Marriage Strategies, Resistance and Stratification

Not all women lack access to resources, and not all are precluded from participation in the wage or salaried sector. Clearly the new elite households include women. Just as marriage was a male strategy of accumulation in pre-colonial Nso', so it is today. Women's production and reproduction continue to support male investment and status. The current context has, however, shifted the focus of these strategies and brought new opportunities for women. Increasingly, women are receiving education at all levels. Parents often see their daughters' education as an investment that will be repaid by their daughter's husband in bridewealth and other services. Educated men marry educated women, and bridewealth, by matching 'like with like', comes to operate in the same way that dowry does, encouraging the combining of resources among elites. Elite women, too, assume primary responsibility for provisioning the household but, unlike their non-elite sisters, they have access to resources which allow them to contribute directly in cash to total household accumulation. Elite men are apt to invest in their wives' careers and enterprises, either by paying education or training expenses or by lending them money for business ventures. Women married to elite men often have salaried jobs and are, in addition, able to invest more substantially in trade and to hire labour on their farms. Marriage practices continue to form the base of accumulation for men and are, in addition, an important factor in the formation of elite groups.

V. told me that a good husband is one who not only gives money to the household and pays school fees, but who will also discuss plans with his wife and listen to her point of view. She and her husband have a marriage which is fairly typical of the new rural elite. Her husband is the headmaster of a village primary school. She married at age 19, had two children, became the secretary of the local women's cooperative, did some petty trading in prepared foodstuffs and worked a slightly larger than average farm. After the birth of her third child, at age 28, she decided to return to school to get a teacher's certificate. Her husband was instrumental in her return by providing encouragement and financing. When V. finished college she and her husband both found employment teaching in Kumbo, where they began to build a large modern cement-block house, and had four more children. With the help of her daughter and some relatives, whom she pays in cash and a percentage of the crops, V. continues to farm in their home village, spending school vacations on her farm. Using some of her salary, she has become quite successful as a petty trader buying produce from women in the small market in her village and selling it in the larger market in Kumbo. Her eldest daughter is now in secondary school, and she and her husband are hoping that this daughter, and all their children, will be able to go to college or even to university. While V. and her husband keep separate accounts, they pool their resources at critical times in order to pursue their shared vision of a modern lifestyle. This has enabled them to put together a distinctively elite lifestyle, denoted by the clothes they wear, their house and furnishings, and an emphasis on cleanliness and neatness in their presentation of self.

Elite women as well as men can now accrue symbolic capital in the form of education. Women with a minimum of a secondary school education now seek salaried employment. Educated men and women marry each other and may combine interests and resources to accumulate resources to permit a distinctive elite lifestyle marked by the ability to consume and display 'western' or 'modern' consumer goods. An important aspect of symbolic capital in Nso' today is that it includes new forms of cultural capital, represented by access to education and jobs which, if not gender blind, are accessible to males and females, but only among a small elite.

Given their history of protest, it is not surprising that in the current economic crisis women are beginning to rebel against what they see as an economic system put together and run by men which increasingly pressures and burdens women. Men are challenged to provide more help to women or risk both the withdrawal of female support and a takeover of economic resources by women. As 'The Cameroonian Woman in Development' states:

we [women] intend to fight the economic crises whose structure and origin are masculine , [emphasis added] by doing our utmost to buy, sell, own and control. In all this we shall always welcome men's advice and assistance, but only when solicited. One area we plan to be careful of, and that is our purses. We plan to keep the menfolk away from them. We may of course assist in paying their taxes to avoid being left in the cold when they are locked up, but we shall strive to let no franc of our sweat be drained into a tumbler of beer.'... (Wendi 1990)

In this we hear echoes of earlier women's protests in this part of Cameroon. The article is not radically feminist, but rather argues that times have changed, that men are not dealing with changing circumstances very well and that women are increasingly marginalized and unable to adequately feed their families. This document echoes the womens' view of men with which I began this paper.

We can see in young women's attitudes towards marriage and marriage strategies a sign of their current impatience with men. Many young women who have been educated beyond primary school and who have access to employment other than farming are choosing to stay single. They say they want to 'have something of their own' before they make a decision about marriage; they rhetorically ask, 'why should we get married and just work farm?'. Most of these single women have children, for this remains the mark of adulthood. They may continue to live in their father's compound, and may help their mothers with farming on weekends in exchange for childcare during the week.

These young women are not rejecting men entirely nor making a decision to stay single forever. But they are not willing to exchange their middle class status for a non-elite marriage. They have more options than their less fortunate non-elite friends, many of whom also do not wish only to farm, are unmarried and commonly referred to as 'second-hand.' Without family support,aan unmarried mother is in an unenviable position. For women whose families have few resources, this resistance is likely to result in a less desirable lifestyle. It may even lead to the feminization of poverty in rural villages since the trend for young women to resist traditional marriage arrangements is likely to effect the future of subsistence farming. Womens' marriage strategies have the potential to change the configuration of male power which depends so substantially on the ability and willingness of women to provision their husband's household and underwrite male accumulation.