PATRIARCHY AND CHANGING FAMILY STRATEGIESRural society in the Dominican Republic, 1870-19301

Michiel BaudLatin American StudiesUniversity of Leiden

Introduction

Discussions on the history of family strategies have had an overtly economic emphasis. They have tried to come to grips with the ways by which usually poor individuals and families have tried to survive in a changing world (Moen and Wethington1992; Moch et al. 1987). The concept of family strategy, or `family adaptive strategy' was used to show the active role offamilies in refraiming external constraints and opportunities and, thus, in directing social and economic change on a micro level (Schmink 1984; Hareven 1990). Whether the central concept has been `survival', `adaptation' or `agency', the underlying query concerned the ways poor people tried to guarantee their social and economic survival.

This general query has been questioned from two perspectives. First there were observers who stressed what we might call the `cultural' content of these strategies. One of the doyens of family history, Tamara Hareven (1991, p. 117), has recently drawn attention to the interaction of economic exigencies and cultural values. She wrote: "The most importantcontribution of recent research has been to emphasize the significance of cultural values both of the dominant culture and of the family's own culture in guiding family strategies".There is no doubt that these values may sometimes be in conflict with more direct economic needs of the family. Secondly, many people have emphasized that the concept of family strategy must not close our eyes for the differences ofpower and the diverging interests of the various members within the family. Although we may suppose that families as a

1 This article has greatly benefitted from the comments on earlierversions by Asunción Lavrin and Susana Menéndez. The normal disclaimersapply.

whole have strategies, it is no less clear that individual family members have their own interests and goals, which may not always be perfectly compatible with those of the family (Dwyer and Bruce 1988; Kabeer, 1994; Young 1978; Pessar 1982).This is the core problem of the family strategy concept. Can we relate the strategies of the family to those of its individual members, and to what extent can we still speak of family strategies as a result?

However, there is a third point that has received much less attention. Whatever our definition of strategy may be, there is no doubt that it has important ideological connotati-ons. The origins of the term are to be found, after all, in the realms of warfare and politics. Family strategies should be conceived as the result of ideology no less than of economic or material factors. The analysis of the goals and objectives of family strategies - and when the concept of `strategy' is used, there is no escape from including these goals and objectives in our analysis - should take into account their cultural-specific direction. Families and households are constructions of the human mind. Barret and McIntosh (cited in: Stolcke 1991, p. 69) state: "[The family] is not only an economic unit, not merely a kinship structure; it is also an ideological configuration with resonance far beyond these narrow definitions". These `ideologies of familism', as Michelle Barret (1980, chapter 6) has called them, have had great, if not determining influence on family strategies (also: Ortner 1989-90, 69). What family members think about themselves and how they are viewed by `outsiders' is essential to our understanding of the family, and thus of prime importance in assessing family strategies. What people aim for, how they try to reach their goals and in what terms they couch them are all factors of this ideological construction of the meaning of the family.

These constructions are `cultural' in the sense that theyshow some over-arching, slowly changing characteristics. An appropriate example of this may be the so-called honor-shame complex which has been considered as central to Mediterranean and Latin American cultures (Pitt-Rivers, 1954; Peristiany 1966). But they are also `historical'. They are adapted, negotiated and contested according to historical change in

society (Mohammed 1995). There is sufficient literature now tobe able to state that ideologies of familism were used and manipulated to serve the development of capitalist relations of production and the development of the modern nation-state. Social relationships were organized through specific and dominant meanings and values. Using this idea Verena Stolcke (1991) has written an influential article on the exploitation of family morality in Brazilian plantations. She tried to showhow planters organized their strategies of accumulation in thenineteenth century by taking advantage of the nuclear family and the patriarchal ideology which surrounded it. Although herargument is well-documented and eloquent, her emphasis on the manipulation of family ideologies may be too simple. Neither the ideology of the family nor its practice and manipulation are unambiguous. As Sherry Ortner has stressed, no society or culture is totally consistent. She draws attention to the multiplicity of logics, practices and discourses (Ortner 1989-90, pp. 44-45; also: Ortner and Whitehead 1981). The question then becomes when certain ideologies became hegemonic, what this hegemony meant in daily practice and how it was reproduced or contested in the formulation and practice of family strategies.

In this article I will try to shed some light on this issue, using a historical case study of a rural village in theDominican Republic as point of departure. I will focus on the importance of patriarchal ideologies for class and gender relations.i It will be argued that the analysis of family strategies should take into account the context of class relations in the countryside and the influence of hegemonic ideologies on the gender relations within rural families. These factors made for specific strategies of rural families, but at the same time for diverging and often contradictory attitudes between individual family members.

Family labor and tobacco cultivation in the Dominican RepublicThe northern valley of the Dominican Republic, usually called the Cibao, has always been an agricultural region. Peasant families of Spanish and mixed descent started already in the colonial period to grow tobacco which was sold to foreign traders. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century,

the major part of the population was in one way or another involucrated in the cultivation, processing and commercialization of tobacco. This did not change with the rapid economic transformation undergone by the country in the second half of the nineteenth century. Peasant agriculture remained the basis of the export-oriented economic developmentof the region in a new context (Baud, 1995; San Miguel 1987). The new opportunities presented by the world market induced some wealthier families to buy extensive pieces of (cheap) land. In this way a new class of relatively large land-owners was created. These landowners became a dominant factor in the region in the first decades of the twentieth century, but theylacked the means to attract labor from outside and therefore depended on the peasantry as providers of cheap labor.

The organization of peasant agriculture depended on the two productive cycles of food crop and tobacco cultivation. Tobacco was usually sown during the rainy period in the last two months of the year, but peasant producers might sow tobacco during any period of the year which promised prolongedrains. The cultivation of food crops required permanent atten-tion. Plantains and yuca (cassava) could render fruits the entire year and were the favored staple crops of the rural population. The productive cycles of tobacco and food crops thus existed side by side. Traditionally, they were not - as is the case today - strictly separated. Tobacco and food cropswere usually cultivated on the same land. When the tobacco wassown, it was the normal procedure to intercrop it with staple crops, such as corn, yuca and beans. This intercropping was strongly criticized by agrarian advisers and tobacco merchants, but it was an essential element of the subsistence economy and continued until the 1960s. Women and children played an important role in the provision of food and a distinct preference therefore existed for cultivating food crops close to the house.

