The Real Power of the Husband/Father

The fact that the expectations in the spouse relationship are unique for men in allowing affective expression but that this is common for women's relationships will be shown to be a central element in women's ability to get their husbands to do things they, but often not their husbands, want. It still remains to be shown, however, that wives getting things they want despite their husband's negative views is due to men being reluctant to use power they have rather than lacking the needed power and further, that this reluctance is connected to the unique character of the marital relationship for men and the potent, if unavowed and at least sometimes unrecognized, resource this provides for their wives.

It could be, of course, that women get the expensive things they want because the husbands simply do not have the power to prevent them from doing so. However, if "power" refers to the ability to control, there can be little question of men having insufficient power to prevent their wives from spending money if they wish to. The fact that husbands do have the power needed to deny their wives' demands is indicated by several types of evidence, including the unanimous views of all the Swahili who were asked about the distribution of family power or were heard to volunteer comments about it.

All of them indicate that the husband and father is the final authority in the family and that although it is desirable that he consult with other affected family members, all family decisions—save those concerning cooking, cleaning, and child care—are properly made by him alone. This applies quite unambiguously to decisions concerning money, since the husband not only controls it as the head of the family but also, in most cases, as the person who

earned it. The latter fact is itself a powerful basis for the power to control the use of the money according to most community members' understandings. Adding this to the generally powerful position of divinely selected family head proclaimed in the holy Koran gives the father's authority a broad base.

Further evidence for the husband and father's power to make family decisions is seen in table 18, which shows that 90 percent of all fathers, mothers, and sons say that fathers are the ones with most influence on important family decisions. Only 63 percent of those in the daughter status make the same response, but inquiry reveals that that relatively low figure is due to several of the young, unmarried women in the sample whose fathers are dead having brothers (in the table, the latter are counted as in the son status) who act toward the women as fathers do when they are alive. The table is unambiguous in indicating that Swahili of both sexes say that fathers are powerful, and anyone who has discussed family relations with members of this community would agree that this view is nearly universally held. Still, attributing power to fathers may be a token that is not also a guide, to use the concept developed in chapter 6. It could be that saying fathers are powerful is the accepted and proper statement but that fathers have no real ability to get anyone to do anything the person does not personally want to do.

In fact, this is not so. The statements about fathers' and husbands' power do reflect social reality in the sense that husbands and fathers rarely fail when they actually exercise their power. This is particularly true as concerns their wives and, slightly less, their daughters, but least often so as concerns their sons. Even in dealings with the son, however, when the father/husband makes a decision and insists on it, that decision quite often determines what happens. Decisions concerning wives are even more uniformly successfully implemented, in large part because, unlike sons, wives do not usually eventually attain financial independence.

One man, for example, told his wife on their marriage that she was to associate with no one: not her relatives, not her neighbors, no one. Limiting women's associations with men to their husbands and close kin is, of course, universally supported by members of the Swahili group, but this husband was forbidding his wife to associate with anyone regardless of sex and without respect to relationship. The wife was said to be very miserable about her husband's decision, but she dutifully followed it throughout their long marriage. Only after his death did she begin to involve herself in the usual round of visiting central to the lives of all other wives. No one who told me this story, and several people did, thought the husband's restricting of his wife's activity was commendable, but it was equally clear that everyone understood that it was within his rights.

As a further approach to the issue of men's power, I showed the table, presented here as table 18, to informants of both sexes including some who had told me in general about, or who had cited instances of, women spending

money in ways that were at the limit of their husband's ability to spend—or beyond it. After discussing the table's meaning with the informants, I asked them to explain how it was that men often gave in to their wives' demands for costly things when he was chosen by most informants as being the one with "most influence on decisions." Both men and women said there was no inconsistency between the husband/fathers having the most influence on decisions and important sums of money nevertheless being spent on things they did not support. If the husbands had insisted on smaller weddings, less expensive clothing, or less jewelry, then, the informants said, that is what would have been. In other words, men have power, but they choose to allow their wives to do things they want to do even if the men do not themselves agree with the wives about the desirability of those things.

This leaves little doubt that consistent with cultural understandings of their general power, husbands do actually have the ability to block their wives' access to the funds the wives seek for the things needed for full participation in the women's groups. The husbands, however, do not always or, even, frequently use that ability. In fact, although men have the cultural resources needed to control their wives' behavior, actually doing so requires an additional resource, emotional independence from the wife.