ABSTRACT
The most important aspect of recent reassessments of African peasant agriculture is the realisation that shortage of labour is often a greater constraint on production than shortage of land. Much of the rural labor in West Africa is recruited through the non-market relations of household membership, kinship or socio-political rank. The negotiations between women and men for access to each other's labor and for access to the resources in labor which each might control are invariably complex. The labor processes involved in the management of women's enterprises are products of history, of the transformation of gender and class relations. The right of wives to operate own-account enterprises has been widely reported in West Africa. The labor contribution of male members of their households is "erratic" and cannot be built into the management of labor practices on their farms.
