ABSTRACT
Land reform is a means of transforming the economic base of feudal- and clan-based society, but the ideologies of such a society are extremely tenacious. They persist long after the base is removed 39 and continue to play a major role in determining the position of women. As a result, for example, urban families reproduce the same relationships of oppression which have been handed down to them by their rural landowning ancestors and which still persist in the villages. Since these ideologies and relationships are generated and regenerated within the patriarchal extended family, the basic unit of feudal and clan society, it is the family itself which must be dismantled and transformed. In order to perform this extremely complex and sensitive task, the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) decided to tackle the heart of the family: marriage, the chief determinant of a woman’s life.
