exam
exam style
Gender and Inequality in the Global Labor Force
Author(s): Mary Beth Mills
Source: Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32 (2003), pp. 41-62
Published by: Annual Reviews
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/25064820
Accessed: 29-01-2020 20:53 UTC
REFERENCES
Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article:
https://www.jstor.org/stable/25064820?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents
You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
Annual Reviews is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Annual
Review of Anthropology
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
Annu. Rev. Anthropol. 2003. 32:41-62
doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.32.061002.093107
Copyright ? 2003 by Annual Reviews. All rights reserved
First published online as a Review in Advance on April 18,2003
Gender and Inequality in the Global
Labor Force
Mary Beth Mills
Department of Anthropology, Colby College, 4700 Mayflower Hill, Waterville,
Maine 04901; email: memills@colby.edu
Key Words industrialization, transnational mobility, masculinity and femininity,
informal sector, unions and labor organizing
Abstract This review examines the convergence of recent anthropological in
terests in gender, labor, and globalization. Attention to gender and gender inequality
offers a productive strategy for the analysis of globalizing processes and their local
variations and contestations. Contemporary ethnographic research explores multiple
dimensions of labor and gender inequalities in the global economy: gendered patterns
of labor recruitment and discipline, the transnational mobility and commodification of
reproductive labor, and the gendered effects of international structural adjustment pro
grams, among others. New and continuing research explores the diverse meanings and
practices that produce a gendered global labor force, incorporating the perspectives of
men and women, masculinities and femininities, and examines how these processes of
gender and labor inequality articulate with other structures of subordination (such as
ethnicity and nationality) to shape lived experiences of work and livelihood, exploita
tion and struggle, around the world.
INTRODUCTION
Studies of gender, labor, and globalization do not constitute a clearly bounded
or easily definable field of research in anthropology. Nevertheless, the complex
intersections of these topics have generated considerable attention and interest in
recent years. Numerous edited collections address the overlapping and multifaceted
effects of gender and labor inequalities worldwide (see, among others, Elson 1995,
Marchand & Runyan 2000, Nash & Fernandez-Kelly 1983, Rothstein & Blim
1992, Ward 1990); whereas, a growing number of focused ethnographies explore
the play of these dynamics in specific settings (for example, Finn 1998, Gill 1994,
Ong 1987). Much of this work documents the heavily feminized labor forces in
free trade zones and similar sites of new industrialization around the world (see
Cravey 1998, Freeman 2000, Mills 1999b, Ong 1991, Safa 1995, Wolf 1992).
Other work extends the analysis of gender and labor to global processes such as
transnational labor migration and domestic service (see Anderson 2000; Constable
1997; Gamburd 2000; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, 2001; Parre?as 2001), as well as
0084-6570/03/1021-0041$14.00 41
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
42 MILLS
micro-enterprise production and other forms of work in what is often called the
informal sector (see Bener?a & Roldan 1987, Clark 1994, Gill 2000, Rahman 1999,
Seligmann 2001). As a whole, the literature encompasses an astonishing range of
geographic and occupational settings; yet this eclectic body of research attests to
a common phenomenon: a profoundly gendered global economy.
Gender inequalities operate simultaneously, but not identically, as systems of
dominant meanings and symbolism; as structured social relations, roles, and prac
tices; and as lived experiences of personal identity. The literature discussed here
is notable for engaging all of these divergent dimensions of gender. Of particular
interest are the findings of many scholars, which state that gender meanings, re
lations, and identities do more than merely sustain existing structures of power in
global labor relations; these complex dimensions of gender also constitute a dy
namic cultural terrain wherein forms of domination may be contested, reworked,
and even potentially transformed.
Of course, in any given place or time, gender is only one of “multiple, in
terlocking systems of domination” (Clark 1994, p. 422). Many ethnographers of
globalization explore the ways that gender intersects with other sources of discrim
ination and exploitation in the lives of working men and women. Gender inequal
ities represent one dynamic within a global labor force that is also segmented by
class, ethnicity and race, nationality and region, among other factors. By tracing
these varied systems of domination as they combine in different settings, scholars
have begun to illuminate the diverse processes through which gender and labor
inequalities shape the global economy. Although this review focuses on gendered
forms and experiences of inequality, its aim is not to discount other aspects of
identity or ideology that underlie global patterns of labor exploitation and material
extraction. Rather the point here is to follow the particular insights that gendered
analyses contribute to a broad and dynamic field of study.
Around the globe, gender hierarchies are produced and maintained in relation
to transnational circuits of labor mobilization and capital accumulation. In varied
and often locally specific ways international capital relies on gendered ideologies
and social relations to recruit and discipline workers, to reproduce and cheapen
segmented labor forces within and across national borders (see, among others,
Enloe 1989, Ong 1991, Safa 1995). These are not new phenomena. Historians of
the industrial revolution document the early recruitment of women (particularly
young unmarried women) as a highly flexible, inexpensive, and easily disciplined
source of labor (Dublin 1979, Tilly & Scott 1978, Tsurumi 1990). Similarly, Eu
ropean colonial regimes relied in part upon the mobilization of colonized women
(as well as men) to work, for example, as domestic servants and concubines to
colonial officials or as family workers on plantation estates (Stoler 1985, 1991).
Yet today, more than in any previous era, the gendered and ethnically segmented
labor pool upon which capitalist accumulation depends encompasses every cor
ner of the globe. The first part of this review examines recent contributions to
teasing apart the gendered inequalities that produce and sustain these global la
bor practices in their many variations. The second part of this review explores
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 43
ongoing efforts by scholars to show how processes of gender and labor inequality
articulate with actual women’s and men’s lived experiences to produce a wide
range of struggles and contestations. This division is made for ease of discussion
only; both directions of analysis offer critical insights and new questions for fur
ther research. Indeed, a central feature of this literature is its consistent attention
to the intersections of structure and agency, ideology and practice in tracing out
the complex and contested dynamics of gender and labor inequalities around the
world.
PRODUCING A GENDERED GLOBAL LABOR FORCE
Feminization and the Disciplining of Global Labor
Around the world, hierarchical gender ideologies serve to cheapen the direct costs
of labor to capital by defining key segments of the population (notably women and
children) as supplementary or devalued workers (see, for example, Elson 1995, En
loe 1989, Marchand & Runyon 2000). At one level, the pictures appear remarkably
consistent; in country after country, industrial employers identify the inherently
desirable qualities of their preferred labor force: “nimble-fingered,” often youth
ful, and deferential female workers. Wherever they locate?from Indonesia (Wolf
1992) to Israel (Drori 2000), Mexico (Cravey 1998, Fernandez-Kelly 1983) to
Malaysia (Ong 1987)?global factories reproduce similar models of organization
wherein women dominate the lowest levels both of pay and authority, whereas men
occupy most positions of supervisory and managerial rank (see also Ong 1991 for
a comprehensive review of these patterns in Mexican and Asian industrialization
through the 1980s). Indeed, it is the hegemonic capacity of patriarchal norms to
define women’s labor as not only “cheap” but socially and economically worth
less (and therefore less worthy of equitable pay and other treatment) that makes
a gendered labor force so crucial to the accumulation strategies of global capital
(Wright 1999, 2001).
And yet the appearance of sameness is also deceiving. A closer look at the ethno
graphic record reveals considerable diversity in the discursive forms and material
practices that gender hierarchies take within the global labor force. In some cases
it is women’s status as unmarried and subordinate “daughters” that makes them an
attractively cheap and flexible pool of labor (Drori 2000, Kim 1997, Lynch 1999,
Wolf 1992). In other contexts, it is women’s status as wives and mothers that justi
fies their lower wages and limited job security (Kondo 1990, Lamphere 1987, Lee
1998, Roberts 1994). Disciplinary strategies may also (and often at the same time)
position female workers as sexualized bodies whose subordination is maintained
through erotic banter and other forms of sexual harassment (Prieto 1997, Wright
2001, Yelvington 1995). A heightened emphasis on feminine beauty, fashion, and
commodified leisure activities associated with wage work can similarly position
workers as feminized consumers rather than as productive (and valuable) laborers
(Freeman 2000, Lynch 1999, Mills 1999b).
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
44 MILLS
In any given setting the variable interplay of multiple gender roles and meanings
can produce a wide range of recruitment and disciplinary regimes. Lee (1998)
found that the same company deployed sharply different gendered discourses to
deal with its female workforces in Hong Kong (where older women were enlisted
in a process of self regulation) and in the nearby free trade zones of South China
(where young rural migrants were subject to a much harsher, authoritarian labor
process). In the U.S.-Mexico border region, a single, dominant gender discourse
constructs Mexican women as the ideal (i.e., docile) labor force for transnational
industry; yet on the shop floor the monolithic image of a feminized labor force
refracts into divergent forms of labor regulation: from factory regimes that highlight
workers’ sexualized appearances as idealized objects of managerial consumption
and control, to settings in which gendered identities are subordinated to workers’
closely monitored performance of piece-rate production quotas (Salzinger 1997).
Such studies demonstrate that dominant discourses about gender affect but cannot
determine the day-to-day dynamics of labor discipline. Hegemonic ideologies
always intersect with local histories and demographies, production processes, and
managerial styles to produce site- and even factory-specific regimes of control and
contestation.
These patterns are also historically contingent. Longitudinal studies of femi
nized labor reveal the value of tracing disciplinary regimes over time. Changing
demographics and immigration patterns over the twentieth century transformed the
preferred labor force of Rhode Island textile and garment factories from unmarried
daughters to married mothers (Lamphere 1987). Bao (2001) and Matthews (2003)
respectively explore other gendered and ethnicized histories of labor in New York
City and California’s Silicon Valley. Political transformations can shape these his
tories as well. The Chinese state’s promotion of capitalist production regimes has
prompted new gendered labor practices that include the massive recruitment of
young rural women for industrial work into urban areas and special economic
zones (Lee 1998, L. Zhang 2001); nevertheless, these shifts have not affected all
workers in the same ways. Rofel (1999) traces the impact of China’s economic
reforms in the lives of female silk workers, once members of a revolutionary pro
letariat whose industrial labor is now no longer an important symbol of national
goals. Rosenthal (2002) examines similar processes in a state-owned textile factory
in Vietnam.
Labor recruitment into export-oriented agricultural production offers another
telling example of the variable ways gender meanings can be used to devalue and
control labor. Global agri-business relies on large pools of cheap and seasonally
replaceable labor to perform tasks that are typically segregated by gender. Com
paring fruit workers in Chile, Brazil, and Mexico, Collins (1995) notes that these
gendered norms vary in ways that make clear their arbitrary quality: identical tasks
are defined as “men’s” work in one place and “women’s” in another. Yet in each
setting patriarchal norms are manipulated to ensure the low cost structure of the
industry. Of particular interest here is the finding that these practices do not mean
that women are always positioned at the bottom of the wage scale, if, for example,
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER m THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 45
a more vulnerable population (such as migrants) can be tapped as an even cheaper
reserve pool (Collins 1995, pp. 190-92). In other studies of commodified agricul
ture in Latin America, India, and Africa, scholars explore similar modes of labor
segmentation. Varied combinations of gender, class, and ethnic divisions structure
agricultural labor inequalities in ways that limit employers’ costs and also under
mine the possibilities for workers’ collective action (Chatterjee 2001, Dolan 2001,
Freidberg 2001, Orton et al. 2001, Sachs 1996, Striffier 1999).
Globalizing Reproduction: Gender in the
Transnational Service Economy
The feminization of global labor is not limited to third-world sites of export
oriented industry or agriculture; feminized and migrant labor forces are also crucial
to reducing the high costs of private consumption and social reproduction at the
centers of global privilege and power. Transnational migrants, both women and
men, represent a pool of vulnerable, feminized labor in the lowest wage sectors
of the world’s wealthiest economies (Foner 2000, Kwong 1998, Mahler 1995,
Sassen 1998, Yeoh et al. 2000). As sweatshop garment sewers, restaurant workers,
domestic servants, and day laborers they provide the undervalued services essential
to maintaining both the structures and symbols of global economic power and
privilege.
For example, Bonacich & Appelbaum (2000) show how the small subcon
tracting enterprises that make up the Los Angeles garment trade are essential to
maintaining the rapid turnover of clothing styles and fashions in the women’s
apparel industry. Small shops must produce new products on demand in short
periods of time, a process made profitable by their ability to hire predominantly
immigrant (often undocumented) and female labor at extremely low wages with
minimal protections. Not coincidentally, the gender and ethnic marginalization of
this sweated labor force sustains the demands of an industry that is itself crucial
to the ideological production of hegemonic femininity as defined through the end
less consumption of women’s fashion. Similarly, Ingraham (1999) notes the links
between sweated labor in the global wedding-gown industry and the consumption
and reproduction of hegemonic femininity and patriarchal heterosexuality in U.S.
popular culture.
