Explaining Gender in Haiti: Review of the Literature

Gender in Haiti is and long has been highly patterned and distinct from the more patriarchal trends found in neighboring Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and many African societies among which development and academic programs frequently classify Haiti. These patterns include female monopoly of most household productive enterprises (such as food harvesting and processing), a hig­h degree of female control over the homestead, and a nearly complete female monopoly over intermediate level redistribution and marketing of agricultural produce, small livestock, and fish (three of provincial Haitian households four main sources of income from production; the fourth source is charcoal produced for the urban market). Women have traditionally been considered the principal owners of homes, they are the primary disciplinarians of children, and their male partners often depend heavily on them as managers of the homestead. Undergirding the prominent role of women in organizing household labor and selling the products of the homestead is the fact that for many people in Haiti the homestead – be it urban or rural – is the single most important and often the only means of social and material security in what is an unforgiving region of the world characterized by catastrophic weather patterns and unpredictable economic crises (for past descriptions from anthropologists see Herskovits 1937; Simpson 1942; Metraux 1951; Murray 1977;  Smucker, 1983; Schwartz 2000).

In the traditional rural Haitian society that to a large degree continues to dominate Haitian cultural expectations, the sexual division of labor and female primacy in governing economic matters of the popular household were linked to distinctly patterned gender rights and duties. Men were considered the financiers and underwriters of female entrepreneurial activities and household expenses; men gave women money; it was the woman’s right to receive; women were expected to reciprocate with sex and domestic service while intensely engaging in their own privately owned and managed marketing businesses the proceeds of which were intended for the maintenance of the household and children. If a man did not meet his obligations, the woman, even if married, had a socially recognized right to look for male support elsewhere (ibid;  also note that all that has so far been described are in fact gender patterns that until recently prevailed throughout the non-Hispanic Caribbean; see for exampleMintz 1955, 1971, 1974; Cohen 1956; R. T. Smith 1956; Solien 1959;  Davenport 1961; M.G. Smith 1962; Kundstadter 1963; Otterbein 1963, 1965: Clarke 1966; Greenfield 1961;  Walker 1968; Rodman 1971; Pollock 1972;  Philpott 1973; Buschkens 1974;  Durant-Gonzalez 1976; Hill 1977; Berleant-Schiller 1978;  Massiah 1983; Griffith 1985; Olwig 1985; Gearing 1988; Handwerker 1989;  Brittain 1990; Lagro and Plotkin 1990;  Senior 1991; Mantz 2007).

The popular class Haitian gender patterns being described were and in popular class continue to be manifest in what anthropologist Ira Lowenthal (1987) called a ‘field of competition’ between the sexes. Women are taught to think of themselves as able to get along without sexual gratification while conceptualizing their own sexuality in terms of a commodity, referring to their genitals as intere-m (my assets), lajan-m (my money), and manmanlajan-m(my capital), in addition to tè-m (my land). A popular proverb is, chak famn fet ak yon kawo te—nan mitan janm ni (every women is born with a parcel of land—between her legs).  Men on the other hand are taught to believe they need sexual interaction with women and chastised for not making material overtures to women. Called “gendered capital” by Richman (2003: 123), these sexual-material values continue to be universal in the popular classes and apply whether the woman in question was dealing with a husband, lover, or more causal relationship. The consequence is an ongoing socially constructed and sexually intoned negotiation between men and women in which material advantage accrues to women.

However, love, devotion, sex, and domestic service for material gain should not be equated with prostitution, promiscuity or subservience. Although influenced by family, particularly mothers, 95% and more of all women in the 2005-06 EMMUS reported selecting their own spouse and their subsequent comportment is embedded in a system of restraint and censorship such that sexual modesty in Haiti is, in terms of reporting and statistical norms, more conservative than found in mainstream US society. For example, while 20.7% American adolescent girls 15 to 19 years of age report having 2 or more sexual partners in the 12 months prior to being interviewed, only 1.6% of Haitian adolescents girls report the same (National Health Statistics Reports 2011; EMMUS 2012).

American women 40 to 44 years of age report 3.4 lifetime sexual partners; Haitian counterparts report 2.5 (ibid; 2005-6 EMMUS). Even Haitian men–who few observers have would describe as sexually conservative–come off as modest in comparison to American men: the 2005-06 EMMUS found that 45% of single Haitian men 15 to 24 years of age reported not having sex in the previous year. The figure for abstinent US men in the same age group is 33 percent (National Health Statistics Reports 2011).  As for subservience, Haitian women are better described not as timid and demure servants to men, but rather as outspoken, aggressive, and even violent defenders of the gender defined economic rights seen above (see Gerald Murray 1977;  Schwartz 2000; and see James 2006 for some rich examples of violent Haitian female “viktim”).

