Women's Work and Lives in Rural Greece: Appearances and Realities (review)

One of the important changes in labor trends brought on by economic globalization and development since the 1970s has been the worldwide feminization of the labor market. Defined as the increase of women's participation in the workforce, the feminization of labor also refers to the changing nature of jobs which have been historically performed by women. Those in favor of the development of the world's so-called periphery according to northern European and American standards, view the feminization of the labor force as a necessary evil (see e.g. Jeffrey D. Sachs, The End of Poverty: Economic Possibilities of Our Time, New York, Penguin, 2005). Yet, critics of neoliberalism and prevailing discourses of development discuss the feminization of labor as associated with much greater social and economic insecurity for women. Specifically, feminist scholars have shown that since the 1970s women's work, both in the global north and south, has been increasingly characterized by low wages, low status, temporality, and flexibility. Most notable are the works of Cynthia Enloe (Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Feminist Sense of International Politics, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), Maria Mies (Patriarchy and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the International Division of Labour, London, Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Zed Books, 1986), and Chandra Talpade Mohanty's chapter in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Features (edited by Jackie Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, New York, London: Routledge, 1997).

Lazaridis's work adds to this discussion by bringing together Marxist and feminist critiques of economic development to explore the issue of women's participation in commodity production, local economic development, and changes in gender roles and status in the 1980s in two villages in rural Crete—Nohia and Platanos. Her study builds on data collected over a period of one year (1987-1988) through participant observation, formal and informal interviews with locals, as well as archival research of statistical and demographic data from governmental and state archives. She considers the economic and political changes that have taken place since World War II and especially since Greece's incorporation into the European Community/European Union (EC/EU) in 1981. Here she examines how women's contribution to family income through their involvement with the production of handcrafts and greenhouse gardening has affected existing patriarchal configurations of gender roles and relations vis-à-vis the structures of the family and the state.

In Nohia, women became involved in commodity production as makers of κουκούλια (cocoons), a traditional Cretan handcraft. Local women made these one-of-a-kind handcrafts in their homes, in what local observers viewed as "spare-time"—between performing such expected womanly duties as cleaning their homes, cooking meals, and raising children. These handcrafts were then sold to other women, called "dealers," who distributed them in Athens and other Greek cities as well as abroad.

In Platanos, local women worked in the family's greenhouse production of vegetables grown for export. As a result, they contributed to the local green revolution that was supported by the agricultural policies of the EC/EU in the late 1980s. Local women mostly worked alongside their husbands, taking on locally prescribed gender-appropriate tasks such as planting, weeding, and packaging agricultural commodities, while at the same time caring for their homes and children.

Lazaridis's key argument is that women's involvement in the production of these commodities had contradictory effects on women's lives and their status as mothers, wives, and citizens. While the women were empowered to have some say in how their families allocated the income that they helped generate, their labor efforts did not challenge either their dependent status as homemakers or the long-standing patriarchal constructions of appropriate women's and men's roles. In Lazaridis's view, this was the result of the feminization of the commodities and the work that was involved in producing them, the patriarchical construction of the family by the state, and fluctuating degrees of...