The complex effects of gendered hierarchies on the transnational mobility of
global labor is also evident in the international market for domestic servants.
Caribbean nannies in New York (Colen 1995); Filipina caregivers in Los Angeles
and Rome (Parre?as 2001), in Hong Kong (Constable 1997), and in Malaysia
(Chin 1998); Mexican and Latina housecleaners in California and other parts of
the United States (Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, Romero 1992); Sri Lankan maids in
Saudi Arabia (Gambufd 2000)?all provide a feminized and racialized support
structure for more privileged households. In many cases, this commodification
of reproductive labor frees female employers to enter or maintain professional
occupations, thereby challenging some gender barriers in their own societies but
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
46 MILLS
without a radical reworking of gender responsibilities in the domestic realm. In
stead these duties are displaced onto ethnically and legally marginalized women in
a complex entanglement of gender, class, racial, and ethnic hierarchies that stretch
across the globe.
Ironically, many women and men who provide transnational service labor are
themselves pursuing globally inflected desires for class mobility and consump
tion. The costs of plane fares, agency fees, and other expenses necessary to attain
international employment (whether by legal or illegal means) are often very high.
Consequently, many of those entering circuits of transnational migration are not
the poorest members of their societies; many come from more intermediate strata
that face reduced economic opportunities or declining income, perhaps as a result
of economic retrenchment and structural adjustment policies in sending countries.
Thus, in the Philippines, women with middle-class education credentials?nurses
and teachers, for example?find they can earn much more working as domestic
servants in Hong Kong, Italy, or Canada (Barber 2000, Constable 1997, Parre?as
2001). Despite the appearance of downward class mobility, these and other transna
tionally employed domestic workers can secure and even enhance the status of their
families left behind. For example, many such migrants use part of their interna
tional wages to hire even cheaper domestic help at home. In this way, circuits of
transnational labor not only are a product of gendered and ethnic hierarchies within
a segmented global labor force, but also they reproduce these same relations of
inequality (Parre?as 2001, pp. 72-78).
The Gender and Labor Inequalities of Structural Adjustment
As the preceding discussion suggests, the structuring of gender inequality in one
type of employment or one segment of the global economy cannot be viewed
in isolation from any other. Further complicating the picture, many scholars ar
gue that the intersections of gender, labor, and globalization extend well beyond
the confines of the formal wage economy and conventional arenas of capitalist
production. Specifically, ethnographies from Bolivia (Gill 1994,2000) to Zambia
(Hansen 2000), Turkey (White 1994) to Nicaragua (Babb 2001) elucidate the gen
der and labor inequalities of international structural adjustment policies and related
neo-liberal economic programs. These and other scholars highlight the ironies of
a global economy in which transnational circuits of labor mobility stretch families
and their functions across international boundaries at the same time that interna
tional policies of neo-liberal economic restructuring rely upon the resilience of
those families to absorb social costs.
Structural adjustment policies require states to cut back or eliminate many social
programs and subsidies; this process has had a devastating effect on many com
munities often with sharply gendered implications. Such programs of economic
restructuring?usually implemented at the behest of international financial au
thorities, such as the International Monetary Fund or World Bank?depend upon
the flexible capacities of private households to absorb the loss of state-funded
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 47
social services (Beneria & Feldman 1992, Bergeron 2001, Harrison 1997, Susser
1997). In effect, structural adjustment plans mobilize women’s unpaid labor as
domestic nurturers and economizers to subsidize costs for international capitalism
and to guarantee the debts incurred by poor states. At the same time, the tightened
economic conditions that result from economic restructuring programs diminish
the security of formal wage employment and increase dependence on informal
means of income generation. These sources of livelihood are often largely femi
nized, including vending and hawking (Babb 1989, Clark 1994, Seligmann 2001),
subcontracting and industrial homework (Beneria & Roldan 1987, Gringeri 1994,
White 1994, L. Zhang 2001), artisanal craft production (Grimes & Milgram 2000,
Tice 1995, Wilkinson-Weber 1999), domestic service (Adams & Dickey 2000,
Bujra 2000, Gill 1994, Hansen 1992, Ozyegin 2000), and sex work (Maher 1997,
Moon 1997, Muecke 1992), among others.
Moreover, women’s informal entrepreneurial and artisanal labor has itself been
identified as a promising field for international economic development. The growth
potential of women’s informal sector work is one of the underlying tenets of micro
enterprise investment, also known as the micro-credit movement (Dignard & Havet
1995). Most often modeled on Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, micro-credit financ
ing is viewed by many states and non-state groups alike as an ideal strategy for
poverty alleviation and economic development. Most micro-credit programs are
targeted primarily if not exclusively at women for investment in small, household
based livelihood projects. Loans typically are secured collectively by small groups
of borrowers for whom new loans are dependent on successful repayment by the
entire group. Micro-credit is hailed by international sponsors as a means to im
plement gender-sensitive development, “empowering” women by mobilizing the
untapped creativity of their productive and reproductive labor (Mayoux 1999).
Nevertheless, micro-enterprise programs rarely challenge the overall sexual di
vision of labor within households and may even reinforce these gendered norms
(Milgram 2001, Rozario 1997). Some ethnographic studies suggest that (in prac
tice if not in their original intent) micro-credit programs are more effective at
extracting profits from the economic activities of poor women and men than in
transforming systems of gender hierarchy or empowering their clients socially and
economically (Gill 2000, pp. 142-51; Rahman 1999).
CHALLENGE AND CONTESTATION: GENDERED
STRUGGLES IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE
Considering the wide range of settings and the diverse labor practices to which
they contribute, it is clear that patriarchal ideologies and related gender inequalities
are significant, even constitutive, features of the global economy. In complex and
multifaceted ways, gendered hierarchies help to produce a segmented and flexible
global labor force. However, the ways in which hegemonic gender meanings struc
ture the lived experiences of actual women and men vary widely. In fact, the forms
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
48 MILLS
of gendered inequality that people encounter in their own lives are often sources of
conflict and contradiction as gendered ideologies and structures of authority clash
with individuals’ own lived desires and identities. Slippages between ideological
norms and everyday experiences can rupture the disciplinary effects of gender
hierarchy whether on the shop floor or in other settings. The resulting disjunctures
and inconsistencies can open the way to generate new meanings and practices.
Gender inequalities are thus not only sources of exploitation within a global labor
force but also, and importantly, critical points of contestation and struggle.
The forms these struggles take, however, are as varied and complex as the hege
monic structures they confront. Some involve explicit oppositional protest, such
as strikes and labor organizing, although, as discussed below, the obstacles to such
actions are often formidable. In many cases, however, new experiences of global
labor give rise to contests that are less obviously confrontational. Nevertheless,
these localized processes of what Ong has called “cultural struggle” (Ong 1991,
p. 281) are critical to understanding the effects of globalizing labor practices. As
individuals and communities confront new modes of exploitation, they also rework
experiences of gender and labor inequality in diverse and often unpredictable ways.
Cultural Struggles and Contested Identities
New experiences of wage work and income earning often engage women and
men alike in unprecedented forms of social interaction and personal autonomy.
Ideological constructions of women as docile and dexterous workers has facilitated
their massive recruitment as idealized workers for global industry; at the same
time, the experiences and resources of wage labor provide workers, and especially
women, with new means to contest their subordination in other arenas of daily life.
Around the world, new forms of wage work offer women novel opportunities to
challenge or renegotiate the authority of others, particularly parents or husbands,
over both their earnings and their activities.
Extensive research challenges assumptions that women’s labor is necessarily
subordinated to household economic strategies; instead, studies reveal the complex
and contested processes through which women’s wage work can enhance their
relative bargaining power vis-?-vis family and community. For many women,
participation in global labor brings new claims to spatial mobility, consumption
expenditures, and a wider range of behaviors in which they can engage as respected
members of their communities, as “good” daughters, wives, or mothers (Beneria
& Roldan 1987, Feldman 2001, Freeman 2000, Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, Kabeer
2000, Lamphere 1987, Silvey 2000a, Tiano 1994, Yelvington 1995).
A theme widely reported in the literature is the pursuit by young women work
ers of greater autonomy and control over courtship and marriage decisions. Wage
workers in rural Malaysia and Indonesia (Ong 1987, Wolf 1992), rural-urban mi
grants in Thailand (Mills 1999b), factory operatives in Sri Lanka (Lynch 1999),
and economic migrants in Shenzen, China (Clark 2001) all use the enhanced auton
omy that wage earning gives them to negotiate with parents over desired partners,
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 49
to postpone or evade arranged marriages, or to experiment with new styles of un
supervised romance and independent matchmaking. A few studies also suggest
that new spaces opened up by globalized mobility and labor practices enable ex
pressions of transgressive gender identities and alternative sexualities (Blackwood
1998; Theobald 2002, p. 146).
Transnational migration fosters similar assertions of new identities and shifts
in gendered claims to autonomy. For example, both historical and contemporary
research on immigration to the United States documents how new income-earning
roles allow immigrant women to negotiate a wider scope of autonomy and au
thority within parental and marital households (Foner 2000, p. 108-41; Gabaccia
1994; Lamphere 1987). Given the potential (and not infrequently, actual) failures
of husbands or consensual partners to make reliable contributions to household
budgets, many women view their wage work as a source of increased personal
independence and security despite the often exploitative conditions of that em
ployment (Grasmuck & Pessar 1991, Hirsch 1999, Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). For
example, studies of Mexican and Caribbean women in the United States often find
that they are much more reluctant than their male compatriots to return to the home
country, believing that it would likely entail a parallel return to more patriarchal
household relations (Goldring 2001; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994, p. 100; Levitt 2001,
pp. 104-6).
An important dimension of women’s expanding autonomy in many parts of the
world is their ability as independent wage earners to participate in new patterns of
consumption linked to desired and often globally oriented standards of “moder
nity.” This points to a complex source of tension surrounding women’s new visibil
ity within global labor practices: State-based discourses promote goals of national
development and progress in which women’s recruitment into export-oriented in
dustrialization or other forms of global labor are often critical components. Thus
entrants into new industrial jobs or migrants who remit wages from overseas may
be hailed as key contributors to nationalist goals of economic growth and mod
ernization (Lynch 1999; Parre?as 2001, p. 53). However, many new recruits to the
global labor force seek to achieve standards of modernity in their own right, par
ticularly as active and sophisticated commodity consumers (Freeman 2000, Gill
1994, Mills 1999b, Rofel 1999).
Wage work and new modes of commodity consumption open up newly imagin
able possibilities of personal autonomy and self-expression that are often targeted
most forcefully at women. Nevertheless, these images of modernity often carry a
contested moral status; women in particular are vulnerable to accusations of im
morality owing to “excessive” modernity and inappropriate commodity consump
tion. Access to new sources of income and consumption possibilities can provoke
public fears that autonomous women will spend their wages on “selfish” pur
chases for personal pleasure or adornment. Furthermore, state-based discourses of
development can promote such anxieties by displacing social and political tensions
associated with rapid economic changes onto concerns about the inappropriate, im
modest, or untraditional behavior of women working outside the home (Brenner
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
50 MILLS
1998, Heng & Devan 1995, Ong 1990, Silvey 2000b). Such charges are only
heightened in contexts where economic development relies in part upon the corn
modification of women’s sexual labor, for example, at sites of militarization or for
tourism (Law 2000, Moon 1997, Sturdevant & Stolzfus 1992, Truong 1990).
Consequently, for many individual subjects, new experiences of labor and gen
der autonomy are often marked by ambivalence and conflict, producing actions
that simultaneously comply with and resist dominant gender ideals. Thus, young
Bangladeshi and Egyptian women adopt the gendered restrictions and respectabil
ity of “Islamic dress” to enable easier access to public mobility and wage employ
ment (Feldman 2001, MacLeod 1991). In a different context, women in Barbados
off-shore informatics (data entry) industries tolerate patriarchal norms and deterio
rating labor conditions within the work place while carving out broader spheres of
autonomy elsewhere, particularly as informal entrepreneurs in the “suitcase” trade
(i.e., goods acquired through international travel for resale at home; see Freeman
2000, 2001). Similar themes of accommodation and resistance are played out in
myriad variations around the globe.