This description, of what can be called Haiti’s traditional popular class “sexual moral economy” –a description drawn largely from the ethnographic literature and supported by the highly regarded Demographic and Health Surveys (EMMUS2005-2006 and 2012)–is incomplete without noting that it has been historically accompanied by a strong, socially reinforced desire to parent children, what can be called radical pronatalism. The trend is such that the observation anthropologist George Simpson (1942: 670) made 60 years ago, ‘that the Haitian peasant  wishes to have children, and to have the largest number possible,’ was applicable 35 years later, in 1977, when anthropologist Gerald Murray did two years of research in Haiti’s Cul-de-Sac; it was applicable in 1987 when anthropologist Ira Lowenthal summarized his four years of research on the Southern Peninsula; it was still largely applicable in 1996 when Anthropologist Gisele Maynard Tucker summarized her 2,383 household survey of men and women in both urban and rural areas of greater Port-au-Prince; it was applicable in 1998 when Jenny Smith reported from two years of research on Haiti’s Plain du Nord; and certainly still applicable when the author (Schwartz 2000) reported on five years of research in Haiti’s Northwest (Schwartz 2000). Linked to radical pronatalism are an abhorrence of abortion; a wide array of beliefs that associate contraceptives with illness and promiscuity; and superstitions and folk beliefs that seem exotic to outsiders but that promote high fertility. The latter include a firm belief in spells that make people fall in love, that having sex with an insane or handicapped woman brings luck, the fictive illness known as perdisyon  wherein a fetus can gestate in a woman’s womb for as long as 5 years (technically known as “arrested pregnancy syndrome”), and superstitious rationales that convince men to accept paternity for children that are not biologically their own, such as the widely accepted blood test–the belief that if a man pricks his own finger and puts a drop of blood on the newborn‘s tongue he can determine if the child is his, for if he is not the father the baby will die instantly. (For descriptions of the aforementioned see Herskovits 1937; Simpson 1942; Murray 1977; Smith 1996; Maternowska 2006; and Schwartz 2009.)

Despite the long history of in-depth anthropological studies cited above, many outsiders (including among them some notable Haitian intellectuals) have misunderstood gender in Haiti and by corollary their relationship to the described pronatal patterns and folk beliefs. Many of the scholars imposed patriarchal models that apply to other countries or that are logical in the context of traditional middle and upper class Western value systems but that do not fit popular-class social patterns in Haiti. For example, in a stark misinterpretation of rural life in Haiti first noted by Gerald Murray (1977: 263), the oft-repeated explanation for polygyny has long been that farmers use “extra” wives to tend additional gardens (Bastien 1961: 142; Courlander 1960: 112; Herskovits 1937; Leyburn 1966: 195; Moral 1961: 175–76; Simpson 1942: 656). As Murray pointed out, this is not now and probably never was true. Women in rural Haiti do not work in gardens on behalf of men. On the contrary, they may sometimes work gardens on their own and their children’s behalf, but when a man is present the obligation to plant and weed falls to him (Murray 1977; Smucker 1983; Schwartz 2009). Indeed, a tradition so consistent over the years that it can be elevated to the status of a cultural rule is that Haitian women, not men, are considered the owners of the household agricultural produce; produce largely cultivated by the efforts of male household members, (ibid).

The same tendency to misconstrue or impose outside gender patterns onto popular class Haiti prevails today, particularly among foreign analysts, international social activists, and aid workers. Several notable exceptions notwithstanding (N’zengou-Tayo 1998, Fafo 2004, Gardella 2006), most present repression of women as worse in Haiti than other countries. In doing so they cite discriminatory legal codes (Fuller 2005; UNIFEM 2004), political violence against women (Fuller 2005; UNIFEM 2004), high levels of mortality during childbirth (UNIFEM 2004; World Bank 2002), the feminine struggle for identity manifest in creative literature (Francis 2004), female involvement in onerous, labor-intensive economic endeavors (Divinski et al. 1998), and even the overall deterioration of economic and political conditions (UNIFEM 2006). Summarizing these views, the UN’s Gender Development Index (GDI) ranks Haiti at the very bottom of the Western hemisphere, making it seem to observers who do not carefully interpret the index that Haiti is the most female repressive country in all of Latin America, indeed the world, considerably lower in ranking than Iran or Saudi Arabia (United Nations Development Programme 2006).

