Marriage,Gender,and Labor: Female-Headed Households in a Rural Cambodian Village(<Special Issue>New Japanese Scholarship in Cambodian Studies)

Abstract

The "feminization of poverty" is apparent in regard to female-headed households, and Cambodiais not an exception. Due to the civil war and the aftermath of the Pol Pot regime, the populationof women has exceeded that of men, and the ratio of female-headed households still remains relativelyhigh. This paper is a case study of one rice-farming village in Takaev Province in the southernplain region of Cambodia. It will describe the present state of female-headed households anddiscuss how these women try to survive by selecting and utilizing various social and humanresources within the milieu of their kinship and marriage system. Despite the fact that the householdunit as means of livelihood was dismantled during the Pol Pot regime, family ties were notdestroyed and households were reconstructed soon after the regime collapsed. Although theregime created many households with a deficiency of members, the kinship structure basicallyremains the same as before the 1970s. The nature of men's migratory marriage sometimesbrings about the easy desertion of wives, but the predominance of a matrilocal residential patternprovides female networks in the wives' home villages. Nevertheless, the matrilocal preferencedoes not always solve the problem of the "feminization of poverty."