The family and the household of the females in war time Eastern Sri Lanka -- Are they disintegrating or being restructured?

Wars all over the world have left scars, both in the minds and bodies, of people. Generally research on postwar situation tends to overlook gender related dimensions. This research paper attempts to identify some of the gender-related problems. An additional perspective that enters the research is the inquiry on the role of the State or rather the complicity of the State in creating coercive patterns of governance. The point that we drive is that state terrorism or any terrorism has specific patterns of affecting men, women, and children with adverse results in different ways.

The female-headed household is not a new phenomenon in Sri Lanka. Women have been widows, deserted and separated throughout history. They have become the de-facto heads of the family, though kin groups, both maternal and paternal, give them the necessary support and sustenance, both financially and emotionally. What is new to Sri Lanka is the dramatic increase of female-headed households in recent years.

The strict conceptual division of the family and the household as sites of an ideological reproduction and structural functioning unit, respectively, is abandoned in deciphering the process of the female as heads of these institutions. They are conflated for a comprehensive and total analysis without subjecting functions, roles and experiences to fragmentation, which would lead to partial or compartmentalised views. The collapsing is essentially desirable.

Feminists have seen the family as a site of oppression (Barret, 1980: 153, 187, 211). Within the family there are various levels at which the oppression of the women is constructed and various levels at which it takes place. Patriarchy as a system of male domination and control of women by men becomes operationalised through the system of the family and household. The patriarchal household organisation has also an ideological site of femininity construction in the family. This construction assigns the so called feminine qualities such as passivity and emotions connected with motherhood. Women's subordination then takes various forms such as exploitation within the family and household. In the domestic mode of production in the household, women do the household labour and childcare on demand, not fixed by hours or time allocation. The domestic labour debate has documented in detail the types and kinds of the exploitative system to which the women as wives and mothers are subjected to (Waily Seacombe 1974, Maxi ne 1979). The overall sense of responsibility that the women are socialised to accept child care and domesticity have clear exploitative patterns. Servicing and nursing as feminine roles have kept the men out of childcare responsibilities. Besides these, there are other factors which would necessarily subordinate women in the sites of the family and household. The control of women's fertility and sexuality and the economic dependency of the women further, contribute to her secondary status. The performance of wage labour whereby a wife earns supplementary income invariably is controlled by the bread winner-husband due to the ideological base that controls the women as men's possession.

To understand the various dimensions of the women's oppression within the family, one has to successfully divorce the concept of family from a natural pre-given entity and regard it as a social unit. Such a process should also lead us to reject the functionalist and reductionist view of sociologists and Marxist feminists. Marx has argued for the naturalness of the family unit based on the biological differences between men and women (Barret 1980 189). Engel's reworking of the problem of the family brought into focus the private property relations as the base for the creation of gender inequality (Engels 1972). Engels hoped that the family considered the private realm as responsible for the creation of private property. That expectation that gender inequality will cease to exist when the particular relations of property ceases to exist has been proved wrong. This has not happened. Talcott Parson (1956) fitting the family into the functional needs of the contemporary society has also been criticised. Marxist f eminists have seen the family as satisfying the needs of capital - that at the economic level the housewives' labour reproduces the labour power of the worker and at an ideological level it reproduces the relations of dominance for capitalist production (Seccombe 1974).

There is no doubt that women's subordination is constructed within the family through an ideology and her exploitation is realised through the functions she performs as a housewife which in fact is labour. The children are cared for, food is cooked, the house is cleaned. This labour process is couched in an ideological baggage as maternal and motherhood service and sacrifice. This is very much the picture in the working class and peasant households where the women have no power to hire the services of other men and women. Domesticity and motherhood keep her at home with no remunerative jobs. She is mostly dependent economically on the breadwinner. If she does earn a "supplementary wage" the power to control the wages earned by the women usually rests with the breadwinner male. The partnership was formed supposedly on trust, love and romance and of mutual help, reciprocity and of a principle of sharing but usually the burden is unshared. Domestic violence from wife beating to rape do occur within the site of the family/household.

The fact that she is economically provided for leads to the misconception that she is given some sort of protection as well. The construction of femininity as weak, docile and passive has rationalised the protective role as an essential function of the breadwinner husband. She is both socially and physically "protected". The sense of possession by the man becomes the nexus for offering protection. The whole process takes place within the realm of the privacy concept and private area. The space is the home/house. However, the construction of femininity as a social process is not confined to the home alone. The society watches it, exerts pressure on its rules of adherence. Socially acceptable norms of the family then become part of the social process and within these norms, the feminine norms are more oppressive. Silence, obedience, passivity, control of speech, chastity, virginity, fidelity are gendered norms, the violation of which may be met with severe punishments ranging from social ostracism, divorce, de sertions, separation, wife beating.