambodian society undergird the poverty that haunts rural widows. Culture holds the key to unlock the devaluation of women and the preference for men. Widows’ poverty will be alleviated only when women are seen and accepted as equal partners in all aspects of rural life.

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Tables

Table 1.  Women’s Educational Achievement by Age School Level Attained

Average Age

Age Range

N

No Education

64

42–83

14

1st to 3rd Grade

53

44–64

13

4rth to 6th Grade

47

37–52

 4

7th Grade and up

50

50

 1

Total

57.5

37–83

32

Note: One woman in the sample did not give information about her education. Source: Lee study interviews

Table 2.  Children’s Average Highest Grade Level Attained by Sex and Age Group Female Age

Grade Level Range