Wives' Power De Nihilo: Social Structure's Effects Independent from Culture

Chapter 10 showed that almost every understanding concerning Swahili spouse relations holds that wives are subordinate to their husbands and must accept their decisions. Almost everyone I talked to regardless of sex said that women are subject to the authority of men because it is part of God's plan as revealed in the Koran. In fact, those men who do exercise this divinely commanded authority over their wives in ways that deny them the expensive ceremonies and finery most want appear to be entirely successful in doing so. These men are not negatively evaluated by men or women.

And yet many women actually do spend very considerable sums of money in ways their husbands say they disapprove. The women's expenditures, the men say, are the single most important factor in the Swahili being less prosperous than the Arabs and Indians among whom they live in Old Town.

Without repeating the argument and evidence, it is enough to say that the central issue is why men choose not to exercise their very real power when dealing with their wives' wishes to use money in ways the men do not approve

and from which, in fact, the men derive little direct benefit. The answer to this, the evidence indicates, is to be found in social relations—not just those between husbands and wives but the various relationships involving men and involving women.

Examination of men's relationships shows that intimacy and emotional support are not readily available to them in any relationship other than that with the wife. Expectations in the broad "man" status make emotional warmth and support difficult to give and to receive in almost every relationship involving men save that between spouses. For women, however, many relationships have expectations that encourage warmth and support, so that for them the spouse relationship is only one source among many.

The men's emotional dependence on the spouse relationship together with the women's relative independence gives the wife a source of power she need not admit, or even recognize, in order to use. Her unhappiness resulting from not getting what she wants is transformed, more or less without her willing it, into her withdrawing emotional support from the husband who frustrated her wishes. For most husbands, this leads to serious efforts to avoid wifely unhappiness. The women need not admit, even to themselves, that their husbands are emotionally dependent on them. All they have to do is act as they feel—and doing this is an expectation of the status "woman"—to increase the likelihood that their husbands will give them what they want. For present purposes, what is important about this source of wives' power is that it demonstrates a means whereby a community's social structure affects community members in ways independent of, in fact, contrary to, the directly concerned elements of culture.

In considering Swahili medical care, it was seen that understandings can and do affect community members, including those who do not share them. Here we see behavior affected in ways that do not depend on anyone sharing understandings that produce the effect seen and without anyone needing to acknowledge, or know about, the basis for what is happening. There is no understanding, certainly not one people admit, holding women have the ability to use their husbands' money as the women wish regardless of their husbands' views. Yet they do.