A good example of how far from fact many feminist presentations have gone is the work of Beverly Bell, one of the more outspoken experts on gender in Haiti and author of the acclaimed book Walking on Fire (2001). In the introduction to her book Bell claimed that,

Haitian women place at the absolute bottom in female-male life expectancy differential, incidence of teen marriage, contraceptive use, primary school enrollment, secondary school enrollment, and ratio of secondary school teachers. They tie for worst or rank second to worst in the following: economic equality with men, social equality, life expectancy, rate of widowhood/divorce or separation, University enrollment, female adult literacy, discrepancy between male and female literacy…

Bell was wrong on every count.  At 63 vs 59 years, women in Haiti live longer than men (UN 2010); at 43 per 1,000 babies annually born to adolescent girls 15 to 19 years of age, Haiti’s teen pregnancy rate is officially among the lowest in the developing world, half or less that of many Latin American countries, including the neighboring Dominican Republic (World Bank 2013; WHO 2007; UNFPA 2007; WHO 2001) and one third the 2006 rate of 126 for both Hispanic and Black youth in the United States (Planned Parenthood 2011). Gender disparity in education for at least the past 20 years is not a huge gap, but ever so slight. The figures for some secondary school for the 20 to 24 year age ranges were 33.5 for females vs. 40.0 for males (see EMMUS 1994/95). In 2012, gender disparity remained slight, with 66 percent of females in the age range 20 to 24 years had at least some secondary school vs. 69 percent of males (see EMMUS 2012). Indeed, for those concerned about gender differential treatment of children a good case can be made that it is Haitian boys, not girls, who are in need of special attention: in addition to the educational differences favoring girls, the 2005-06  EMMUS found that chronic malnutrition was significantly greater among boys (25% vs 20%: p.162); the same was true for child mortality (143/1,000 boys to 132/1,000 for girls 0 to 62 months of age: p. 86).

Returning to Bell and the contemporary status quo for the presentation of gender in Haiti, the only point that she seems to have gotten right is that, as seen earlier, it is true that Haitian women, particularly rural women, eschew contraceptives. Despite massive and costly internationally funded contraceptive campaigns extending back in time back to the early 1970s, only 28.7% of reproductive aged Haitian women were using them in 2010; that translates to the lowest contraceptive use rate in the Western hemisphere; 7.6% lower than the next lowest rate (Bolivia at 36.3%; see Alkema et. al. 2013).  But there is little evidence that female contraceptive use in Haiti has anything to do with male domination. In the 2005-06 EMMUS only 2.3% of reproductive aged Haitian women interviewed reported not using modern contraceptive because their spouse opposed (p. 73).

Perhaps the most interesting feature of the misrepresentation of gender status in Haiti is precisely the point touched on above: that the notion of Haitian women as “viktim” and under the control of their spouses has prevailed despite the fact that the EMMUS studies–the most relied on source for demographic, reproductive health and gender data for Haiti–provide extensive evidence to the contrary. An overwhelming proportion of women interviewed for the Haiti EMMUS’s report having or sharing the final word on household issues ranging from large and small household expenditures, to work habits, child discipline, education, and health (EMMUS 2005-6; p 245 – 250).  Moreover, the trend is not, as many observers seem to assume, one of the poorest women suffering the most severe repression. The authors of the 2005-2006 EMMUS noted that,

Against all expectations, we find that women who most frequently participate in making the seven decisions inquired about are rural women and those who have less education. [And] Women who work for money are [also] involved much more frequently than others in decision making.                               [EMMUS 2005-6:247]

Reinforcing the erroneous or at least ethnographically and statistically unsupported image of Haitian women as, by global standards, economically, physically, medically, and socially repressed vis a vis men are claims that they suffer extreme physical and sexual violence at the hands of their male spouses, criminals, paramilitary thugs and even police. Since the 2010 earthquake this image has been especially prominent in reports from grassroots activist organizations, human rights organizations, NGOs, the UN, and the international press (Bell 2010; Faul 2010; KOFAVIV 2010; Amnesty International 2011; Kolbe et. al. 2010). For example, following the earthquake grass-roots activist organizations were reporting such a high incidence of rape that the international press labeled it “epidemic.”

