Volume 47, Part A, October 2016, Pages 31–40
- American University, 4400 Massachusetts Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20016, USA
- Received 11 February 2016, Revised 13 May 2016, Accepted 6 July 2016, Available online 30 July 2016
Highlights
- •
- Changing dynamics on family farms in the South of Brazil affect women’s empowerment.
- •
- Three strategies are analyzed: the family farm, urban migration, and rural factory work.
- •
- In this specific context, women are most empowered by urban spheres of labor.
- •
- We may seek to emulate characteristics of urban labor in family farms to increase empowerment.
Abstract
This
article focuses on understanding the question: what do recent studies
on the modernization of Brazilian agriculture tell us about the changes
in gender dynamics as a traditional family farm moves to alternative
strategies for reproduction and how do these respective roles empower or
disempower women? To understand this issue, this article determines
what kinds of roles women occupy in traditional family farms, as well as
the urban roles they take on after the phenomenon of pluriactivity
manifests, and evaluates these roles in an empowerment index. The
analysis shows that the family farm is the least empowering option of
the strategies I identified (and urban migration the most empowering),
and that we can seek to emulate the empowering qualities of urban
employment within family farms to maximize their future empowerment. A
possible pathway to empowering women on family farms includes feminist
support for the institutionalization of programs that make gender
dynamics more equal within family farms.
Keywords
- Gender empowerment;
- Labor;
- Family farm;
- Feminism;
- Pluriactivity;
- Brazil
© 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