Tobacco was always grown on recently cleared land. Until well into the twentieth century, agriculture in the Cibao would start with the slash-and-burn clearing of a patch of virgin land, the tala y tumba in local jargon. The trees were cutdown and the underbrush was burnt. The trees which were cut down during this operation produced the wood to make fences,

necessary to protect the crops against roaming animals. The clearing of the conuco was quite a labor-intensive way of preparing land. However, the trees which were cut down to clear a conuco fulfilled many functions in the peasant household. Apart from being essential for protecting the crop,they provided wood to build houses and firewood to cook with. Furthermore, the clearing of land was done in the dead season,between August and November, when there was little agricultural work to do. Another advantage was that weed control was hardly necessary on recently cleared land. This saved much labor in the busy period when the tobacco was on the field. In addition, it may be assumed that peasant men liked the rough and rewarding work of clearing a conuco. It affirmed their manhood and was an opportunity to show the world their masculine responsibility of taking care of their family (Ortega 1922). This concurs with Louise Fresco's (1986,p. 134) discussion of farming practices in Zaire, where women (farmers) observe that "if a man wants to be nice to his wife,he opens up a new field for her".

Family labor alone was often insufficient to cope with the simultaneous work involved in the harvest and this period was therefore the occasion to organize communal labor gangs, Juntas gratuitas or Juntas de vecinos (sometimes the word convite was also used). We do not know when the peasant producers started to use this institution of reciprocal labor exchange, but it already existed in the beginning of the nineteenth century (Place 1849, p. 189). It seems to have been a logical answer to the periodical need for extra labor in the money-scarce peasant economy (Erasmus 1956). It was part of a survival strategy in which individual peasant households linked their fate with others. Apart from the economic convenience of such a system, it was a moment when networks of friendship and social obligation were reaffirmed and consolidated.

The cultivation of food crops was essential for the peasant economy. For peasant families they were just as important as the tobacco crop. It guaranteed their reproducti-on and decreased their dependence on an unpredictable market. The importance of food crops was the explanation for the alternating processes of market participation and withdrawal which has been so characteristic for the history of peasant

production (Wolf 1955). Peasant households used the income provided by the tobacco to buy consumer goods. Sometimes it allowed them to obtain credit, but most families were not dependent on the selling of tobacco. We may rightly doubt whether the cultivation of tobacco was the center around whichtheir agricultural cycle revolved. As a consequence, the fortune of the peasant producers depended not so much on the tobacco market, as on the success or failure of the harvest offood crops. It may be significant that older peasants hardly recall years of extremely low tobacco prices, while they remember very accurately the years in which food shortages occurred.

Family labor was also used in the processing of tobacco. Cultivators often kept their best tobacco to themselves and rolled their own cigars, which they smoked and sometimes sold in retail. The production of andullos, roles of pressed tobacco,was an artesanal activity, complementary to the agricultural work. When market prices went down, rural families extended this activity. They kept a larger part of their tobacco to themselves and increased the amount of tobacco they processed themselves (Baud 1995, pp. 86-88).

In the first decades of the twentieth century new wage-earning opportunities arose. Many tobacco exporting firms built warehouses in the main production areas and started to do the selection and processing of tobacco there. These activities provided peasant families with the possibility to earn extra income. Although men were involved in some of the tasks, women formed the main labor force. It is not readily clear whether this was a conscious policy on the part of the exporting firms or a result of the logic of peasant production. In any case, during the harvest season many peasant women worked in the rural warehouses earning some extra money for their household. Thus, agriculture was embedded in an intricate mosaic of activities in which the labor of all members of the family was used.

Families and households in the Dominican countrysideWe can say that children formed the axis of the family structure in the Cibao. Most of the rural marriages were common law (amancebado) but even when confirmed by the law or

the church, they only became a social reality with the advent of children. At that moment the young couple decided to construct a house and start a new household (also: Hoetink 1982, pp. 193-205). Some couples stayed with the parents of one of them, but this was considered a transitory stage. Marriages could be arranged in three ways. Sometimes the parents chose a suitable candidate and arranged a marriage. Some old peasants tell that they could not marry the person they were in love with, but married the person favored by their parents. This was the clearest indication of the authority parents traditionally exercised in rural society. The second form was that the marriage was decided on by mutualconsent between the prospective husband and wife and their respective parents. This was the ideal way of starting a family and caused least tension. It often took place in the form of a so-called fuga (`flight').ii It almost always happenedwith the consent of the prospective bride and her parents. This was the most frequently occurring way to start a family and was often seen as the typical start of rural `marriages'. A report of 1922 observed: "Almost always pregnancy or flight (la fuga) precede matrimonies, and it may surely be said that parents consent in their children living together unmarried (elamancebamiento) as something very natural, in which case the unmarried couple is considered really married, because the consent of the parents or the word given to them is respected"(Ortega 1922, p. 139). The third way was the consumation of marriage by two youngsters without the explicit consent or against the wish of their parents. Its most obvious consequence was a precarious financial and material starting point of the newly wed, who could not fall back on the supportof their respective families.

In principle the new family constituted an independent household, but under normal circumstances it existed within a broader framework based on kinship and reciprocity. The organization of the communal labor mentioned above was based on bonds of kinship and trust. The reproduction of these bondswas not self-evident but depended on their continued usefulness. When marriages broke up, existing patterns of reciprocity and loyalty were also shattered. In these circumstances, women fell back on their own kinship group,

often reintegrating - with their children - into the parental household. Many men established a second household with another woman while still married. This was a frequent cause for divorce. In such situations, the man normally went to livewith this second woman. The independent female-headed household which is so often mentioned as characteristic for the Caribbean was practically non-existant in the Cibao countryside. Socially and economically it was not feasible fora woman to have an independent household with her children (compare: Chant 1985). The only things coming near to it, werethe second households some men established. In these circumstances the woman lived alone with her children to be visited by a man only infrequently. The other case was when the households were temporarily run by women while their men were away doing wage-labor.