Women’s transnational labor offers yet another perspective on the complex ways
in which global workers both reproduce and contest the gendered conditions of their
subordination. Migrants working as international domestic servants assert pride
in their achievements and sacrifices as workers, as contributors to their families
and sometimes to their nations as well. Although migrants may assert that they are
“better” mothers than their employers, claims that are backed up by substantial
financial remittances, many women who leave families behind also negotiate a
sharp sense of failure for not being “good” (i.e., physically present) mothers to
their own children (Gamburd 2000, pp. 207-8; Hondagneu-Sotelo 2001, pp. 22
27; Parre?as 2001, pp. 119-31). At the same time, for some women transnational
migration can be a means to escape violent or abusive partners without abandoning
their economic obligations to children or other kin (Arguelles & Rivero 1993;
Gamburd 2000, pp. 146-47; Parre?as 2001, pp. 66-69).
Gendered Struggles In/About the Workplace
As the forms of accommodation and resistance discussed above reveal, workers
around the world may tolerate tremendous exploitation and hardship in order to
achieve other economic or social goals. Gendered encounters with capitalist labor
relations do not necessarily direct workers’ struggles for greater autonomy toward
the workplace. In the case of industrial labor, open resistance to harsh working
conditions may be especially unlikely when alternative employment options (such
as domestic service or sex work) are even less attractive (Harrison 1997). Never
theless, new experiences of work and newfound autonomy in other aspects of daily
Ufe can also open up avenues for contestation on the job. These may be subtle as in
footdragging, withdrawal, or other forms of nonconfrontational resistance to em
ployer demands (Drori 2000, pp. 127-32; Freeman 2000, pp. 208-12; Yelvington
1995, pp. 200-2). Distress and anger may find expression in locally situated idioms
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 51
of protest such as episodes of mass spirit possession in Malay electronics factories
(Ong 1987). Faced with different constraints than industrial workers, transnational
domestic servants find indirect ways to resist their isolation and the paternalistic
control of employers (Chin 1998). In Rome and Hong Kong, for example, Filipina
housekeepers gather visibly in open urban sites on their days off, appropriating
public spaces as their own (Constable 1997, pp. 166-70; Parre?as 2001, pp. 202-4).
Strikes, unions, and other organized conflict offer the most obvious evidence of
contestation in global labor relations; however, ethnographic research concerning
such activities remains rather limited. In part, this gap in the larger literature
reflects the formidable obstacles to labor organizing in the global economy. The
ease with which capital investment can shift production from one site to another
limits the effective bargaining power of workers in any one place; at the same
time, many contemporary state regimes seek to attract international investors by
sharply restricting (or banning outright) unions and other forms of independent
collective organizing for workers. The widespread practice of subcontracting in
many industries around the world is also a barrier to worker solidarity: because
components of the same end product may be manufactured in several different
countries by workers employed by multiple subcontractors. This fragmentation of
the global labor force, the distancing of production decisions and marketing from
the people and places actually assembling global commodities, may well have
curtailed opportunities for labor organizing. It has not, however, prevented labor
militancy. Moreover, when strikes and other labor conflicts occur women are often
key and sometimes primary figures as, for example, in South Korea (Kim 1997,
Koo 2001, Ogle 1990), in Mexico (Cravey 1998, Pe?a 1995, Tirado 1994), and
in Southeast Asia (Hutchison & Brown 2001, Margold 1999, Roha 1994, West
1997).
Strikes, walkouts, and other militant labor actions reveal the outrage and poten
tial for confrontation that are obscured by images of “nimble-fingered” docility in a
feminized global labor force. Assumptions about deferential and compliant women
workers are challenged by patterns of organizing and activism around the globe
(Chhachhi & Pittin 1996, Hutchison & Brown 2001, Louie 2001, Rowbotham
& Mitter 1994). Although, to date, few extensive ethnographic studies focus on
gendered processes of labor organizing and politicization, this is beginning to
change. Kim’s (1997) study of women workers in Korea offers a particularly de
tailed ethnography of militant female labor. Related work includes recent studies
of women’s labor activism in Asia (Brown 2001, Margold 1999, Mills 1999a, West
1997) and Latin America (Gill 1994, Stephen 1997).
The commodification of women’s productive and reproductive labor throughout
the global economy has prompted new modes of confrontation and collective strug
gle. For example, ethnically marginalized domestic servants struggle to unionize
in Bolivia (Gill 1994). Transnational Caribbean and Filipina migrants organize
for better legal protections and citizenship in Canada (Stasiulis & Bakan 1997).
Unions and activist groups represent sex workers in many countries (see Kempadoo
& Doezema 1998). Similarly some industrial and artisanal homeworkers join
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
52 MILLS
union-like bodies (Prugl 1999, Rose 1992, Rowbotham 1998). Other examples
include marketing and production cooperatives through which women can seek
greater control over their participation in local and global markets often as handi
craft producers (Babb 2001, Milgram 2001, Tice 1995). Some of these organiza
tions begin as local self-help groups, others as projects sponsored by development
or charitable programs; many receive support from and maintain crucial ties to re
gional and transnational networks of women’s activist and nongovernmental orga
nizations (cf. Rowbotham & Linkogle 2001, Rowbotham & Mitter 1994, Stephen
1997). As a whole, however, the global record of women’s economic organizing
reveals the enormous obstacles that their efforts face.
In no small part, these difficulties reflect the fact that, around the world, the pa
triarchal assumptions of employers are often shared by labor organizers. Globally,
labor union leadership remains predominantly male; when women do organize
their efforts are often perceived as supplementary, subordinate, or constrained by
prior domestic roles and responsibilities (Kim 1997, Stephen 1997, West 1997). In
an Indian example, male-dominated unions in the Calcutta jute industry actively
collaborated with employers to protect men’s privileges as full-time skilled work
ers rather than seeking to extend protections to women employed as temporary and
unskilled laborers in the same production process (Fernandes 1997). The failure
of labor institutions to overcome their own histories of gender inequality remains
a critical source of weakness for labor solidarity and activism worldwide.
Masculinities and Global Labor
Women may be especially visible as subordinated labor in the global economy, and
the contested quality of their experiences can place them in particularly vulnerable
positions. However, gendered struggles in the global economy are not only con
tests about norms and practices of femininity; they are also about meanings and
experiences of masculinity. Ethnographers are only beginning to ask how shifting
material conditions of labor shape gender roles and relations from the perspective
of men. Although overall the gendered dynamics of men’s participation in global
labor has received far less attention than that of women, ethnographies of transna
tional labor mobility have addressed these questions more consistently than others.
For example, high rates of overseas contract labor in South and Southeast Asian
men have led some ethnographers to note the effects of this pattern of labor re
cruitment on local gender systems and identities (de Guzman 1993, Gardner 1995,
Pinches 2001, Yamanaka 2000).
Filipino men working in the Middle East endured harsh working conditions
as well as persistent marginalization as members of an alien ethnic and religious
minority. Migrants experienced their legal inferiority and vulnerability as a denial
not only of their masculinity but also of their own humanity; the effects of these
inversions continued to trouble many migrants even after returning home (Margold
1995). A similar sense of vulnerability affects rural Thai men involved in over
seas contract labor, expressed in part through fears of deadly attacks by female
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 53
spirits (Mills 1995). Nevertheless, many overseas workers seek a confirmation of
masculine pride as intrepid and able workers in high-status sites of globalization.
Consequently, rural men in Kerala, India view overseas employment, despite its
risks, as increasingly necessary if they are to acquire the material and symbolic
capital necessary to claim a fully adult masculine status at home (that is, to es
tablish themselves as responsible and marriageable householders?see Osella &
Osella 2000). Similarly, some working class Chinese Malay men have made over
seas work experience critical to their assertions of successful masculine identities
and authority over other men and women at home (Nonini 1997).
Crises of masculinity also figure into migration studies where transnational
mobility involves both sexes or when men are the ones left behind. For many mi
grant and immigrant communities, the obstacles to achieving economic security in
the new setting are often experienced as particularly painful failures for men. No
longer able to fulfill traditional provider roles, men are often compelled to rene
gotiate their status and authority within the household (George 2000, Goldring
2001, Levitt 2001, Rouse 1995). This is the same process that results in the ex
pansion of women’s claims to authority in immigrant communities and in men’s
and women’s differing perspectives on the long-term settlement plans of many
migrant households (see discussion above). An additional consequence, however,
is the elaboration of misogynist discourses among some groups of working class
men. These discourses can allow men to deflect their own experiences of subordi
nation or distress in the workplace onto images of women, and sometimes violently
onto the bodies of female companions (Ferguson 1999, p. 188; Hondagneu-Sotelo
& Messner 1994).
Similar conflicts can arise when women move and men stay behind, as noted
above. In Sri Lanka, women migrate to work as maids in Saudi Arabia, reversing the
expected order of support between husband and wife; however, men do not assume
the feminized status of caregivers in return. Struggling to retain a satisfactory
identity as masculine heads of household some men claim their wives’ remitted
earnings for personal use instead of managing these funds for the household. The
persistent power of gender hierarchies in the home community makes it difficult
for women to challenge husbands when this happens, in part because husbands’
transgressions are viewed as a response to the women’s own failures to be good
(i.e., present) wives (Gamburd 2000).
Global transformations can also prompt crises of masculinity for long-term
residents of the world’s wealthier societies as, for example, when nonmigrant men
face the loss of relatively high-paying working class jobs to de-industrialization or
lose managerial positions under corporate down-sizing (McDowell 2000, Newman
1988). In New York City, young Puerto Rican men reject service-sector jobs as both
poorly paid and requiring acts of deference that are demeaning to their masculine
self-respect. However, without the educational or social capital to achieve well
paying work in the formal economy some young men find both high earnings
and a hyper-masculine (and violent) sense of dominance in the illicit drug trade
(Bourgois 1995). The gendered effects of economic restructuring on impoverished
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
54 MILLS
urban dwellers in Bolivia are reflected in heightened patterns of masculine violence
both toward each other and women, owing in part to the brutalizing effects of
military service, one of the few employment options still available to poor men
(Gill 2000, pp. 117-28). Similarly the decline of Zambia’s Copperbelt compels
former mineworkers to reexamine their claims to a “modern” masculine self
identity predicated on secure wage earning and a domestic division of labor that
are both increasingly untenable (Ferguson 1999).
Recognizing the persistent privileging of masculine authority within gender
hierarchies, a few scholars have begun to examine the production of hegemonic
masculinities at the centers of global economic power and prestige. Representations
and experiences of gender hierarchy in the global economy are not just concerned
with cheapening feminized labor forces; they also reveal the shifting ideological
grounds upon which entrepreneurial models of masculinity stand. For example,
new demands for “caring” in corporate cultures exist in uneasy relationships with
longstanding metaphors of “cowboy” competition and related models of aggres
sion in global business practice (Hooper 2000). The different experiences of capi
talists in Italian family firms (Yanagisako 2002), diasporic Chinese entrepreneurial
elites (Ong 1999), U.S.-Mexico border factories (Salzinger 1997, Wright 2001),
and informal sector entrepreneurs in Beijing (L. Zhang 2001) all promote business
practices that assert and refigure hegemonic norms of masculinity but in highly
specific and culturally contingent ways.
For example, E.Y. Zhang (2001) examines male-peer culture among new en
trepreneurs and state officials in Beijing. This is characterized by ritualized outings
to nightclubs where men negotiate globally inflected norms of masculinity through
the consumption of imported alcohol and the commodified bodies of women. Such
ties between expanding business circuits and the heightened demand for women’s
labor as sex workers also suggest interesting parallels with the ways women’s sex
ual labor supports similar relations of masculinized power linked to global tourism
or military expansion (Enloe 1989, Hyde 2001, Law 2000, Moon 1997, Sinclair
1997, Skrobanek et al. 1997, Truong 1990). In a different context, recent anal
yses of post-Soviet Russia and Eastern Europe note that the shift to neo-liberal
capitalism has meant a r??valuation of economic practices in gendered terms. The
entrepreneurial and higher-paying segments of the emerging private sector are of
ten linked with a new sense of globalized masculinity, whereas lower-waged jobs
and much of the public sector increasingly represent a domain of feminized and de
valued labor (see Gal & Kligman 2000, p. 60; Humphrey 2002, p. 178; True 2000).
Whether hegemonic or subordinate, neither masculinities nor femininities in
global economic relations are uniform; nor are they experienced in uniform ways.
