women, remittances, and reproduction

Reproduction has become a central issue in the analysis of peasant households that supply migrant labor to capitalist enterprises. Many have argued that the physiological reproduction of peasantries in underdeveloped countries has been accompanied by the reproduction of their social and economic conditions. When peasant households finance reproduction, they subsidize the continued strength and expansion of capitalist enterprises that depend on their surplus labor, as well as maintain peasant relations and techniques of production. Jamaican peasant women use remittances from seasonal labor migrants to the United States to help meet the costs of reproducing their households and their social and economic conditions, without significant improvement. In addition, migrants' wives and girlfriends must increase their work on their peasant farms to compensate for the absence of male household members. This supports arguments that peasant participation in wage labor markets, a common means of integrating peasant households into wider social and economic systems, can result in the conservation of peasant techniques and relations of production, as well as the further subordination of women to household production and reproduction processes. British West Indies, peasants, labor migration, international development, women's roles