Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Associate Professor of Sociology, Social Sciences Department of Islamic Azad University, Garmsar Branch
2 Master of Women Studies
Abstract
The present study aims to examine the effect of women’s access to money (as a power relation) in power relations in underprivileged families, and the initial research question is that based on access to money, how are the power relations between spouses in these families categorized? The study was conducted with the institutional ethnography method and participatory rural appraisal (PRA) and through employing observational techniques (direct and indirect), in-depth unstructured interview, focused group discussion (FGD), and creating graphs of daily activities in two local communities of women, being Tekkieh Shohada (District 10) and Dastan Sabz (District 15) of Tehran. Findings show that money and power in family, even in a definite economic class, are deeply gendered concepts. Pocket money, allowance, visible money, invisible money, savings, inheritance and gifts from parents, informal loan funds and Mahr, are all funds to which women have access or which are resources for women. Women’s economic agency in the communities studied is defined as earning invisible money (through frugality) and managing male money. Female power is mostly close to influence and is persuasive and passive; meaning that it is formed through conformance to men and is of the executive dominance and less important in the general picture of things. Controlling the way of spending the money earned by women, refusing to give money or cash assistance, and preventing women or children’s basic needs such as food, medicine or other medical services from being provided, are all forms of economic abuse which women have experienced in the communities studied here. In return, emphatic tolerance can be imagined as a situation in which husbands, despite the difference in access to money, can adjust the power relations in an amicable way.
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