The gendered practices of women and men, both capitalists and laborers, are always
and already culturally and historically situated. As such they constitute appropri
ate, indeed critical, subjects for ethnographic investigation (cf. Yanagisako 2002,
p. 188). The challenge is to explicate globally inflected processes in their locally
specific forms while at the same time seeking connections across economic and
social contexts.
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 55
CONCLUSION
Engaging gender as both a subject and a tool of analysis, the ethnographic and
scholarly research discussed above has generated new ways of understanding the
intersections between international hegemonies and particular localities in a global
labor force. A rich array of case studies and comparative analyses?many more in
fact than can be cited in a short review?explore the multiple ways that gendered
meanings, practices, and identities mediate these points of contact. The result is
an innovative and wide-ranging body of scholarship that illuminates the heteroge
neous character of globalizing labor practices and their gendered dynamics.
In a diverse global economy, gender ideologies can support flexible modes of
labor control and discipline because of their ability to naturalize arbitrary and
constructed claims about whose labor is worth more (or less) and what kinds of
bodies are best suited to particular tasks. At the same time, global transformations
in production, mobility, and livelihood have specific effects in the lives of gendered
subjects, creating tensions and conflicts as well as newly imaginable possibilities.
The resulting struggles involve men and women, workers and employers, commu
nities and states in contests that can at times reproduce existing relations of power;
however, they can also lead to new, potentially transformative forms of action and
identity. Continuing research into the intersections of gender, labor, and global
ization must engage all of these varied dimensions of discipline and contestion.
Critical as well are studies that can link diverse patterns of gender and labor in
equalities with other intertwining sources of power and domination: ethnic-racial
divisions, rural-urban conflicts, state ideologies, mass media influences, and more.
Whereas women’s entry into new forms of employment has focused considerable
attention on transformations in experiences and images of femininity in the global
economy, far less research has traced how discourses and experiences of mas
culinity are also implicated in the shifting dynamics of a globalized labor force.
Although scholars have begun to ask these and related questions, new research
must incorporate closer attention to the constructions of both masculinities and
femininities, and the contested experiences of men as well as (and in relation to)
women within a gendered labor force.
Comparative work across national boundaries is especially important to illumi
nate these complexities and contradictions in labor and gender inequalities. Finn
( 1998) offers an instructive model in her study of a transnational mining corporation
and its effects on the men and women of two communities, one in the United States
and the other in Chile. Though mining employment in both sites was a masculine
preserve, women’s domestic work and image were essential to the systems of la
bor control and struggle in both communities, albeit in different ways. Tracing the
interactions of management and workers, men and women, Finn’s cross-border
and historical analysis unravels the tangled hierarchies of gender, class, ethnic
ity, and nationality. She highlights the struggles these forces engendered to show
how and why they produced differential and shifting experiences of inequality in
time and space.
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
56 MILLS
This kind of attention to gender and gender inequalities, in both their mate
rial and ideological dimensions, will continue to offer productive strategies for
scholarly research. Historically informed and ethnographically rich comparative
work is essential to build a more complex understanding of gender and labor in
globalizing processes. How do men and women sustain new understandings of
themselves and their relations with others while seeking to survive amid often lim
ited options? How and when can people channel new meanings and experiences
into actions that may challenge underlying structures of inequality and domina
tion? Under what conditions are such confrontations with inequality more likely to
maintain or reproduce structures of power, including gender hierarchies? Ethno
graphic and anthropological research is and will continue to be particularly well
positioned to trace these complexities across settings and times, amid intersecting
ideological and symbolic systems, within and between particular industries, states,
communities, workplaces, and lives. In so doing, ethnographers of gender, labor,
and globalization can and will continue to make gender visible in new ways, to un
cover the arbitrary and artificial ways through which gendered inequalities devalue
labor and undermine the security and livelihoods of men and women around the
world.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Eugenie Montague and Connie Beal, student research assis
tants who contributed many hours to the preparation of the bibliography for this
review. My thanks also to Colby College for the financial support of these posi
tions. I am especially grateful to my colleagues in the Department of Anthropology
at Colby College for their generosity and support throughout and to Lesley Sharp
for invaluable procedural advice.
The Annual Review of Anthropology is online at http://anthro.annualreviews.org
LITERATURE CITED
Adams KM, Dickey S, eds. 2000. Home and
Hegemony: Domestic Service and Identity
Politics in South and Southeast Asia. Ann
Arbor: Univ. Mich. Press
Anderson B. 2000. Doing the Dirty Work?: the
Global Politics of Domestic Labour. London:
Zed Books
Arguelles L, Rivero AM. 1993. Gender/sexual
orientation violence and transnational migra
tion: conversations with some Latinas we
think we know. Urban Anthropol. 22:259
75
Babb FE. 1989. Between Field and Cooking
Pot: the Political Economy of Market-Women
in Peru. Austin:
Univ. Texas Press
Babb FE. 2001. After Revolution: Mapping
Gender and Cultural Politics in Neoliberal
Nicaragua. Austin: Univ. Texas Press
Bao X. 2001. Holding Up More Than Half the
Sky: Chinese Women Garment Workers in
New York City, 1948-92. Urbana: Univ. 111.
Press
Barber PG. 2000. Agency in Philippine
women’s labour migration and provisional
diaspora. Women’s Stud. Int. Forum 23:399
411
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 57
Beneria L, Feldman S, eds. 1992. Unequal
Burden: Economic Crises, Persistent Poverty
and Women’s Work. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press
Beneria L, Roldan M. 1987. The Crossroads
of Class and Gender: Industrial Homework,
Subcontracting, and Household Dynamics
in Mexico City. Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago
Press
Bergeron S. 2001. Political economy discourses
of globalization and feminist politics. Signs
26:983-1006
Blackwood E. 1998. Tombois in West Su
matra: constructing masculinity and erotic
desire. Cult. Anthropol. 13(4):491-521
Bonacich E, Appelbaum RP. 2000. Behind the
Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Apparel
Industry. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Bourgois P. 1995. In Search of Respect: Selling
Crack in El Barrio. New York: Cambridge
Univ. Press
Brenner SA. 1998. The Domestication of De
sire: Women, Wealth, and Modernity in Java.
Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
Brown A. 2001. After the Kader fire: labour or
ganising for health and safety standards in
Thailand. See Hutchison & Brown 2001, pp.
127-46
Bujra J. 2000. Serving Class: Masculinity and
the F?minisation of Domestic Service in Tan
zania. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univ. Press In
ternat. Afr. Inst.
Chatterjee P. 2001. A Time for Tea: Women, La
bor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian
Plantation. Durham,
NC: Duke Univ. Press
Chen NN, Clark CD, Gottschang SZ, Jeffrey L,
eds. 2001. China Urban: Ethnographies of
Contemporary Culture. Durham, NC: Duke
Univ. Press
Chhachhi A, Pittin R, eds. 1996. Confronting
State, Capital and Patriarchy: Women Or
ganizing in the Process of Industrialization.
New York: St. Martin’s Press
Chin CBN. 1998. In Service and Servitude:
Foreign Female Domestic Workers and the
Malaysian ‘Modernity’ Project. New York:
Columbia Univ. Press
Clark CD. 2001. Foreign marriage, “tradition,”
and the politics of border crossings. See Chen
et al. 2001, pp. 104-22
Clark G. 1994. Onions Are My Husband: Sur
vival and Accumulation by West African
Market Women. Chicago, IL: Univ. Chicago
Press
Colen S. 1995. “Like a mother to them”: strat
ified reproduction and West Indian childcare
workers and employers in New York. In Con
ceiving the New World Order: the Global Pol
itics of Reproduction, ed. FD Ginsburg, R
Rapp, pp. 78-102. Durham, NC: Duke Univ.
Press
Collins JI. 1995. Transnational labor process
and gender relations: women in fruit and veg
etable production in Chile, Brazil and Mex
ico. J. Lat. Am. Anthropol. 1:178-99
Constable N. 1997. Maid to Order in Hong
Kong: an Ethnography of Filipina Workers.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press
Cravey AJ. 1998. Women and Work in Mex
ico’s Maquiladoras. Lanham, MD: Rowman
& Littlefield
de Guzman AF. 1993. ‘Katas ng Saudi’: the
work and life situation of the Filipino con
tract workers in Saudi Arabia. Philipp. Soc.
Sei. Rev. 52:1-56
DignardL, Havet J, eds. 1995. Women inMicro
and Small-Scale Enterprise Development.
Boulder, CO: Westview Press
Dolan CS. 2001. The ‘Good Wife’: struggles
over resources in the Kenyan horticultural
sector. /. Dev. Stud. 37:39-70
Drori I. 2000. The Seam Line: Arab Work
ers and Jewish Managers in the Israeli Tex
tile Industry. Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ.
Press
Dublin T. 1979. Women at Work: the Trans
formation of Work and Community in Low
ell, Massachusetts, 1826-1860. New York:
Columbia Univ. Press
Elson D, ed. 1995. Male Bias in the Develop
ment Process. Manchester, UK: Manchester
Univ. Press. 2nd ed.
Enloe C. 1989. Bananas, Beaches and Bases:
Making Feminist Sense of International Pol
itics. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Feldman S. 2001. Exploring theories of
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
58 MILLS
patriarchy: a perspective from contemporary
Bangladesh. Signs 26:1097-127
Ferguson J. 1999. Expectations of Modernity:
Myths and Meanings of Urban Life on the
Zambian Copperbelt. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.
Press
Fernandes L. 1997. Producing Workers: the
Politics of Gender, Class and Culture in
the Calcutta Jute Mills. Philadelphia: Univ.
Penn. Press
Fernandez-Kelly MR 1983. For We Are Sold, I
and My People: Women and Industry in Mex
ico’s Frontier. Albany, NY: SUNY Press
Finn JL. 1998. Tracing the Veins: Of Cop
per, Culture, and Community from Butte to
Chuquicamata. Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Foner N. 2000. From Ellis Island to JFK: New
York’s Two Great Waves of Immigration. New
Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press
Freeman C. 2000. High Tech and High Heels
in the Global Economy: Women, Work and
Pink-Collar Identities in the Caribbean.
Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press
Freeman C. 2001. Is local.global as femi
nine.masculine? Rethinking the gender of
globalization. Signs 26:1007-37
Freidberg S. 2001. To garden, to market: gen
dered meanings of work on an African
urban periphery. Gender Place Cult. 8:5
25
Gabaccia D. 1994. From the Other Side:
Women, Gender, and Immigrant Life in
the U.S., 1820-1990. Bloomington: Indiana
Univ. Press
Gal S, Kligman G. 2000. The Politics of Gender
After Socialism: a Comparative-Historical
Essay. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press
Gamburd MR. 2000. The Kitchen Spoon’s Han
dle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Mi
grant Housemaids. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ.
Press
Gardner K. 1995. Global Migrants, Local
Lives: Travel and Transformation in Ru
ral Bangladesh. Oxford, UK: Clarendon
Press
George S. 2000. “Dirty nurses” and “men
who play”: gender and class in transnational
migration. In Global Ethnography: Forces,
Connections and Imaginations in a Post
Modem World, ed. M Burawoy. pp. 144-74.
Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Gill L. 1994. Precarious Dependencies: Gen
der, Class and Domestic Service in Bolivia.
New York: Columbia Univ. Press
Gill L. 2000. Teetering on the Rim: Global Re
structuring, Daily Life and the Armed Retreat
of the Bolivian State. New York: Columbia
Univ. Press
Goldring L. 2001. The gender and geography
of citizenship in Mexico-U.S. transnational
spaces. Identities 7:501-37
Grasmuck S, Pessar PR. 1991. Between Two Is
lands: Dominican International Migration.
Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Grimes KM, Milgram BL, eds. 2000. Artisans
and Cooperatives: Developing Alternative
Trade for the Global Economy. Tucson: Univ.
Ariz. Press
Gringeri CE. 1994. Getting By: Women Home
workers and Rural Economic Development.
Lawrence: Univ. Press Kansas
Hansen KT, ed. 1992. African Encounters with
Domesticity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
Univ. Press
Hansen KT. 2000. Salaula: the World of Sec
ondhand Clothing and Zambia. Chicago:
Univ. Chicago Press
Harrison FV. 1997. The gendered politics and
violence of structural adjustment: a view
from Jamaica. In Situated Lives: Gender and
Culture in Everyday Life, ed. L Lamphere, H
Ragon?, P Zavella, pp. 451-68. London/New
York: Routledge
Heng G, Devan J. 1995. State fatherhood: the
politics of nationalism, sexuality and race in
Singapore. See Ong & Peletz 1995, pp. 195
215
Hirsch JS. 1999. En el norte la mujer manda:
gender, generation and geography in a Mex
ican transnational community. Am. Behav.