The relative absence of female-headed households in the Dominican countryside may be taken as a clear sign of the patriarchal control reigning there. In this respect, Dominicanfamily structure mirrors a more general Latin American patternin which there is a clear and unequivocal link between the organization of the family and male domination. Elizabeth Jelin (1990, p. 2) for instance writes: "In Latin American cultural tradition, the subordination of women is anchored to the strongly cohesive family group that constitutes the base of the whole system of social relations".iii A woman whom I interviewed in the Cibao implicitly made the same link. When Iasked her about the importance and role of the family in peasant society, she said: "The families have much importance for someone. When a father and a mother make a family, they are respected by the children. And, it does not matter if it is the father, it may also be the brother, but the minors haveto respect him". What she was implying here, was that male authority was central to the family institution. When the father was not present, another man had to take his place in order to exercise the male authority.

The principal obligation of men was to take care of the material well-being of the members of his family. Whether he earned a living as peasant or wage laborer he had to provide his family with food and shelter. Women also played an important (sometimes the most important) role in the material

reproduction of the family, but ideologically this was the responsibility of the men. In exchange they could dominate thelives of their women and children, just as they themselves were dominated by the merchants and landowners.

It is clear that access to labor was an important aspect of rural family organization. Access to sufficient labor to take care of agriculture was essential to peasant agriculture.More family labor meant more cultivated land and could lead tomore prosperity. Control over labor became more important withthe increasing dominance of the market. It was common for men to have multiple families and having many children was considered an asset. Male dominance depended on his control over the labor of the members of his family. His ability to deploy that labor determined the possibilities for accumu-lation (for an interesting case-study: Reinhardt 1988, esp. pp. 56-60). According to Bray (1983, p. 93), control over labor was an important factor of accumulation in peasant agriculture in the Cibao in this period, which led to increased differentiation among the peasantry: "Men strived for the accumulation of wives and children when their materialresources permitted it". This must have been the background ofthe large number of children produced by richer cultivators. My research shows that most men had children with more than one woman. Several men had more than twenty living children.

The need to control family labor may have been the principal factor in the reproduction of patriarchal tendenciesin a period of rapid transformation of rural society. Childrenwere kept under close control until an advanced age. Older menand women tell that they `no pertenecían', that they had no control over their own lives. Grasmuck and Pessar (1991, pp. 140ff) suggest that this was a way of maintaining control overthe labor of the children. It postponed the moment when their labor had to be shared with another household (for a similar analysis: Worobec 1991). Patriarchal control over the children(and women) was firmly entrenched. This was not a result of some traditional peasant way of life, but responded to the specific combination of subsistence production and the production of tobacco for the market. It became even more important in a period when new wage labor opportunities drew men away from the peasant household. The construction of two

railways in the region between 1880 and 1910 employed hundredsof men who left their families for several months each year. This could only continue because women and children took care of the agricultural production.

Peasants and patrons in the tobacco economyOne of the most remarkable aspects of rural society in the Cibao region was the close co-existence of the different classes. Although cultural and socially the landowners and thepeasantry were far apart, no clear ethnic differences existed between them. This made the northern tobacco region different from the southern part of the country, where racial and ethnicfactors played a much more significant role (Baud 1996; Millan1993).iv In the Cibao countryside the classes lived side by side and were in regular, sometimes quite intensive, contact with each other. Elite children often entertained friendships with age-peers within the peasantry, which could be the base for a life-long mutual esteem between members of the two classes. Adult men from different social classes shared their interest in agriculture, cock-fights and drinking. Social distinctions were thus mitigated by physical proximity and thesharing of the same rural environment. It is this ambiguity which shaped the relations between elite and peasantry. It showed itself most clearly in the long-lasting paternalist interdependence between the two groups.

Sexual relations between elite men and peasant girls werenot uncommon. In spite of the social differences between the classes, it was generally accepted that men from the elite hadsexual relations with women of lower social status. Indeed, itmay be argued that this acceptance was a direct consequence ofthese social differences and the patriarchal ideology in whichthey were embedded. Where the female members of elite society were kept under close watch and the virginity of the daughterswas jealously guarded, male adolescents were allowed to acquire sexual experience with girls of poor families. Not only in adolescence, but also at a later age, sexual relationships outside marriage were easily accepted within therural elite. This behavior was a clear example of the male-centred ideology which pervaded Dominican society. The idea that men could have many sexual relations was also accepted in

peasant society. Within elite ideology it was complemented by a class-based sense of superiority towards the poor. Followingthe classic path of Latin American elite families to maintain the property intact the elite married only its equals (Balmori,1984; Wilson 1982). It is clarifying to see the frequency of the marriages between members of rich families. For instance, in the beginning of the twentieth century, two of the most influential families of the region were related by three marriages (Baud 1995, p. 121).

Peasants and landowners were linked to each other by a complex scala of rights and obligations and patron-client relations proliferated in Cibao rural society. The mutual dependency and vertical bonds between the rural elite and the peasantry originated in the insecure political situation of the nineteenth-century Dominican Republic. The authority of political leaders depended on the loyalty and support of the peasant population. On the other hand, peasant cultivators needed protection against the constant incursions on their property and the abuses to which they were exposed. One of theprincipal threats to peasant society was the forced recruitment of men. The peasants tried to secure protection byentering into vertical relationships with the elite.v An influential patron could avoid expropriation or involuntary recruitment. The paradox was, of course, that they were expected to fight for their patron when the latter himself gotmixed up in political trouble.