It would seem that at least some support for the image of Haitian women suffering extraordinary domestic violence comes from the EMMUS studies. The 2005-6 Haitian EMMUS found that 19.3% of women interviewed had, at some point in their lives, experienced physical or sexual violence at the hands of a partner. However, putting this in regional perspective, it is the second lowest rate in Latin America (PAHO 2012); and 2.8% less than the 22.1% reported in year 2000 for the United States (Tjaden and Thoennes 2000). Moreover, what we do not learn from the EMMUS interviews is what men report about female violence or to what extent women may sometimes be more accurately categorized, not as passive victims, but as combatants. The EMMUS did not interview men regarding female violence. Moreover, at least some anthropologists report that Haitian women are in fact physically assertive and as or more violent than male counterparts with respect to both other women and men (Murray 1977; Schwartz 2000).  If true, the observation should arguably not come as a surprise. Given the high degree of economic engagement and the conspicuous role of popular class Haitian women in household and family decision-making processes a high degree of assertiveness on the part of women can be expected in both defending and exerting their entrenched and socially recognized rights. In the surveys discussed in this report, women who reported experiencing domestic violence were in fact more likely be among those who made significant economic contributions to the household. As for reports of epidemic levels of post-earthquake extra-domestic rape and violence against women: we found no evidence in the Leogane and Carrefour surveys to support the claims.

Returning to the trend in the literature of misrepresenting Haiti’s popular class gender patterns, not all scholars have overlooked the prominence and high degree of de facto male-female equity. In her 2006 Gender Assessment for USAID, Gardella emphasized that Haitians show no gender preference in educating their children. The Understanding Children’s Work Project (2006), drawing on EMMUS 2005-6, concluded that Haitian boys more often than girls work outside the home, they work harder than girls, and they work for longer hours than girls. In terms of adult female participation in the work force, Haiti is second only to Lesotho as that developing country with the highest rate of female economic participation; in 1995 the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) estimated male vs. female participation rates at 87% and 62%, respectively (IDB 1999). Moreover, there is at least some strong evidence that rural female headed households may be better off–or at least not as badly off–as their male counterparts: Sletten and Egset’s (2004) found that 28% of rural households are headed by women and 72% are headed by men; but four times as many rural male-headed households face “extreme food insecurity.”  In the surveys discussed in this report we found that in both rural and urban areas Single Female Headed Households were materially as or better off than those households with both a male and female head.

None of this to say that there are not serious gender issues that should be addressed. Haitian gender patterns have been widely misunderstood. But times are changing.  Haiti has gone from 95% rural in 1950 to 60% rural in 2000; with the year 2009 marking the first time that Haiti was as urban as it was rural. (World Bank 1995; CIA 2005). In the three years since the earthquake the urban population has shot to 55 percent (World Bank 2013).  This means that a large portion of the Haitian female youth is now being reared in an ambiance where they will no longer have the traditional female dominated rural marketing system as a means to economic autonomy in adulthood. Nor will they have the socially defined rights to control household production–specifically, the traditionally defined female ownership of household agricultural produce. Greater physical presence of men –i.e. less male transience with urban employment–and greater dependency on male dominated wage labor also seems to bode a loss of power and prestige for women.  And indeed, while it was seen above that in rural areas there are dramatically fewer “extremely poor” female vs. male-headed households, other researchers report the opposite in the urban environment.  Gardella (2006) noted that 26 percent of female headed households in Port-au-Prince are “extremely poor” vs. 17 percent of those headed by males.  While we did not find similar results in the present survey, associated with this disparity is the fact that the single most powerful predictor of household economic status in Port-au-Prince is if the household head has a salaried job in the formal sector, an area where men outnumber women by a factor as high as 3 to 1 and where men monopolize the upper income strata (Sletten and Egset, 2004:14; Charmes 2000; Gardella 2006:11).