Sei. 42:1332-49
Hondagneu-Sotelo P. 1994. Gendered Transi
tions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration.
Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Hondagneu-Sotelo P. 2001. Domestica: Immi
grant Workers Cleaning and Caring in the
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 59
Shadows of Affluence. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.
Press
Hondagneu-Sotelo P, Messner MA. 1994. Gen
der displays and men’s power: the “New
Man” and the Mexican immigrant man. In
Theorizing Masculinities, ed. H Brod, M
Kaufman, pp. 200-18. London: Sage
Hooper C. 2000. Masculinities in transition: the
case of globalization. See Marchand & Run
yan 2000, pp. 59-73
Humphrey C. 2002. The Unmaking of Soviet
Life: Everyday Economies After Socialism.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univ. Press
Hutchison J, Brown A, eds. 2001. Organising
Labour in Globalising Asia. London/New
York: Routledge
Hyde ST. 2001. Sex tourism practices on the
periphery: eroticizing ethnicity and patholo
gizing sex on the Lancang. See Chen et al.
2001, pp. 143-62
Ingraham C. 1999. White Weddings: Romanc
ing Heterosexuality in Popular Culture. Lon
don/New York: Routledge
Kabeer N. 2000. The Power to Choose:
Bangladeshi Women and Labour Market De
cisions in London and Dhaka. London/New
York: Verso
Kempadoo K, Doezema J, eds. 1998. Global
Sex Workers: Rights, Resistance, and Redef
inition. London/New York: Routledge
KimS-K. 1997. Class Struggle or Family Strug
gle?: the Lives of Women Factory Workers
in South Korea. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
Univ. Press
Kondo DK. 1990. Crafting Selves: Power, Gen
der, and Discourses of Identity in a Japanese
Workplace. Chicago: Univ. Chicago Press
Koo H. 2001. Korean Workers: the Culture and
Politics of Class Formation. Ithaca, NY: Cor
nell Univ. Press
Kwong P. 1998. Forbidden Workers: Illegal
Chinese Immigrants and American Labor.
New York: New Press
Lamphere L. 1987. From Working Daughters
to Working Mothers: Immigrant Women in a
New England Industrial Community. Ithaca:
Cornell Univ. Press
Law L. 2000. Sex Work in Southeast Asia: the
Place of Desire in a Time of AIDS. Lon
don/New York: Routledge
Lee CK. 1998. Gender and the South China
Miracle: Two Worlds of Factory Women.
Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Levitt P. 2001. The Transnational Villagers.
Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Louie MC Y 2001. Sweatshop Warriors: Immi
grant Women Workers Take on the Global
Factory. Cambridge, MA: South End Press
Lynch C. 1999. The “good girls” of Sri Lankan
modernity: moral orders of nationalism and
capitalism. Identities 6:55-89
MacLeod AE. 1991. Accommodating Protest:
Working Women, the New Veiling and
Change in Cairo. New York: Columbia Univ.
Press
M?her L. 1997. Sexed Work: Gender, Race and
Resistance in a Brooklyn Drug Market. Ox
ford, UK: Clarendon Press
Mahler SJ. 1995. American Dreaming: Immi
grant Life on the Margins. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Univ. Press
Marchand MH, Runyan AS, eds. 2000. Gen
der and Global Restructuring: Sighting, Sites
and Resistances. London/New York: Rout
ledge
Margold J. 1995. Narratives of masculinity and
transnational migration: Filipino workers in
the Middle East. See Ong & Peletz 1995, pp.
274-98
Margold J. 1999. Reformulating the compliant
image: Filipina activists in the global factory.
Urban Anthropol. 28:1-35
Matthews G. 2003. Silicon Valley, Women, and
the California Dream: Gender, Class, and
Opportunity in the Twentieth Century. Stan
ford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press
Mayoux L. 1999. Questioning virtuous spirals:
micro-Finance and Women’s Empowerment
in Africa. /. Internat. Dev. 11:957-84
McDowell L. 2000. Learning to serve?: em
ployment aspirations and attitudes of young
working-class men in an era of labour mar
ket restructuring. Gender Place Cult. 7:389
417
Milgram BL. 2001. Operationalizing micro
finance: women and craftwork in Ifugao,
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
60 MILLS
upland Philippines. Hum. Organ. 60:212
24
Mills MB. 1995. Attack of the widow ghosts:
gender, death, and modernity in Northeast
Thailand. See Ong & Peletz 1995, pp. 244
73
Mills MB. 1999a. Enacting solidarity: unions
and migrant youth in Thailand. Crit. Anthro
pol. 19:175-91
Mills MB. 1999b. Thai Women in the Global
Labor Force: Consuming Desires, Contested
Selves. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ.
Press
Moon KHS. 1997. Sex Among Allies: Military
Prostitution in U.S.-Korea Relations. New
York: Columbia Univ. Press
Muecke M. 1992. Mother sold food, daughter
sells her body: the cultural continuity of pros
titution. Soc. Sei. Med. 35(7):891-901
Nash J, Fernandez-Kelly MP, eds. 1983.
Women, Men, and the International Division
of Labor. Albany, NY: SUNY Press
Newman KS. 1988. Falling From Grace:
Downward Mobility in the Age of Affluence.
Berkeley: Univ. Calif. Press
Nonini DM. 1997. Shifting identities, posi
tioned imaginaries: transnational traversais
and reversals by Malaysian Chinese. In Un
grounded Empires: the Cultural Politics of
Modern Chinese Transnationalism, ed. A
Ong, DM Nonini, pp. 203-27. London/New
York: Routledge
Ogle GE. 1990. South Korea: Dissent Within
the Economic Miracle. London: Zed Books
Ong A. 1987. Spirits of Resistance and Capital
ist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia.
Albany, NY: SUNY Press
Ong A. 1990. State versus Islam: Malay fami
lies, women’s bodies, and the body politic in
Malaysia. Am. Ethnol. 17:258-76
Ong A. 1991. The gender and labor poli
tics of postmodernity. Annu. Rev. Anthropol.
20:279-309
Ong A. 1999. Flexible Citizenship: the Cul
tural Logics of Transnationality. Durham,
NC: Duke Univ. Press
Ong A, Peletz MG, eds. 1995. Bewitching
Women, Pious Men: Gender and Body Poli
tics in Southeast Asia. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.
Press
Orton L, Barrientos S, McClenaghan S. 2001.
Paternalism and gender in South African
fruit employment: change and continuity.
Women’s Stud. Int. Forum 24:469-78
Osella F, Osella C. 2000. Migration, money and
masculinity in Kerala. J. Roy. Anthropol. Inst.
(NS) 6:117-33
Ozyegin G. 2000. Untidy Gender: Domestic
Service in Turkey. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
Univ. Press
Parre?as RS. 2001. Servants of Globalization:
Women, Migration and Domestic Work. Stan
ford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press
Pe?a DG. 1995. The Terror of the Machine:
Technology, Work, Gender and Ecology on
the U.S.-Mexico Border. Austin: Univ. Texas
Press
Pinches M. 2001. Class and national identity:
the case of Filipino migrant workers. See
Hutchison & Brown 2001, pp. 187-213
Prieto NI. 1997. Beautiful Flowers of the
Maquiladora: Life Histories of Women Work
ers in Tijuana. Austin: Univ. Texas Press
Prugl E. 1999. The Global Construction of
Gender: Home-Based Work in the Political
Economy of the 20th Century. New York:
Columbia Univ. Press
Rahman A. 1999. Women and Microcredit in
Rural Bangladesh: an Anthropological Study
of the Rhetoric and Realities of the Grameen
Bank Lending. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press
Roberts GS. 1994. Staying on the Line: Blue
Collar Women in Contemporary Japan.
Honolulu: Univ. Hawaii Press
Rofel L. 1999. Other Modernities: Gendered
Yearnings in China After Socialism. Berke
ley: Univ. Calif. Press
Roha K. 1994. The conditions and organis
ing activities of women in free trade zones:
Malaysia, Philippines and Sri Lanka, 1970
1990. See Rowbotham & Mitter 1994, pp.
73-99
Romero M. 1992. Maid in the USA. Lon
don/New York: Routledge
Rose K. 1992. Where Women Are Leaders:
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GENDER IN THE GLOBAL LABOR FORCE 61
the SEWA Movement in India. London: Zed
Books
Rosenthal M. 2002. Facing a new revolution in
Vietnam: state textile workers in the post
reform economy. In Women and Work in
Globalising Asia, ed. DS Gills, N Piper, pp.
112-30. London/New York: Routledge
Rothstein FA, Blim M, eds. 1992. Anthropol
ogy and the Global Factory: Studies of the
New Industrialization in the Late Twentieth
Century. New York: Bergin & Garvey
Rouse R. 1995. Questions of identity: person
hood and collectivity in transnational migra
tion to the United States. Crit. Anthropol.
15:351-80
Rowbotham S. 1998. Weapons of the weak:
homeworkers’ networking in Europe. Eur. J.
Women’s Stud. 5:453-63
Rowbotham S, Linkogle S, eds. 2001. Women
Resist Globalization: Mobilizing for Liveli
hood and Rights. London: Zed Books
Rowbotham S, Mitter S, eds. 1994. Dignity and
Daily Bread: New Forms of Economic Or
ganizing Among Poor Women in the Third
World and the First. London/New York:
Routledge
Rozario S. 1997. Development and rural
women in South Asia: the limits of empow
erment and conscientization. Bull. Concern.
Asian Schol. 29:45-53
Sachs CE. 1996. Gendered Fields: Rural
Women, Agriculture and Environment. Boul
der, CO: Westview
Safa HI. 1995. The Myth of the Male Bread
winner: Women and Industrialization in
the Caribbean. Boulder, CO: Westview
Press
Salzinger L. 1997. From high heels to swathed
bodies: gendered meanings underproduction
in Mexico’s export-processing industry. Fern.
Stud. 23:549-73
Sassen S. 1998. Globalization and its Discon
tents: Essays on the New Mobility of People
and Money. New York: New Press
Seligmann LJ. ed. 2001. Women Traders in
Cross-Cultural Perspective: Mediating Iden
tities, Marketing Wares. Stanford, CA: Stan
ford Univ. Press
Silvey RM. 2000a. Diasporic subjects: gender
and mobility in South Sulawesi. Women’s
Stud. Int. Forum 23:501-15
Silvey RM. 2000b. Stigmatized spaces: gender
and mobility under crisis in South Sulawesi,
Indonesia. Gender Place Cult. 7:143-61
Sinclair MT, ed. 1997. Gender, Work and
Tourism. London/New York: Routledge
Skrobanek S, Boonpakdee N, Jantateero C.
1997. The Traffic in Women: Human Real
ities of the International Sex Trade. London:
Zed Books
Stasiulis D, Bakan AB. 1997. Negotiating citi
zenship: the case of foreign domestic workers
in Canada. Fern. Rev. 57:112-39
Stephen L. 1997. Women and Social Movements
in Latin America: Power from Below. Austin:
Univ. Texas Press
Stoler AL. 1985. Capitalism and Confrontation
in Sumatra’s Plantation Belt 1870-1979.
New Haven: Yale Univ. Press
Stoler AL. 1991. Carnal knowledge and im
perial power: gender, morality, and race in
colonial Asia. In Gender at the Crossroads
of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the
Postmodern Era, ed. M di Leonardo, pp. 55
101. Berkelely: Univ. Calif. Press
Striffler S. 1999. Wedded to work: class struggle
and gendered identities in the restructuring
of the Ecuadorian banana industry. Identities
6:91-120
Sturdevant SP, Stoltzfus B. 1992. Let the Good
Times Roll: Prostitution and the U.S. Military
in Asia. New York: New Press
Susser I. 1997. The flexible woman: regender
ing labor in the informational society. Crit.
Anthropol. 17:389-402
Theobald S. 2002. Working for global factories:
Thai women in electronics export companies
in the Northern Regional Industrial Estate.
In Women and Work in Globalising Asia, ed.
DS Gills, N Piper, pp. 131-53. London/New
York: Routledge
Tiano S. 1994. Patriarchy on the Line: La
bor, Gender, and Ideology in the Mexican
Maquila Industry. Philadelphia, PA: Temple
Univ. Press
Tice KE. 1995. Kuna Crafts, Gender, and
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
62 MILLS
the Global Economy. Austin: Univ. Texas
Press
Tilly LA, Scott JW. 1978. Women, Work,
and Family. New York: Holt, Rhinehart &
Winston
Tirado S. 1994. Weaving dreams, constructing
realities: the Nineteenth of September Na
tional Union of garment workers in Mexico.
