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Women As Workers In Bead Industries
In Women as Beadmakers I discussed an industry dominated by women. Here is a little exercise to examine women participating in beadmaking.
I chose ten bead industries I know well enough to say something about gender roles within them. The five large and five small industries are sprinkled around the globe (you always have to pardon my bias toward India). They are:
The Large Ones:
- The Ornela factory in Zásada, Czech Republic. This is likely the world's biggest bead factory. It produces "seed beads" for beadwork.
- Purdalpur, India. The largest beadmaking village in the world. They turn out glass beads: furnace wound, mosaic, molded and more recently lamp-wound ones there.
- Ohwim, Ghana. The village with more powder-glass beadmakers than anywhere else, as far as I can tell.
- Cambay (Khambhat), India. The world's oldest beadmaking industry and perhaps the oldest continuous industry of any kind in the world, producing stone beads.
- Rameswarum, India. At the end of "Adam's Bridge," where shell beads are worked, likely the second largest such industry (Mactan, The Philippines, is probably larger).
The small ones:
- Simojóvel, Mexico. An amber bead village with a very limited marketing region.
- Ban Dan Kwan, Thailand. A Mon potter's village where clay beadmaking has caught on in the last decade or two.
- Matanglag, The Philippines. A tiny Ifugao village where one man makes the metal lingling-o, now symbolic of being a northern Luzoner.
- Aboabo, Ghana. A small, spread-out Krobo village with a recent and now nearly closed powder-glass bead industry.
- Franz Glass, Shelton, WA (USA). Patricia and Michael Franz; one of the earliest commercially successful new American glass lamp-wound beadmakers.
These bead industries work in different media. Each makes beads in quite different ways. None of them are quite comparable. Yet they all have basic steps in common. I have conceptualized six of them:
- Securing the raw material. For example, diving for shells, mining stones, digging clay, making glass, crushing glass.
- Shaping the bead into its basic form.
- Finishing the bead (polishing, decorating).
- Piercing the bead (often done as part of step 2).
- Packaging the bead (usually stringing).
- Selling the beads. This is the part of commerce that directly involves the beadmakers. Subsequent distributors and small traders are a different story.
I constructed a grid to place the bead industries against the beadmaking steps. Each cell notes which gender tends to dominate.
M stands for "men"
W for "woman." (Isn't that clever?)
W/M or M/W mean this step is shared about evenly.
This cooperative sharing is scored independently. M(W) means it is mostly man's work, but some women participate. It is scored as man's work. When a cell is blank it means that operation is not performed in that industry. The question mark is to keep me humble.
The "B" is "Ban," Thai for "village."
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The score by industry is as follows:
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Breaking up by beadmaking steps, we have:
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Interesting, huh? Beadmaking is largely man's work, but women participate heavily. There are great differences between what they do and where they work.
In the large industries, men dominate, scoring 23 against the women's 5 and shared work's 1. In the smaller ones, women are much more important (10 men, 8 women, 8 shared). There is more cooperation within the smaller industries, and more gender specialization in the larger ones.
Men dominate the gathering of raw materials (going out of the village or town to secure it) and selling the beads (meeting outsiders). Both are exterior operations. Packaging, which can be done at home, while watching the kids, is the women's department.
Does this surprise you? It doesn't me. Many gender-specific roles cross cultural barriers.
There is a study (if anyone knows it and sends me bibliographic data, I would appreciate it) that took Murdock's list of 186 world cultures and worked out which tasks (weaving, pottery making, cooking, fetching fuel, etc.) were performed by which gender.
There was considerable variation. Cooking was about evenly divided, as I remember. Weaving and pottery making were mostly women's work, but in some societies men did these tasks. The most gender-specific task was drawing water and that was all but exclusively women's work.
I can attest to that. In the house I built in India we used get water from a tap down our little gulli (alley). The water didn't come on until about 4 or 5 p.m. If I needed even a bucket for drinking, cooking or cleaning, the "boys" that hung around the house refused to get it until some time after midnight because the "girls" would laugh at them. So I had to get it myself.
"Grandma" next door, would scold the "boys" for making the "old man" (that's me) do the heavy work. No matter. They would not be seen drawing water. I've only seen a boy do it when the only woman in the house was not physically up to the task.
In this little survey of beadmaking, gathering and making raw materials were the most gender-specific task, followed by packaging and selling. The other tasks were mixed.
The beadmaking world is as gender-slanted as anywhere, perhaps somewhat more so since so much beadmaking is done in traditional societies. It is not in the vanguard of the women's rights movement, but an ordinary slice of life.
Women as Workers in Bead Industries
"But, if only she weren't so dark!"
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