When the agrarian export economy of the Cibao expanded around the turn of the century, entreprising landowners extended and modified the existing system of patronage and used it to further their commercial interests. Patron-client relations in the twentieth-century Cibao became more extensivewith the commercialization of Cibao agriculture. Instead of eradicating personal and `pre-capitalist' relations of production, the market economy gave new significance to compadrazgo relations and other systems of personal loyalty. Itwas sometimes even instrumental in creating them (Equipo de Investigación Socioeconómica 1979, pp. 33-36). Most landownersdid not try to expel the small-holding peasantry from the agricultural land. In fact they actively stimulated peasant agriculture on their land contrary, for instance, to what

happened in the case of the agregados in the nineteenth-centuryPuerto Rican coffee sector (Bergad 1983). This was a direct result of the fact that local landowners lacked sufficient capital and labor to bring their land under cultivation. Especially the absence of a reliable labor force prevented a rapid expansion of large-scale commercial agriculture. Local entrepreneurs could not recruit peasant labor by extra-economic coercion and lacked the funds to attract laborers with high wages. They found a (temporary) solution by integrating peasant production into the exploitation of their property. Not able to clear and cultivate their landed properties themselves, they allowed landless peasant families to squat on their land. We see a simultaneous development and an integration of two systems of agricultural organization. Nascent capitalist agriculture took advantage of the presence of peasant producers in various ways. First of all, through their slash-and-burn agriculture, the peasant producers were instrumental in clearing the land. In the second place, members of the peasant families provided a stable, be it restricted, source of wage labor. Finally, they were the producers of the tobacco which was the mainstay of commercial activity in the region.

It was only in the course of the 1920s that increasing state intervention and the modernizing of the export trade brought fundamental changes in the situation of the small-scale cultivators, who owned land. Especially the law of 1920,which made the registration of land obligatory, increased the gap between the elite and the peasant population. Registrationwas a costly affair and many poor landowners could do nothing else than to hand over part of their land in compensation for the costs of surveying their property. In this way they lost the surplus of land which had been an important element of their agricultural organization. At the same time, the costs of land registration induced the larger landowners to increasethe returns on their properties. They intensified their agricultural activities and started to occupy more land. As a consequence, from the late 1920s onwards, the peasantry had topay for access to land. In that period share-cropping arrangements became the rule, so much so that tobacco production was considered a typical share-cropping sector

(Crouch 1981, pp. 35-36).However, the paternalist ties did not disappear with the

agricultural transformation of the region. This was very clearin the squatting arrangements between landowners and peasant producers. To obtain access to land, the producers were dependent on the benevolence of the landowners. Old peasants often tell that until the 1920s, the landowners demanded no compensation for the use of a patch of land. A cultivator would simply go to one of the landowners and he was normally assigned a piece of land. As long as the applicant was `decente' and `cristiano', permission to clear a conuco was never refused. It was this last addition that points at the dormant inequality of power in these squatting arrangements. The landowners presented their permission as an act of individual generosity and so reinforced vertical, paternalist ties between themselves and the peasant. Squatting on someone's land also implied a range of obligations for the peasants. They were expected to offer their labor to the landowner, sell their tobaco to him and show obedience to his family. The more authoritarian landlord even interfered with the private lives of `his' peasants, meddled in the education of their children, arranged or at least advised on their marriages and censured inappropriate conduct of individuals. The dependent peasant producers were expected to reconfirm their loyalty regularly. When they were `sent for' by their patron they had to go, or at least send a son. The essence of the social dominance of the rural elite was that it was informal and quite unpredictable. The benevolence and protection of the patron could turn into rage and the withdrawing of favors at any time (compare: Jiménez 1989, pp. 126-29).

The substitution of squatting by sharecropping was an important factor in the introduction of capitalist relations of production in the countryside. Still, peasant producers continued to judge their relationship with the landowners fromthe personal perspective. Just as `giving' pesos was the rural description of credit, so do peasant producers often indicate sharecropping as `working with' a certain landowner. Today, most cultivators condemn the sharecropping as a system of exploitation. At the same time, they often borrow words and

phrases from political discourse and legislation. Talking about their own experiences, they tend to stress the personal characteristics of the different landowners. The willingness to help the sharecropper's families in moments of distress wasoften perceived as more important than the structural exploitation to which they were exposed. Authoritarian and exploitative landowners were also remembered for their generosity, buying a coffin for a poor widow, giving milk to children or buying medicine for a destitute family. Landownerswho did not help old tenants who had been working their land for their entire lives were severely criticized.

The patriarchal relationships thus worked two ways. It secured sufficient labor force and support for the patron. The peasant population it provided with security and a potential safety net in difficult times. Most importantly, landowners could give access to land and credit. The political and economic vulnerability of peasant production rendered protection and security in the shadow of a powerful member of rural society an important asset. Both parties involved thus had an interest in continuing these relations. In his study onthe relationship between landowners and day-laborers in the northern mountain region of the Dominican Republic, David Bray(1983, p. 190) notes: "It is in the interest of both workers and owners to establish informal understandings that the worker will do a particular job each year." The same logic applied to the relationship between tobacco cultivators and merchants. Peasants expected protection and a certain loyalty from the tobacco merchants. The latter had a moral obligation that even in years of a bad quality harvest they would continue to buy the crop for reasonable prices. On the other hand, for the peasant producers the idea of a `compromiso' implied an almost sacred obligation to comply with the implicit and explicit requirements of a trust relationship.

Patriarchy and classThe consequences of the patriarchal ideology in the Cibao countryside was a strict set of rules for `decent' behavior. Respect should be shows by younger to elder, by female to male, by poor to rich (Gudeman 1972, p. 55). It is significantthat the unwritten codes of daily behavior for the subordinate

groups showed great similarities. Peasants with their landlords, women with their men, children with their parents, were not supposed to initiate a conversation in public, could not show curiosity and had to `civilize' their language. In nineteenth-century rural society children were expected to kneel down alongside the road and wait for the benediction of an adult. Women had to obey the whims of their men. Peasants had to approach the large landowners as father figures, all-knowing in their advice and always to be respected. In exchange they received protection from the outside world, helpin difficult times and, in some cases, a fraternity transcen-ding class differences, coming close to friendship. They understood male vices and weaknesses and therefore licensed irresponsible behavior, sexual adventures and male jealousies and fighting.