See Rowbotham & Mitter 1994, pp. 100-13
True J. 2000. Gendering post-socialist transi
tions. See Marchand & Runyan 2000, pp.
74-93
Truong T. 1990. Sex, Money and Morality:
Prostitution and Tourism in Southeast Asia.
London: Zed Books
Tsurumi EP. 1990. Factory Girls: Women in the
Thread Mills ofMeiji Japan. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Univ. Press
Ward K, ed. 1990. Women Workers and Global
Restructuring. Ithaca, NY: IRL Press, Cor
nell Univ.
West LA. 1997. Militant Labor in the Philip
pines. Philadelphia, PA: Temple Univ. Press
White JB. 1994. Money Makes Us Relatives:
Women’s Labor in Urban Turkey. Austin:
Univ. Texas Press
Wilkinson-Weber CM. 1999. Embroidering
Lives: Women’s Work and Skill in the Luc
know Embroidery Industry. Albany, NY:
SUNY Press
Wolf DL. 1992. Factory Daughters: Gender,
Household Dynamics, and Rural Industri
alization in Java. Berkeley: Univ. Calif.
Press
Wright MW 1999. The dialectics of still life:
murder, women and the maquiladoras. Pub.
Cult. 29:453-73
Wright MW. 2001. Desire and the prosthetics
of supervision: a case of maquiladora flexi
bility. Cult. Anthropol. 16:354-73
Yamanaka K. 2000. Nepalese labour migra
tion to Japan: from global warriors to global
workers. Ethnic Racial Stud. 23:62-93
Yanagisako SJ. 2002. Producing Culture and
Capital: Family Firms in Italy. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton Univ. Press
Yelvington KA. 1995. Producing Power: Eth
nicity, Gender and Class in a Caribbean
Workplace. Philadelphia, PA: Temple Univ.
Press
Yeoh BSA, Huang S, Willis K. 2000. Global
cities, transnational flows and gender dimen
sions: the view from Singapore. Tijdschr.
Econ. Soc. Geog. 91:147-58
Zhang EY 2001. Goudui and the state: con
structing entrepreneurial masculinity in two
cosmopolitan areas of post-socialist China.
In Gendered Modernities: Ethnographic Per
spectives, ed. DL Hodgson, pp. 235-65. New
York: Palgrave
Zhang L. 2001. Strangers in the City: Recon
figurations of Space, Power, and Social Net
works Within China’s Floating Population.
Stanford, CA: Stanford Univ. Press
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 20:53:15 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 32 (2003), pp. i-xiv, 1-500
Front Matter
Preface: Bring Back the Reading [pp. v-vi]
In Pursuit of Culture [pp. xiv, 1-12]
Context, Culture, and Structuration in the Languages of Australia [pp. 13-40]
Gender and Inequality in the Global Labor Force [pp. 41-62]
Mississippian Chiefdoms: How Complex? [pp. 63-84]
Developmental Biology and Human Evolution [pp. 85-109]
Environmental Pollution in Urban Environments and Human Biology [pp. 111-134]
The Neolithic Invasion of Europe [pp. 135-162]
The Social Brain: Mind, Language, and Society in Evolutionary Perspective [pp. 163-181]
Complex Adaptive Systems [pp. 183-204]
It’s A Material World: History, Artifacts, and Anthropology [pp. 205-223]
Urban Violence and Street Gangs [pp. 225-242]
Sustainable Governance of Common-Pool Resources: Context, Methods, and Politics [pp. 243-262]
Urbanization and the Global Perspective [pp. 263-285]
Resource Wars: The Anthropology of Mining [pp. 287-313]
The Anthropology of Welfare “Reform”: New Perspectives on U.S. Urban Poverty in the Post-Welfare Era [pp. 315-338]
Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology in South America [pp. 339-361]
Intergroup Relations in Chimpanzees [pp. 363-392]
Maddening States [pp. 393-410]
Highlights and Overview of the History of Educational Ethnography [pp. 411-429]
Children, Childhoods, and Violence [pp. 431-446]
Anthropology, Inequality, and Disease: A Review [pp. 447-474]
Back Matter
The Ending of Apartheid: Shifting Inequalities in South Africa
Author(s):
Margaret Roberts
Source: Geography, Vol. 79, No. 1 (January 1994), pp. 53-64
Published by: Geographical Association
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40572386
Accessed: 29-01-2020 21:00 UTC
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
Geographical Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Geography
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
The Ending of Apartheid:
Shifting Inequalities in South
Africa
Margaret Roberts
ABSTRACT: Apartheid is claimed by many to be over. The ideology has been largely
abandoned. The apartheid legislation is being repealed. Yet the political, economic and
social structures, constructed during the four decades of apartheid, remain. Inequalities
associated with apartheid are shifting, with new inequalities emerging. The ending of
apartheid is experienced differently by different groups leading to different perceptions
of the current situation. For many the “ending of apartheid” has shifted nothing.
Mastership and baaskap are stained
Stained into the mind and soul
Since the day of conquest
Till nowadays
Hard to erase
(Modikwe Dikobe, 1983).
South Africa’s participation in the Olympic Games in 1992 marked, for many people,
the official world recognition of the ending of apartheid. Nelson Mandela’s presence for
the opening ceremony in Barcelona seemed to endorse this. During 1992 there were other
signs of international recognition that things were changing. Some commercial sanctions
have been withdrawn. Sporting links were increased. Visitors to South Africa are told
again and again that “apartheid is over now”. Not everybody shares this perception.
There are some who feel that the participation of South Africa in world sporting events is
giving the world a misleading impression and that it should not take part in them yet. In
mid- 1993 the cultural boycott continues. The oil and arms embargo continues. Some trade
sanctions remain, eg. the trade in gold coins. For some, apartheid is by no means over.
This article sets out to explore the contradictions of these views. Is apartheid dead? Is it
dying? Or is it very much alive?
Margaret Roberts is Lecturer in the Division of Education at the University of Sheffield, the Education
Building, 388 Glossop Road, Sheffield S10 2JA. This is the revised text of the Longman Lecture which she
delivered on April 15th, 1993 in Sheffield at the Centenary Annual Conference of The Geographical Association.
© The Geographical Association, 1994.
53
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
54 GEOGRAPHY
Meanings of apartheid
One reason for the confusion is that the term ‘apartheid’ is used in many different ways
with different meanings, not just in the simple textbook definition of ‘separate
development’. Some of these meanings are attached to the ideology of apartheid. The
word was coined by the Nationalist Party, which came to power in 1948, to describe their
policies. The word itself is an Afrikaans word meaning separate-ness or apart-ness. The
term apartheid has been attached to Nationalist ideology and theories ever since, even
though these have been modified during the past few decades. The central features of this
ideology have been variously interpreted over time to encompass: racial segregation;
separate development of the different groups; preservation of white Afrikaner identify;
white political domination; exploitation of cheap black labour; or the maintenance of the
capitalist system. As the emphasis of the ideology has shifted so has the meaning of the
word. Which aspects of this ideology need to disappear before apartheid can be declared
dead?
The term apartheid has also been commonly used to mean one or more of the
thousands of apartheid laws, passed between 1948 and 1988, )vhich determined who could
live, work, eat, travel, play, learn, sleep and be buried, where and with whom. If these
laws are removed from the statute book is that the end of apartheid?
The apartheid laws have been interpreted and implemented. Their implementation has
altered the spatial, political and economic structures of the country. For some, apartheid
means the visible surface of these structures, the visible realities of these laws in everyday
life. Others are more aware of the deeper structural features of the political, economic and
social life of the country and of the inequalities sanctioned by the apartheid legislation.
Lastly, the meaning of apartheid varies according to experiences of it, which are
different for different groups of people in South Africa and different again for visitors.
These experiences over four decades have changed the way people think and talk.
This article refers to all these layers of meaning. It focuses on four aspects of apartheid
and the recent changes related to them: classification of people; apartheid on a national
scale; apartheid at the urban scale; and apartheid at a local scale. It will then discuss how
these changes appear to different groups of people.
Classification of people
We have been defined as black people and when we reject the term non-white and take upon
ourselves the right to call ourselves what we think we are, we have got available in front of us a
whole number of alternatives, starting from natives to Africans to kaffirs and bantu to non-
whites and so on and we choose this one [black] precisely because we feel it is most
accommodating (Steve Biko, 1978).
One of the elements of the apartheid ideology has been the preservation of the identity
of the white Afrikaner people. The idea of the distinctness of different groups of people
underpins the classification of the people of South Africa. The Population Registration
Act of 1950 required every person in South Africa to be classified and registered as
belonging to a particular group. There was a broad classification into Native, White, and
Coloured groups. (The term ‘Native’ was later changed to ‘Bantu’ and more recently to
‘Black’. Coloureds were sub-categorised into two major groups: ‘Coloured’ and ‘Asian’,
sometimes referred to as ‘Indian’). The classification took place within seven days of birth,
by which time a child had to be registered. Later, at the age of 16, the classification
appeared, in a code number, on the identity document that everyone has to possess,
regardless of classification. The identity card numbers are stored on computer in Pretoria.
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GEOGRAPHY 55
The Population Registration Act in itself did not cause people to refer to people by
“racial categories’ or to treat them differently. This had been taking place in some form for
centuries. What it did do was to attempt to force the complex reality of the South African
population into rigid, defined categories so that different classified groups could be treated
differently under the law. It is not surprising that the Population Registration Act has
been called “the cornerstone of apartheid” and “the mother of apartheid laws” (SAIRR,
1992).
It has now been repealed. Since June 1991 the law has not been on the statute book. If
people are no longer classified, is that the end of apartheid? It is not as simple as that. The
legislation applies only to those born after 27th June 1991. Those born before that date
remain classified on the population register. This is because some of the discriminatory
laws still apply, most notably the right to vote. Under existing legislation those classified
as White can vote for members of the House of Assembly, those as Coloured for the
House of Representatives, those classified as Asians for the House of Delegates. Those
classified as Black can vote only for officials in their black townships or their so-called
‘homelands’.
The remaining apartheid laws are increasingly contested. One example is the
requirement that all men classified as White have to do military service at 18, then spells
of military service at intervals. There have been several cases of white people refusing to
do military service, claiming that the law is discriminatory.
So although the Population Registration Act has been repealed the political and military
structures which were essential to the apartheid regime remain. They are not expected to
last much longer. It may be, however, that some racial classification will continue in order
to facilitate the protection of minority (‘white’) interests.
What is likely to remain, however, is the way the classification of people is built into
attitudes. It structures people’s thinking. Many white people in South Africa always use
the ‘racial’ categories when referring to groups other than their own. When they talk
about people, or a man, or teacher, etc. without the racial description they are talking
about white people. For instance, if they say, “most people in South Africa have
swimming pools now, most people support this or that . . . “, they are talking about white
people. The other groups are quite separate in their minds.
Black people frequently experience the impact of this classification. They can be asked
to go to the back of a queue, are referred to with insulting terms, just because they are
black. Very occasionally the classification which was introduced to control the black
population is used against the white population. In August 1992, a white garage owner
shot dead one of his employees in Umtata, Transkei. Word spread round Umtata quickly
and street demonstrations involving hundreds of people followed. White people who
happened to be walking in or driving through the streets were attacked, because they were
white.
How long will it be before the categories in people’s minds disappear? Will there come a
stage when most people will see others in South Africa as people rather than categories?
One of the six textbooks published for the new South African geography curriculum does
try to do this (Carr et al, 1991). The chapter on population mentions the age structure,
and the distribution, but makes no mention of classification. Nor is it mentioned
throughout the book. The pupils, of course, will know which groups are being talked
about when they study the ‘homelands’, or maize farming. But they are being encouraged
to think of everyone as just ‘people’. This may seem unrealistic and idealistic. It certainly
challenges ingrained thinking.
This article, while not accepting the distinctness of different groups in South Africa,
nevertheless uses the apartheid terms of Black, (limited in this article to mean Black
African, although it is often used in South Africa to include Asian and Coloured), Asian,
Coloured and White. It seems impossible to write about apartheid without using its
terminology.
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
56 GEOGRAPHY
Apartheid on a national scale: grand apartheid
Where you stand the grass is rich and matted, you cannot see the soil. But the rich green hills
break down. They fall to the valley below, and falling changes their nature, for they grow red and
bare; they cannot hold the rain and mist and the streams are dry in the kloofs (Alan Paton,
1958).