 

NOTES

The causes underlying the outstanding role of women in popular Haitian culture is surely linked to the country’s regionally unique economy and prevailing subsistence strategies. For two hundred years Haiti has been a regional, if not global anachronism. While neighboring countries became or remained oriented toward plantation and latifundia systems, within 30 years of its 1804 independence Haiti had evolved into a nearly full-blown peasant economy dependent on small garden plots equitably distributed among 10s of thousands of farming families; while neighboring countries became or remained export and import oriented, Haiti depended and still largely depends on local petty production organized around households and regional rotating marketing systems; while neighboring countries became mechanized, Haitian farmers and craftsmen depended and still largely depend on pre-19th century technology as well as human and animal labor power; while most neighboring countries have experienced demographic transition to lower birth rates, the process has been much slower in Haiti where many women, particularly those living in rural areas, continue to bear children at rates equal to the highest in the world and the highest biologically possible (see Schwartz 2000). Linked to these economies, land tenure systems, and subsistence strategies, Haiti was also unique in the degree to which it has depended for foreign revenue on male labor migration. For over 100 years a Haitian male right-of-passage included migration to plantations in Cuba and the Dominican Republic. More recently men and an increasingly number of women migrate to work in to areas of intense hotel construction, fishing grounds, and touristic zones. The traditional pattern was for men to migrate to get the money to set spouses up in homes and to invest in expanded household enterprises such as peasant agricultural, livestock rearing, craft production, and commerce. The frequent absence of men encouraged and conditioned the prominent role of women seen earlier and gave them an edge in the “field of competition” that Lowenthal described.

Specifically, teen pregnancy rates vary widely by race and ethnicity. In 2008, the pregnancy rate for non-Hispanic white teens was 43.3 per 1,000 women 15–19 years of age. Depending on which of the cited sources is used, the pregnancy rate for Hispanic teens was 106.6. For African-American teens it was 117, with a upper level for 2006 of 126 for both. “See page 2 of the Planned Parenthood Fact Sheet, by the Katharine Dexter McCormick Library Planned Parenthood Federation of America  OAH (Office of Adolescent Health) 2013 Trends in Teen Pregnancy and Childbearing.

Researchers who have treated the topic at length have argued that pronatalism in Haiti derives from the need for children as a mechanism of old age security (Murray 1977), from cultural values left over from slavery (Maynard-Tucker 1996), poor healthcare system (Smith 1998), as deriving from insensitive and even rude doctors and nurses (Maternowska 2006); and even deriving from the economic contributions that children make to the household survival strategies (see Schwartz 2009). But few if any have found that males are the cause of low contraceptive use among women.

The exact quote, “Contre toute attente, on constate que les femmes qui participent le plus fréquemment aux sept décisions et qui sont le moins fréquemment exclues de toutes ces décisions sont les femmes du milieu rural et celles qui ont le moins d’instruction. Par contre, les femmes qui travaillent pour de l’argent participent beaucoup plus fréquemment que les autres aux prises de décision.” [EMMUS 2000: 247].

At least part of the reason that gender in Haiti has been misconstrued can be attributed to generalizing developing world gender relations among the middle and upper classes to the working classes living in popular neighborhoods and living largely within the informal sector. The popular classes have dense social networks where the same people know and interact with each other on many levels. The women are in the market together, their children are in school together, they all go to the same funerals, the same weddings and baptisms, their husbands work together, play dominoes and soccer together. Larger families mean geometrically greater number of kinship ties. In the case of urban neighborhoods they live in densely packed neighborhoods. There are few secrets and exponentially greater social censure than in the middle class residential families where a man can begin to abuse, intimidate and eventually graduate to beating his wife in the seclusion and privacy of the family home, with no one to check his behavior and no other men or other women to run to her defense. The Haitian man embedded in the formal sector can then get up the next morning and go to work with people who do not know his wife, go to the gym with an entirely different social set that also do not know her. In other words, he doesn’t have to face up to what he did. Add to this greater male access to jobs and higher male salaries that come with a nascent formal sector; add middle class social stigmas that constrain women sexually but liberate men, meaning that a middle or upper class Haitian woman can destroy herself socially by engaging in a sexual liaison with any man socio-economically beneath her while her husband’s sexual liberty and access to women of all classes means he is less dependent on her emotionally or sexually; add the transition from a traditional agrarian and/or household based economy with its informal legal system and social censure to a  formalized legal system that has not yet been adapted to dealing with gender and abuse of women that occurs privately.  What all this means for the Haitian woman in the formal sector is that that she is more, not less, dependent on a man. She does not even have the lower class Haitian woman’s right to engage in extra-marital liaisons when her husband fails to take care of her financially. Isolated residentially, checked with social stigmas, with no option of a career in the informal economy, and unprotected by a nascent formal justice system, the middle class woman still has the burden of rearing the children but without the extended family and neighbor support characteristic of popular neighborhoods.

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