Women Left Behind? Migration, Spousal Separation, and the Autonomy of Rural Women in Ugweno, Tanzania

For some time, scholars have argued that migration research has neglected women. The young male migrant in search of wage labor has long been the model actor for demographic, economic, and sociological theories of migration. Through its disregard for women’s roles in migration and migration decisions, this male‐centered scholarship has suggested that women are either passive followers or “left behind” wives. In recent years, scholars from several disciplines have responded to this neglect of women by emphasizing their mobility and their experiences as emigrants in international and internal migration. By and large, these studies have recognized women migrants as agentive. Nevertheless, rural stayers, those apparently left behind by migrant husbands, still receive little attention. This article addresses this lacuna by investigating why it is that women in Ugweno, Tanzania, have remained on their farms while their husbands have migrated out. Through detailed migration histories and in‐depth interviews with a randomly selected group of couples, I explore how the label “left behind” does injustice not only to the ways in which Ugweno women are involved in migration and migration decisions but also to the fact that, for many women, remaining on the rural farm is part of an empowering strategy, offering women a degree of economic autonomy and social well‐being that they would not necessarily have found as migrants.