Gender, developmental cycles and historical process: a critique of recent research on women in Botswana

The dominant focus in the present literature on women in Botswana is on femaleheaded households and their relative disadvantage in a migrant labour economy. Schapera in the 1930s had noted that the femme sole had 'emerged' but that there was 'as yet no place for her in the legal system, or in the political life of the community'. I Today, women can apply for residential and arable plots in their own names and can speak for themselves in the customary courts. Yet the 'place' for either the femme sole or any other woman remains more restricted than for men, and the former faces difficulties peculiar to that status. Schapera documented the deleterious effects that the migration of large numbers of adult men had on the family and on 'married life' and described women as being burdened by extra responsibilities and greater insecurity. Yet he also pointed to women's more independent attitude and their tendency to be less submissive to men.2 Current writing has concentrated more on the burdens and has not paid any systematic attention to the contradictory consequences for women's independence. In particular, the virtually exclusive focus on female-headed households has now reached a point of diminishing analytical returns, while the variation in household organization that is gradually being documented cannot be explained by the production of increasingly elaborate typologies. This article does not purport to be a comprehensive review of current literature on women in Botswana, but selectively raises a number of critical questions about present trends as they relate mainly to rural women.3 The particular challenge in analysis of the Southern Africa situation, as elsewhere, has been how to integrate 'macro' and 'micro' perspectives. The labour reserve theory of labour migration,