On the other hand, rural paternalism was far from uncontested. Peasant producers were all too aware of the conflicts of interests between them and the local power-holders. Many peasants tell stories about illicit land usurpations by local potentates. Numerous examples exist of conflicts about the demarcation or division of land. This kindof conflicts intensified after land had acquired unprecedentedvalues and the squatting relations were replaced by sharecropping systems, which were very unfavorable for the peasantry. Many peasant producers confirm that this development meant a crucial deterioration in the conditions ofpeasant agriculture. Its conditions formed a continuous field of negotiation. The balance between rights and obligations depended on the outcome of these negotiations and was always liable to change. The squatting arrangements in the first stage of agricultural development in the region were the consequence of the `strong' negotiation position of the peasantry, while the introduction of sharecropping demonstra-ted the increasing dominance of the larger landowners.

On basis of `hidden transcripts' (Scott 1990), the peasantry tried to turn things as much as possible in its favor. The continuous commentaries about the behavior of patrons in peasant discourse were an indication of the peasantry's attentive scrutiny of patron-client relations in which they were involved.vi Yet, the patriarchal authority of

the landowner was hardly defied openly. Open opposition to thelandowning class or militant defense of acquired rights seem to have been absent in the region.vii Their apparent subservient attitude towards the rural elite allowed them to continue their system of family farming in which all members of the family participated. In addition, peasants may add, personal relations with the landowner could mitigate the most extreme consequences of capitalism and poverty in the countryside.

This peasant acquiescence may also be explained by the fact that respect for patriarchal relations had a strong base within peasant society. The ideology of male dominance pervaded all spheres of rural society. Peasant men also forgedbonds based on a common ideology of patriarchal domination. The organization of the communal labor in the form of Juntas wasan affair between males. They agreed on the work to do and thetime schedule. They self-evidently included their wives and children in these plans. They also reaffirmed male chauvinist ideology among themselves in their complaining of female behavior, bragging at their escapades and conquests, talking cock-fights or baseball and spending money on drinks and gambling. However, it should be stressed that this male attitude which is normally referred to as machismo not only implied the domination of women, but also rivalry among men (Wolf and Hansen 1972, p. 224). Although patriarchal ideology in the Dominican countryside tended to strengthen the bonds between men, it also imposed a strong hierarchy within male society. Differences in status or economic resources played animportant role in daily relationships among rural men.

A last interesting feature of patron-client and patriarchal relations was that they also reproduced a degree of autonomy among the subordinate group. They were based on the implicit idea that unequal social spheres existed, which were clearly separate. This was very clear in the relations between landowners and the peasantry. Patron-client relations implicitly confirmed the existence of a separate peasant society which had its own logic and was outside the control ofthe landowners. The peasantry also tended to emphasize these distinctions in daily life, as though aware of their importance in the protection of the autonomy of peasant

society. This led to a very formal acting out of social hierarchy. People who were considered socially superior were approached with a great deal of deference by the peasantry. They were addressed with the honorary title `don' or `doña' and treated with great courtesy. Unexpected visitors were often received with a `reverence' and treated with great politeness and hospitality. It was considered the duty of the housewife to offer something to drink or eat to the visitor.

Eduardo García Tamayo (1984, pp. 46-7) considers such an attitude, which is often accompanied by self-denigrating references to peasant society, part of the survival strategy of the peasant population. His analysis coincides with the ideas of Pitt-Rivers, who has stressed the double edge in the extreme respect shown to visitors by the peasantry. To act respectfully and hospitably towards strangers was part of rural culture. "[Y]et", writes Pitt-Rivers (1954, p. 27), "itsanalysis would not be complete if one were not to point out that it is also a means whereby the community defends itself against outside interference". Peasant producers usually eschewed open confrontation. An appearance of submissiveness and acceptance was often much more effective in safeguarding some degree of autonomy of peasant society.viii The submissive attitude towards representatives of the outside world should also be considered a method to fence off peasant society. The emphasis on social distinctions between the peasantry and the rural elite thus enabled the peasant producers to protect specific elements of their social and cultural organization and to avoid outside interference.

The most important conclusion we can draw from the foregoing is that patriarchal ideologies were shared by peasants and elite members alike. Patriarchal dominance was the one over-arching hegemonic ideology in rural society. Between the classes this led to strong clientelistic relationswhich had a long history, but were reinforced with the capitalist development in the region in the first decades of the twentieth century. On the other hand, they were never uncontested and sometimes even instrumental in creating counter tendencies and resistance.

Patriarchy and family strategies

What does this mean for the concept of family or household strategies? What remains of the concept of strategy when we have to reject the supposed homogeneity of the household and focus, on the contrary, on the ideology of masculine domination?ix Of course, these questions are too broad to answer here. But two points may be mentioned. First, there must be something in these units which enables them to attractand hold onto their individual members. Secondly, families andhouseholds act sometimes as units, and therefore have, in other words, strategies. The emphasis in this last instance ison `sometimes'. The crucial question is when and on what issues these family strategies express themselves.

The problem is that these strategies are couched in cultural and ideological terms, which usually overestimate thecohesion of the family. This was (and still largely is) very clear in the Dominican Republic. There is no doubt that the patriarchal ideology was hegemonic to the extent that many women also tended to confirm its basic tenets. Just as their husbands in general accepted the terms of the clientelistic relations which determine their working lives, many rural women repeat (elements of) the prevailing patriarchal ideology. But in both cases, daily practice shows a great dealless submission than these ideologies may want us to believe. There is a lot of what Deniz Kandiyoti (1988) has called `patriarchal bargaining' going on, which points at the continuous negotiations taking place within a set of concrete constraints (for a critical perspective: Liu 1994). I believe that we need to analyze the strategic behavior of individual family members and families on these two levels. On the general level of prevailing hegemonic ideology and on the level of daily contestation.

