Structures and processes: Land, families, and gender relations

Abstract

Despite the variation in land-reform processes and in the cultures in which they occur, there is striking similarity in some of the effects of land reform on gender relations and women's family positions. Family and kinship patterns both affect, and are affected by, land reform. This two-way relationship is examined here, looking in particular at the author's study of north-eastern Zimbabwean Resettlement Areas, conducted in the mid-1980s, and Agarwal's 1994 study of women and land rights in South Asia.