ABSTRACT

This chapter examines each arena of gendered work and potential economic agency. It considers village economic activities based on the land and introduces the farming cycle and associated religious activities. The chapter presents specific aspects of the cycle: paddy farming, upland rice farming, and the growing of other crops and animals. For each of the activities, it describes the pre-1975 practices and the division of labor by gender and considers how practices and division of labor changed through socialism and into early economic liberalization. Workers earned work points for all tasks in collective paddy farming, but not all village cooperatives awarded equal work points to women and men for their respective contributions. During the socialist period and more, some upland areas that initially had low population densities became too densely populated to sustain shifting cultivation. Women grew crops other than rice in upland fields, gardens, and orchards, and they bartered or sold some of the surplus.