The patriarchal value system of the Dominican peasantry may be considered a value system which gave coherence to the behavior of men and women belonging to different social classes. It gave the landowning and mercantile elite an opportunity to dispose of agricultural products and local wagelabor without having to resort to economic or extra-economic coercion. For the peasant men it embodied the `moral' pact with the rural elite. As such, it symbolized the `moral economy' of the Dominican countryside, it guaranteed the

material survival of themselves and their families and, last but not least, it confirmed their dominant position as men within peasant society. In other words, the acceptance of their subordinate position vis-à-vis de rural elite, at the same time secured their own dominance vis-à-vis their wives and children.

The same logic applied, in a sense, to the women. By accepting male dominance they showed their respectability and thus acquired the right to act autonomously within their own territory, that is the female world, and more specifically, the household. I will try to shed some light on the contradictions of these female strategies using the life story- and its interpretation - as told to me by a forty-years-old peasant woman, mother of five daughters.x Talking about her marriage with a man almost twenty years older than herself, she told:

"Because after a woman has linked her fate to a man,she has to live with him in good and in bad times. But there are many women who do not accept that, whocarry illusions and say `that man cannot give me what I want. Thus when he stays, I go.' I am not like that. I have never demanded anything from him, because when I see that he does not have it, I am not going to ask it. I adapt myself to what he givesto me. I have adapted, but there are many who do notdo that, who say that they are not obliged to sufferthese difficult circumstances (no tienen que agüantarle esta calamidad), who say that he scarcely gives them anything. For instance, that when he earns money, hegoes out drinking with another woman, that he goes `to the whores' as we say here. For that reason manywomen say that they cannot tolerate this. They say: `I am not going to accept that. If he goes and enjoys himself, I will do the same.' But I am not like that. I believe that when someone has become mother, she can no longer demand many things, becau-se you cannot give a bad example to your children. ....Hunger, being without cloth or shoes, when you want

to be a good mother, you have to endure everything. There are many women who no longer accept this, who say that they want security. But after you have a family you have to adapt in order to give a good example."

This responsibility of mothers for securing the respectabilityof their families and their communities is a general feature of rural society in Latin America. Women in this way often reproduced an ideology of male dominance and female subordina-tion among the peasant population. In her analysis of Andean society, Florencia Mallon (1987, p. 387) for example notes that `the village could enforce the position of the patriarch by becoming the guardian of women's morals'. This attitude hasoften been considered a consequence of the ideology of marianismo, which heralded the image of the accepting and suffering woman (Stevens 1973). This explanation has been muchcriticized because it presents a much too general stereotype for the behavior of Latin American women (Bourque and Warren 1981, pp. 60-2; Bachrach Ehlers 1991). In addition, this kind of female attitude cannot be considered exclusive for Latin America. Similar processes have been described for other partsof the world, such as rural Russia (Worobec, 1991).

Female acceptance of patriarchal dominance may be considered above all a way of confirming female separateness and a symbol for the autonomy and independent responsibility of women. By stressing the differences between men and women, women created autonomous ideological spaces for themselves. More than twenty years ago, Louise Lamphere (1974, p. 100) suggested that a clear separation of domestic and political spheres led to female strategies aimed at influencing the men who hold authority. In the Dominican rural context it appears to have led to the creation of a female sphere, which functioned more or less separate from the men's world. Men were considered unreliable and impulsive squandering money that was badly needed for the maintenance of the members of the family. They were also portrayed as nomadic, moving from one woman to the next (Wade 1994, esp. p. 117). This vision had clear historical origins. In the late nineteenth century, wage labor became an accepted activity for peasant men. Many

male peasants migrated to plantations or railroad constructionsites for several months a year. The rest of the household, mainly women and children, but also elderly peasants, replacedthem in their absence. The material and cultural autonomy which was the result of this situation confirmed the central place of women in the reproduction of the household and the care for children. We could say that women's capacity to contest the ideology of male responsibility in the domestic sphere was linked to their importance within the agrarian production process (Kabeer 1994, p. 121).

In last instance, the acceptance of patriarchal dominancewas induced by a social reality. This attitude was a sign of recognition of the importance of men's roles in the physical reproduction of the household. Just as happened with patron-client relations, patriarchalism had its protective side. Men had some clear responsibilities in exchange for their extensive freedom of action. They were expected to take care of their families, provide them with food, buy medecine and, in general, do the work necessary for their survival. The woman just quoted continued:

"You must think well before you are going to live with a man in order that tomorrow, with God's help, you do not fail. You see, now the old age has made Modesto calm but when he was younger he was quite terrible. He liked women and drinking rum very much,he went to bars and that kind of things. But I have never quarreled, because I said that when he left money for food before going out - and he never failed to do that - he could go out Saturday night. But he always bought us things and when the girls needed something, he said `go, get them what they need, this is yours'. Even when he went and returnedon Monday, always he left money to buy meat and other things. Therefore I never quarreled because I said that men need their moments. The only one who does not have that right, is the one of the house, the woman. And there are many women who do not want to accept that. But the only one who has rights is the man, after he has taken care for the household.

A woman can only have one husband but the man can have all the women he wants."

This acceptance of the female role is striking in its self-consciousness. There is complaining in it but it shows, above all, a clear-minded assessment of different gender roles in rural society. If anywhere, we can here discern a strategic attitude in which the acceptance of male supremacy was perceived as the best possible way of securing the family's livelihood. Such a strategic worldview and attitude did not preclude the existence of emotional and amorous relations in the rural society but it does demonstrate the extent to which gender and family relations were also governed by the interests of the parties involved. Women's acceptance of patriarchal relations can be considered a constituant element of female behavior geared at securing the livelihood of themselves and their children.

In this acceptance of a hegemonic ideology and its practical consequences we can find the roots of what may be called `family strategy'. Despite differences in power many women felt solidarity for their men. Men and women, mothers and fathers faced the outside world as a unity. They agreed ontheir strategies and acted, so to say, as one. Their principalpurpose was raising their children and securing their physicalreproduction. But they also decided on economic issues, the choice of crops, the nature of off-farm activities and the behavior vis-à-vis landowners and merchants.

