Women and Work in Zimbabwe, c.1800–2000

Abstract

This paper looks at the working lives of women in Zimbabwe and how these have shifted and changed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. To do so, official labor records, census and labor surveys are augmented with qualitative data about the labor relations women performed outside of the formal economy. Key here will be exploring female contributions to the informal labor economy, subsistence or peasant agriculture, and their reproductive and household labor. In order to fully assess women’s participation in the economy of the region, attention will also be paid to the migrant labor system in southern Africa and how women have responded to this, participated in it, and pursued their own agency within this system. The paper adopts wider conceptual approaches, including a broader definition of labor and using the methodology and the taxonomy of labor relations developed at the International Institute of Social History for the study of shifts and continuities in labor and labor relations across time and space at a global scale. The paper makes the argument that social structure and gender relations present in African societies during the late 1800s informed responses to colonialism, not necessarily the other way around. These relations continued to influenced how women interacted with the wage labor economy and informal economy after independence and into the twenty-first century.