Apartheid on a national scale is most clearly seen on Fig. 1. It shows South Africa’s
land divided up and allocated according to ancestry and language groups. These divisions
on the map of South Africa were based on divisions constructed well before the
Nationalist Party came to power and before the apartheid laws were established. The
Black Land Act of 1913 and the Development and Trust Act of 1936, had already
restricted most rights of the Black African population to these parts of the country. The
Nationalist government used these existing boundaries to construct a system of 10
‘homelands’ for the black population, although far more than 10 separate areas of land
were involved. Each black person was allocated to a particular homeland. The Bantu
Authorities Act of 1951 established separate administrative structures for the ‘homelands’.
The next major step in the construction of apartheid on a national scale came in 1959
when the Promotion of Bantu Self-government Act was passed. The Act took the concept
of racial and ethnic identity and expanded it into a system of separation and control. The
theory of apartheid was that the homelands would develop towards independence, its
citizens would be stripped of their South African citizenship and leave ‘white’ South Africa
as a white state. The division of the black population into separate ethnic groups and
separate homelands diffused and fragmented power. Black people were allowed to buy
land and property only in the 13 per cent of the land which was contained in these
homelands: 87 per cent of the land was for the white population and white ownership.
This article is using the past tense. In June 1991 60 laws which limited the rights to live
in and own land in particular areas were repealed in their entirety in one Act, the
Abolition of Racially-based Land Measures Act. One cabinet minister said that it was the
government’s firm intention to turn apartheid into “a political dodo”. In repealing the
laws, President De Klerk said that apartheid did not work, “it was an experiment gone
wrong” (SAIRR, 1992).
It is clear from government statements that the grand theory of apartheid, as far as
separate development is concerned, has been abandoned, even if that abandonment is
stated in such casual terms. Most of the laws have been repealed. Is this, then the end of
grand apartheid? Not quite. Not yet.
For a start, the map remains the same. The so-called ‘homelands’ still exist and will
continue to exist as legal entities with their own administrative structures until the new
constitution is established. What will happen then is uncertain. Between 1976 and 1981,
four homelands (Transkei, Bophuthatswana, Venda and Ciskei – sometimes referred to as
the TBVC states) had moved so far along the road of separate development that they were
granted ‘independence’ by the South African government although this independence was
not recognised by any other countries. South Africa has no legal powers under the existing
legislation to incorporate them into a new South Africa against the will of their leaders. It
is likely however, that Transkei and Venda, under their present leadership, would want to
be re-absorbed. The present leaders of Ciskei and Bophuthatswana are likely to want to
keep their present powers, possibly within some federal structure. They could be hampered
in their wishes by their lack of financial independence from South Africa. Ciskei receives
two-thirds of its income from South Africa and Bophuthatswana receives about a quarter.
It is possible that they would suffer financial penalties if they did not acquiesce to South
Africa’s plans.
The other six homelands had been given self-governing status under the Self-Governing
Territories Act of 1988. This increased their powers to set up their own administrative
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GEOGRAPHY 57
‘INDEPENDENT REPUBLICS
jig j;| Venda l’S.yl Bophuthatswana
lu Ciskei fiffll Transkei
SELF-GOVERNING TERRITORIES -r” M L ^^^^ 2
i^KwaZulu /’ M MMto> ‘ «
r-5-S-a .. BOTSWANA rf .
^^ ^B ; / /’ J:-:-:-:^ /¿/ TRANSVAAL#Johanne8burg W’ ^ ^ ^B QwaQwa ; | ^ ^ y–7 ^s:;:;:;:;^ T”^ . Ài
i :: ^’^”/J xc~^^W
NAMIBIA J ^/ ORANGE FREE STATE / ^ ^ ^7
X* *-• < *' .-^^•'''O<^.NATA1-^^/ ' / Bloemfonteln^, / ^"% ^^^^"^ ' ( ^' LESOTHO ^ ^^7 ' CAPE PROVINCE ' ' ,~£J <^^^Durban ' / ^/ Indian ' ^rv^r^v^/v >^ Ocean
Atlantic ‘ äS_ jT
Ocean ‘ ^ ^*V >r
S ^^fc^Jtast London ^
X5apeTown ^ ^^ ^- – ‘–^^ío^ ‘
^ *- V-. J^”^
Fig. 1. The Black or African ‘homelands’: ‘self-governing territories’ and ‘independent republics’. Source: RSA
(annual) South Africa Official Yearbook of the Republic of South Africa, Bureau for Information, Pretoria
(reprinted in Smith, 1990).
structures, without giving them legal independence. It seems likely that these 6 self-
governing homelands will be re-absorbed into South Africa, although the present
administration of Kwa Zulu would argue for retention of some separate powers within a
federal structure. Other remnants of the separate development ideology remain on the
extreme political right. A group of Afrikaners is arguing for the setting up of a separate
white homeland, a ‘Volkstaat’, located in Transvaal and the Orange Free State.
Although the theory and laws have mostly disappeared and although it is likely that the
boundaries will be re-drawn, other impacts of grand apartheid will persist for many years.
The inequalities in land distribution will remain. There are no plans for redistribution of
land except via the market, in which Blacks have limited purchasing power. 87 per cent of
the land is at present under white ownership. The homelands, under African ownership,
amount to only 13 per cent of the land area. Not only is the land in black ownership
smaller in area, it is poorer in quality. Much of it is overpopulated, overgrazed, eroded and
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
58 GEOGRAPHY
on the whole less suitable for agriculture. Whites own land containing better farming land,
most of the country’s minerals, most of the roads and railways and all the main ports.
There are marked visible differences between the land in the homelands and the land in
‘white’ South Africa (see Figs. 2 and 3). While inequalities in land distribution and
population distribution continue these boundaries in the landscape will continue to exist,
even when the few border posts, indicating a homeland boundary, have been removed.
In addition to the evident unfairness of land distribution there is continuing bitterness
from the struggles and confrontations which were part of the process of implementing the
homeland policy. Just over a million black Africans who had worked on farms in the
white areas were moved from the land to their homelands between 1960 and 1983. A
further 600,000 Africans were compulsorily moved from ‘black-spots’, an official term
used to describe African freehold land acquired (before the Black Land Act of 1913) in
areas which were later declared for white occupation only. Each removal from a black-
spot is a story of struggle and bitterness, with very few successful outcomes for the black
farmers. Most ended up transported to homelands up to 300 miles away, and settled in
areas where they were provided with tin toilets, and some land for cultivation, but
insufficient land for grazing. In addition to the settlements of people moved involuntarily,
settlements grew ‘voluntarily’ as black people chose to build homes in areas in homelands
“as close to the cities as grand apartheid allowed” (Lemon, 1991). One of the largest areas
of black settlement in a homeland is Winterveld in Bophuthatswana, a sprawling
settlement with a population estimated to be approximately half a million (Smith, 1990),
within commuting distance of Pretoria in ‘white’ South Africa. One of the legacies of
grand apartheid is the large number of settlements of desperately poor people involuntarily
resettled or ‘voluntarily’ settled in the homelands. They provide a pool of cheap labour
willing to commute considerable distances to earn an income or to apply for 11 -month
contracts to live and work apart from their families in ‘white’ South Africa. Most school
textbook accounts of migrant labour in South Africa fail to mention that the migrants’
first migration was an involuntary one into the homelands, making their second migration
into the urban areas necessary.
Another legacy of grand apartheid is the continued confrontation and struggle as some
resettled groups try to reclaim their land. The White Paper on Land Reform of 1991
did not address the issue of black land dispossession. The land which black farmers were
forced to leave has in most cases been bought by white farmers who have no intention of
releasing it now. Communities which have tried to reoccupy land taken from them at, for
example, Brakllegte, Machaviestad, and Doornkop have all experienced difficulties. In
parliament it was stated that those blacks who had been removed had already been
compensated (SAIRR, 1992). Nevertheless, members of 60 dispossessed communities are
planning a national campaign to press their claims to land expropriated under apartheid
legislation.1
Apartheid in the urban areas
South of a city is a city
Ten miles south of a city
Founded fifty years ago
By the by-laws of a city
Under Ordinance 10 of a province
Up north
It was not a choice of their own . . .
(Modikwe Dikobe, 1983).
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GEOGRAPHY 59
Fig. 2. Natal. Boundary between part of the ‘homeland’ of Kwa Zulu and ‘white’ South Africa, showing contrast
between overgrazed eroded land of Kwa Zulu and the less populated ‘white’ land.
Fig. 3. Kwa Zulu. Overpopulated and overgrazed eroded land which is a legacy of grand apartheid.
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
60 GEOGRAPHY
Another aspect of change is in the urban areas. During the last decade both the theory
of apartheid in urban areas and the laws enforcing it have disappeared. One part of the
theory, which was developed well before the Nationalist Party came into power, was that
“the native should be allowed to enter the urban areas . . . when he is willing to minister to
the needs of the white man and should depart therefrom when he ceases so to minister”
(Transvaal, 1922, p. 47). A series of laws since the 1920s had restricted the rights of black
people, controlling their employment and where they could live. Residentially they have
been restricted to ‘locations’, now called townships, situated apart from towns, separated
by a buffer zone. Some lived in shacks; some lived in rented accommodation. Others lived
in single-sex hostels, either for males or females, without their families.
Several changes over the last decade have signalled the decline of the theory. From 1978
Blacks were allowed to buy their township houses on a 99-year lease. Since 1986 they have
been allowed to buy the freehold. The pass laws were repealed; black people no longer had
to have a work permit to be allowed to be in an urban area. These changes were the
beginnings of official acknowledgement that black people, although still denied the vote,
were being regarded as permanent residents in the urban areas.
Another significant change, described by Chief Buthelezi as “another nail in the coffin
of apartheid” has been the repeal of the Group Areas Act of 1950. Since 1950 there has
been legislation to divide up all urban areas into residential areas each for the exclusive
use of one racial group (Fig. 4). The 1950 Act mostly affected Coloureds, Asians and a
few Whites as Black Africans were already separated in their own townships. Urban
apartheid was constructed by the removal of thousands of people from their homes. The
Surplus People’s Project estimated that between 1960 and 1983 approximately 860,000
people were moved as a result of the Group Areas Act (Platzky and Walker, 1985).
Now things have changed. To some extent legislation has followed events. For over a
decade some white areas had become increasingly mixed as people of different groups
ignored the law and moved in. For example, Hillbrow in Johannesburg was already mixed
by 1980. Such areas became known as ‘grey areas’ and were officially acknowledged in the
Free Settlement Areas Act of 1989, which applied to a few limited areas. More recently,
wealthy Black Africans and Indians started moving into more exclusive white areas. The
repeal of the Group Areas Act in 1991 acknowledged the increasing breakdown of the law
and removed the widespread remaining legal restrictions on who could live where.
Thus in some senses apartheid in urban areas is finished. Those who can afford to and
who wish to are moving into ‘white’ areas. In some areas, eg. Leondale, near
Johannesburg, the process is quite rapid. Once a few Black families move into an area,
more are likely to follow. White people then start selling their property and moving
elsewhere. In some areas there is movement in the other direction. As the recession bites,
some white people have been pleased to be able to buy houses in a ‘coloured’ area near
the centre of Cape Town at half the price of similar white houses (SAIRR, 1992).
Although the theory and the laws have gone, the urban settlement patterns with their
“starkly differentiated housing stock” (Smith, 1992a) and their buffer zones dividing the
group areas of the past, will persist for decades. The inequalities in housing will remain.
The divide between those who live in superior and inferior housing will have shifted
slightly away from a division on grounds of racial classification to a division based partly
on income. There has been little class change in residential areas so far (Simon, 1989).
Some of the bitterness associated with past struggles to resist removal will also remain.
One of the most notorious struggles was in District Six in Cape Town, at the foot of
Table Mountain and close to the central business district. This area had long been settled
by ‘Coloured’ people, who were forcibly moved between 1966 and 1982 to settlements in
the Cape Flats some 10 miles away. Following the outcry about the removal there has
since been very limited development in the area, renamed Zonnebloem. The area, which
had an estimated population of 38,000 in 1965, now has fewer than 4,000 (Lemon, 1991).
The virtually derelict area and the relocated settlements on Cape Flats remain as legacies
of apartheid.
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GEOGRAPHY 61
Fig. 4. Group Areas in
Durban, before the
repeal of the Group
Areas Act. Source:
compiled by the author
from various sources.