Of course, this harmony was not automatic, eternal or self-evident. As every anthropological textbook teaches us: matrimony is a social institution fraught with tensions and contradictions. It brings together people with different personalities, but, above all, two kinship networks with different interests and potential conflicts. Partly for that reason, patriarchal domination was always restricted. The dominant position of the (future) husband meant a direct intrusion into the authority of the (future) wife's parents, and more in particular, her father. This, combined with the just-mentioned economic interest of controlling labor, made for more or less important limitations on the husband's authority. Women could normally resort to an alternative

patriarchal network, a situation which effectively provided them with some space to manoeuver.

This brings us to the second essential perspective with respect to the concept of family strategies. Patriarchalism did not go uncontested. An interesting example of this resistance to patriarchal control is the frequent out-migration of younger men. Just as Nola Reinhardt has noted forher Colombian case-study, in the Dominican countryside many adolescent men migrated away from their parental village, evenin cases where the farm would have provided an adequate standard of living. This migration was a means of escaping patriarchal control and acquiring an independent position in society (Baud 1995, p. 70-71; Reinhardt 1988, p. 59).

Similar processes can be seen in the cases of women. The phrasing of the two preceding citations demonstrates that obedient behavior was not unambiguous and predictable. By contrasting her own choices with those of other women, this woman implicitly confirmed that life had provided her with options. These may have been limited and unattractive, by expressing them she accentuated her personal identity and the strategic contents of her actions. When I asked her why she had acted the way she had, she answered:

"You see, it is a way of life. Every person has his own attitude. Already as a little girl I was no dreamer (ilusionista). That I said: I want that! Becausewe were raised like that. My mama raised us because she and my father separated, and he did not take care of us. My mother had to work to buy us things. Later when I grew older I helped her to take care ofthe little ones. Thus, I grew older with this idea, this responsibility. That when you had something, you had to share it, so that everyone has the same. I kept the same attitude when I had established my own household. When I earned something I could not buy something for myself but I spent it, for instan-ce, to buy shoes for my daughters. I shared my earnings to buy shoes for them in order that when one day they needed them, I would not need to take credit because I had bought something for myself."

This version of her own past is couched in terms of female responsibilities, but it was also presented as the result of her own choices. This woman saw herself to have chosen a certain road, in which responsibility and respectability were central concepts.xi They may have been imposed by male dominated society and hegemonic patriarchal ideologies, but they were (partly) transformed into an instrument of affirmingher personal identity.

Women maintained financial and emotional distance from the world of men also in other respects. They did not normallycompletely link their fate to their husband and his family completely. They maintained close contacts with their own kin-group and could have their own property. Many women also triedto generate their own income. They did ironing work for the rich, cooked food for day laborers (peones) or engaged in irregular informal income-generating activities such as selling food at public holidays or making clothes. They also organized their own communal or reciprocal saving clubs (san). Nowadays they often have their own lottery (rifa) circuits whichmay be considered an informal way of redistributing female-owned money. In is not clear to what extent the increased wagelabor opportunities have also changed the position of peasant women (see Safa 1995). A specific characteristic of the tobacco economy was the presence of warehouses in the countryside. This allowed rural women to earn extra income without having to forego their female obligations in the household. It would be interesting to know how this increased financial independence affected intra-marital relations. All these activities and options safeguarded a minimum of autonomous space in a society dominated by patriarchal values.In a study into strategies of poor women in the Dominican Republic, Susan Brown (1975; also Chant 1985; Kabeer 1994, pp.103-4) suggested some twenty years ago that women who did not link their fate to one man and who retained some space to manoeuver were social and economically better off than those following what she called `the single mate pattern'. Poor women thus appear to have been able to adapt better to changing circumstances when they could use their own kinship systems and maintain some independence from patriarchal

control (Chant 1985, pp. 648-50).The acceptance of patriarchal domination thus had its

limits. Although its hegemonic character made opposing it far more difficult than accepting it, many women tried to mitigateor neutralize its most unfavorable consequences. When men did not meet their part of the contractual agreements implicit in patriarchal relations, women were absolved of their passive and accepting parameters in their behavior. Frequent drunkenness and irresponsible behavior were justified causes for a woman to leave her husband. Especially when this behavior involved the beating of women and children, women were allowed to leave their husband. As the woman quoted aboveadded: "Good women have to endure much. The only thing they donot have to take is when their husband beats them". Talking about her own mother who had left her extremely jealous husband, who did not allow her mother to leave the house, she said: "Because this house and land was hers. So she said to her husband that she could not go on. That her life was unbearable. As a result she went to my grandmother. He stayed in the house".

This quote points at an essential feature in the positionof women. The option of leaving her husband depended on the possibilities a woman had maintained outside her marriage (compare Postthast-Jutkeit 1991, p. 231). With a supportive family or some possessions of her own, such a decision was much easier to take. This may explain the fact that in settings of urban (migrant) families, the position of women appears to be much weaker. Social control which patronized women in the countryside, also protected her. When this protection disappeared, it was more likely that intra-familialtensions got out of hand. This may explain the greater frequency of women and children being beaten in the context ofurban shanty-towns (González de la Rocha 1994; Lancaster 1992,pp. 34-47. For an emphasis on male violence in the Mexican countryside: Stern 1995, pp. 45-49).

The position of women within the family household was thus an ambivalent one. They were first and foremost responsible for taking care of the children. To secure the reproduction of the household they followed an - ever-changing- strategic course. Whenever necessary and useful they faced

the outside world together with their husband. They needed menfor many purposes, not in the last place to `represent' them as local vernacular has it. In this sense, women took part in family strategies. This dependence on the public protection bymen was, of course, the consequence of their subordinate position. In the public sphere, women needed men to accomplishcertain things.