^M Central ^^”^VAVs^ ZZ^^i “>
M ^M Central whites BuslnessArea R^^Äl ZZ^^i / “> :::::: whites yCv^^^vk**1*11/ I
Residential. ^ Asians ^^XvS^ííííííííj/ I
w wentworth ^xíííííííííi^O^T^v^V/ Indian
N Ne^andEast ^^0^^ / ^jyi °Cean
Apartheid on a local scale
Alongside the legislation affecting residential areas there have been changes affecting
schools, with attempts made to reduce the inequality between them. Since 1991 financial
pressure has been put on white schools to become multi-racial. All schools had to raise a
certain amount of their income from fees, with white schools having to raise the most. The
amount to be raised by fees was substantially less for those white schools agreeing to
admit Black, Coloured and Asian pupils. Most white schools agreed to change their intake
so access to school is not now determined solely on ground of colour, but by ability to
pay fees. The inequalities are shifting; a new black middle class is emerging. Huge
inequalities of accommodation, equipment, and staffing remain between the schools in
different group areas, but they are being slowly reduced (Table 1). The task of removing
them completely is ‘formidable’ (Van der Berg, 1991).
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
62 GEOGRAPHY
Table 1
South African per capita expenditure on school pupils by racial classification, as a percentage of white expenditure
Black African Coloured Asian
(including homelands)
1969/70 5 20 27
1979/80 8 20 33
1989/90 25 53 71
For the visitor the most obvious signs of apartheid used to be the notices about separate
amenities for different groups. The whole Durban sea-front was divided up into separate
beaches for Whites, Asians, Coloureds and Blacks. Notices made it clear who could sit on
and swim from which beach. The Separate Amenities Act of 1953 had required municipal
authorities to make separate provision for different groups. The Act has now been
repealed. The beach notices have disappeared and those beaches which had been for the
exclusive use of white people are used by all groups.
Another example of what came to be known as ‘petty apartheid’ was the separate
provision for different groups on trains. Whites travelled first class, Blacks travelled third
class. Not only were the trains segregated, but the ticket offices and the bridges leading to
the appropriate sections of the platform were also segregated. The first-class/third-class
segregation continues, with separate ticket offices and bridges in some stations. The
difference is now that anyone who can afford it can travel first-class. So many of the first-
class passengers are Black, Coloured and Asian. Third-class carriages are used exclusively
by Blacks. The commuter trains of Johannesburg epitomise the new inequalities in South
Africa; there is a shift from separation according to racial classification to separation
according to income.
The repeal of the Separate Amenities Act has been welcomed by most black people and
by many white people. In many areas there has been tolerance and acceptance of the
changes. In some traditional Afrikaner areas of the Transvaal and Orange Free State,
however, there has been more resistance. Municipal authorities have found ways of
circumventing the changes. In Piet Retief, for example, non-residents were required to pay
an annual fee of R500 (about £100) to use the municipal library, while residents could use
it free (SAIRR, 1992). Townships are outside towns.
There are no laws against restricted entry to private facilities and discrimination is
common. Petty apartheid is dead, but unequal treatment continues daily.
Perceptions of the changes
H.G. Wells might have invented such a place: a country where people occupy the same space but
live in separate time frames, so that they do not see one another and perceive different realities
(Alistair Sparks, 1984).
The perception of different realities continues in relation to the changes described in this
article. People in South Africa have totally different experiences and perceptions of the
current situation.
For many white people the changes have been enormous. Everything that they
associated with apartheid has gone. They hear the National Party denouncing the theory.
They know the laws have gone and they experience change. The public amenities they use
are now all mixed. They are likely to sit next to people from different groups in the
cinema, on the beach, in a cafe, or on the beach. They are aware of the growing Asian
and African middle class, very evident in towns in shops and businesses. They see Black
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
GEOGRAPHY 63
and Asian people moving into their suburbs. They see mixing of groups in their schools.
They are aware of the presence of far more poor black people in their town centres. Many
feel that apartheid has gone.
Their views are shaped by their experiences, but there is much of their country they do
not see and experience. The ‘social cleavages’ of apartheid (Smith, 1992a) restricted social
mixing by white people with people from different groups. For many Whites their only
visits to the homelands are to travel to other parts of the country along the roads which
go through them or to visit one of the casino and hotel complexes built on their margins.
Very few have ever visited a black township. The roads they are likely to use do not take
them through any of them. Townships are not even marked on most maps. The South
African AA tourist maps do not show them, apart from Soweto. A spokesperson for the
South African AA said that he did not think such omissions were a problem since, “blacks
prefer someone to give them directions in the form of landmarks and streets rather than to
use maps”.2 Atlases published in Britain also have what could be considered apartheid
maps of South Africa. The names of the settlements in which 26 million black South
Africans live are not marked. Not all atlases mark Soweto which has over a million
inhabitants. Other settlements such as Winterveld, Crossroads, Sharpeville, Boapatong are
not marked. This is not because of their size. Some amazingly tiny white settlements are
marked on atlas maps. The arguments used against marking them do not stand up. They
are not suburbs of white settlements. Black people who live in Tembisa do not think of
themselves as living in Kempton Park, nor do they have Kempton Park for their address.
If there are too many settlements to be marked, why are only white settlements selected to
be shown? If marking them gives recognition to apartheid, then what about other
uncomfortable realities which are marked on atlas maps?
The perceptions of the white community of the ending of apartheid is shaped by its
experiences, which for the majority are limited by the structures which apartheid has
constructed, and by the invisibility of much of black experience and existence.
For middle class black and Asian people much has changed. They have far greater
access to land, housing, health, education, and amenities than before the repeal of the
apartheid legislation. They still wait for the vote on a common electoral register.
For poor black people, living in townships or in the homelands, little has changed. They
remain poor. Poor black people are harder hit by recession, inflation and unemployment.
Their homes remain inadequate. Their schools remain overcrowded, with large classes,
poor buildings and few resources. They still have to commute large distances from
settlements established during the apartheid decades to seek work. They continue to take
up opportunities for migrant labour in the towns. They continue to farm the eroded lands
of the homelands. The ending of apartheid has changed nothing in their lives. They are
expected by some to be grateful for the right to do things, such as eat, swim, live and
work where they like in their own country. They are expected by some to be grateful for
the opportunity, if they had the money, to share the facilities Whites have enjoyed for
decades. Many Blacks, far from feeling grateful, feel bitter about their past experiences;
they feel impatient that things are not changing, and angry at the everyday violence which
is unequally concentrated in black areas. Their perceptions are totally different from those
of most Whites.
Apartheid, in many of its meanings, is disappearing. The theory and ideology have been
discarded. Only a small minority cling to the old ideology. In April 1993 the National
Party, anxious to distance itself from its apartheid image, changed it colours. De Klerk,
unveiling the new colours, spoke about scrapping apartheid, opening its doors to all South
Africans and breaking “with that which is wrong with the past”.3 The apartheid laws have
mostly been repealed. Those remaining on the statute book will be removed with the new
constitution. Geographical divisions, apartheid patterns on the landscape, and unequal
structures, will remain. Some Blacks, Asians and Coloureds have become part of the more
privileged group and more will follow, but inequalities between rich and poor are greater
Geography © 1994
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
64 GEOGRAPHY
than ever. The attitudes and feelings developed by different groups during the apartheid
decades will be slow to change. The changes in South Africa raise the greatest
expectations, provoke the deepest fears, and provide a huge challenge to a new
government. This is only the beginning of the end of apartheid; there are so many
inequalities to shift.
Author’s note:
In July and August 1992 I visited South Africa for a period of six weeks. During this period
I stayed with ‘white’ relations and friends in Cape Province, Orange Free State, Transvaal
and Natal and with ‘black’ friends in Transkei and Bophuthatswana. I visited many other
‘white’ and ‘black’ homes and discussed the changes taking place in South Africa with most
people I met. I also visited schools and had the opportunity to discuss the situation with both
‘white’ and ‘black’ teachers and pupils. The perceptions of different groups referred to in this
article are based, it is recognised, on access to a limited number of people during a limited
time. They represent an opportunistic sample at a time of change. The general thesis of the
Longman Lecture, which has been modified slightly to form this article, was checked again
and again with different people and modified accordingly.
NOTES
1. Reported in The (South African) Sunday Times, 4th April 1993.
2. Quoted in The Weekly Mail, 14th August 1992.
3. Reported in The Star, (A Natal Newspaper) Durban, 30th April 1993.
REFERENCES
Biko, S. (1978) / Write What I Like, London:
Heinemann.
Carr, D., Winter, K. and Wood, A. (1991) Successful
Geography. Book 6, Cape Town: Oxford University
Press.
Dikobe, M. (1983) Dispossessed, Johannesburg: Raven
Press.
Lemon, A. (1991) Homes Apart: South Africa’s
Segregated Cities, Paul Chapman.
Paton, A. (1958) Cry, the Beloved Country,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Platzky, L. and Walker, C. (1985) The Surplus People,
Johannesburg: Raven Press.
Simon, D. (1989) “Crisis and change in South Africa:
implications for the apartheid city”, Transactions of
the Institute of British Geographers, NS, 14, 2, pp.
189-204.
Smith, D. (1990) Apartheid in South Africa,
Cambridge: University Press.
Smith, D. (1992a) “Redistribution after apartheid: who
gets what where in the new South Africa”, Area,
24, 4, pp. 350-358.
South African Institute of Race Relations (1992) Race
Relations Survey 1991/2.
Sparks, A. (1984) “The high walls of apartheid”, The
Observer, November 1984.
Transvaal (1922) Report of the Transvaal Local
Government Commission, Transvaal Provincial
Government.
Van der Berg, 5. (lyyi) Redirecting government
expenditure”, in Moll, P., Natrass, N. and Loots,
L. (eds.) Redistribution: How can It Work in South
Africa?, Cape Town: David Philips.
Further Reading (not directly cited)
Davies, R.J. (1981) “The spatial formation of the
South African city”, Geography Journal, Supp. 2.
Davies, R.J. (1986) “When! – reform and change in
the South African city”, South African
Geographical Journal, 68.
Desmond, C. (1971) The Discarded People,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Hart, D.M. (1988) “Political manipulation of urban
space: the razing of District Six, Cape Town”,
Urban Geography, 9, 6, pp. 603-628.
Omond, R. (1986) The Apartheid Handbook,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Smith, D. (ed.) (1982) Living Under Apartheid,
London: George Allen and Unwin.
Smith, D. (ed.) (1992b) The Apartheid City and
Beyond, London: Routledge.
Unterhalter, E. (1987) Forced Removal: The Division,
Segregation and Control of the People of South
Africa, London: International Defence and Aid
Fund for Southern Africa.
Western, J. (1981) Outcast Capetown, Minneapolis:
University Press.
d*nnrnnh’i tPs ‘QQA
This content downloaded from 130.123.99.4 on Wed, 29 Jan 2020 21:00:57 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
- Contents
- Issue Table of Contents
p. 53
p. 54
p. 55
p. 56
p. 57
p. 58
p. 59
p. 60
p. 61
p. 62
p. 63
p. 64
Geography, Vol. 79, No. 1 (January 1994) pp. 1-96
Front Matter
Development Cycles and Urban Landscapes [pp. 3-17]
Origami at Work: The Changing Nature of the European Community’s Trade of Pulp and Paper [pp. 18-31]
The Impact of Defence Cuts: the Case of Redundancy in Plymouth [pp. 32-41]
Birth Pangs in Utopia: the Plans for an International, High-tech, Sustainable City in Australia [pp. 42-52]
The Ending of Apartheid: Shifting Inequalities in South Africa [pp. 53-64]
The National Curriculum: What shall we do with it? [pp. 65-76]
This Changing World
Unique Earth [pp. 77-78]
Over the seas or to the hills: Population growth and impact in the Philippines [pp. 78-83]
Labuan: International Offshore Financial Centre [pp. 84-87]
Book Reviews
Review: untitled [pp. 88-88]
Review: untitled [pp. 88-89]
Review: untitled [pp. 89-89]
Review: untitled [pp. 89-90]
Review: untitled [pp. 90-90]
Review: untitled [pp. 90-91]
Review: untitled [pp. 91-91]
Review: untitled [pp. 91-92]
Review: untitled [pp. 92-92]
Review: untitled [pp. 92-93]
Review: untitled [pp. 93-93]
Review: untitled [pp. 93-93]
Review: untitled [pp. 93-95]
REVIEW NOTES [pp. 95-96]
Back Matter
New Internationalist (1995) The New South Africa. New Internationalist: March.