On the other hand, women had separate reponsibilities. They had to guarantee the stability and reproduction of the household. The unreliability and irresponsibility of men (a stereotype that, just as the subservience of women, was ideologically constructed, and often less one-sided in daily life!) forced the women to build in extra guarantees. They maintained their own networks of assistance based on kinship or gender. In this sense, they followed their own strategies and maintained a certain distance to the male world. Women thus perceived male patriarchy in similar ways as the peasantsdid with the rural elite. They took advantage of the benefits,and accepted the hardships and potential exploitation that went with it. At the same time, they were all too aware of their own unfavorable position and tried to devise alternativestrategies which could enhance their autonomy and increase their material independence.

ConclusionIn the foregoing, some aspects of patriarchal hegemony in rural society of the Dominican Republic in the period 1870-1930 have been presented. The article has been written in the past tense, because it is based on research on that period anddescribes the situation in rural society in that period. As our use of oral history information indicates, this is not to say that elements of the social relations analyzed here do notexist to this day. The work of Patricia Pessar (1982) for instance has shown how elements from rural patriarchalism continue to dictate the terms of present-day migration to the US. On the other hand, her work demonstrates how the migrationexperience has caused gender relations to change significantly. This is a clear warning that we should not underestimate the changes and adaptations seemingly static cultural institutions can undergo. Similarly, social relations

in rural society in the Dominican Republic changed considerably in the period under study. One clear conclusion of our analysis is that the development of capitalist relations of production in the countryside made control over labor more important and in at first reinforced patriarchal control.

This article has argued that the hegemony of a patriarchal ideology has shaped class and gender relations in the Dominican countryside (compare also: Jiménez 1989; Tutino 1983). It provided the rural elite with an ideological basis for its social and economic dominance. The acceptance of its superior position was greatly facilitated by the fact that peasant men this shared patriarchal ideology and belief in male-dominance. The peasant men were subordinate and dependentin class-terms, but the same ideology confirmed their own patriarchal power within peasant society. By accepting the patriarchal dominance of the elite, peasant men legitimized and safeguarded their own dominance over women and children.

In the foregoing, we have indicated two ways in which patriarchal hegemony was questioned. In the first place, many peasant men themselves were aware of their unfavorable position and the abuses to which they were subjected. They tried to improve the terms of tobacco production and trade. Ingeneral, they tried to stretch the social and economic boundaries of their existence. Most importantly, peasant men constantly reminded the patrons of the reciprocal obligations which were a necessary precondition for their loyalty. Even today, talking about the history of rural society, the behavior of the powerful towards their clients is a constantlyrecurring theme. There was a general understanding that patrons who did not fulfil their culturally defined duties towards their clients did not deserve loyalty. The interestingthing, of course, is that a clear distinction was made betweenthe moral obligations and the market-oriented relations in which tough and treacherous behavior were to a certain extent condoned. The rural population generally tended to accept tough landowners who squeezed the peasantry but were prepared to help a destitute person. This points first of all to the extent of patriarchal hegemony, and secondly to the incompletenature of capitalist development. The tobacco sector followed

the `immoral' rules of the market, but social relations were (still) seen as relations governed by a moral economy (Scott 1976; Taussig 1980).

Within peasant society, patriarchy was even more ambiguous. Here, the stakes were higher. A guaranteed production of food was essential for the survival of the household. Reciprocity and redistribution among the house-hold's members was a matter of survival. When the male head ofthe family took his responibilities and took care of his family, his authority was accepted and he was allowed many liberties. But even in these situations, women tried to maintain their own networks of production, support and redistribution. As we saw, patriarchal ideology itself was partly responsible for generating a separate female sphere. The strength of these separate female networks is uncertain. They must have variated greatly according to the strength of awoman's kinship network, her own capacities and her relationship with her husband. In any case, they allowed womena certain amount of autonomy. Female strategies thus showed a complex interplay of accepting, evading and opposing patriarchal dominance.

The case of children is also complex. Up to a certain age, children just follow their parents and do not have strategies of their own. In this stage, mothers often joined their husbands in authoritarian and patriarchal ways of rearing their children. A romanticized nostalgy is a common characteristic of social memory in the countryside, but most elderly people in the Cibao remember the parental control of their childhood with a mixture of abhorrence and amazement. They are aware that things have changed since then. Most of these changes they welcome - people were `too closed' in former days -, but some they sincerely deplore. The most general complaint is that children no longer have respect for their parents and do not want to help their parents with manual agricultural labor. This two-sided assessment of the changes in rural society nicely points at the ambivalence always provoked by patriarchal systems. They were based on a structural inequality. On the other hand they worked and provided rural society with a degree of order and security.

In her article on the exploitation of family morality in

Brazilian plantations, Verena Stolcke tried to come to grips with the complex ideological consequences of the confrontationof gender-divided peasant families with changing social and economic circumstances. She has drawn attention to the contradictory nature of the family. It constituted a source ofsubordination for women, but also offered support and solidarity to family members in the face of economic hardship and insecurity (Stolcke 1991, p. 70). Still, I believe that she presents a too mechanistic image of an over-arching capitalism that exploits men and, by taking advantage of family morality, women through these men. She ignores the possibility that the family may also be a source and instrument of female strategies. As Worobec (1991, p. 215) notes: "[Women] were both actors in and victims of a system that provided them with rewards as well as punishments". Patriarchy was a system based on the idea of inequality, but as any other system it could be subverted. In this way it could also provide the basis for counter-hegemonic strategies.

This ambiguity points at a certain direction for future research. We should `deconstruct' the simple concept of familystrategy. Some people have advocated an `individual' approach to family history (for instance: Kertzer 1984, p. 210). This has sometimes been misunderstood - ignoring the contradictio in terminis - as a plea for focusing on individuals. I would like to view it as a perspective which may allow us to acquire a better understanding of the ideological and practical logic ofthe behavior of families and households (also: Hareven 1990, pp. 216-7). In whatever form, the family (as a kinship unit) and the household (as a co-residential unit) have been the crucial (albeit not exclusive) nuclei in which human beings have organized their daily lives. When we talk of family strategies we should therefore consider them as layered mosaics of strategies, sometimes pointing in the same direction, sometimes opposing each other (compare also: Liu 1994).

The result of this perspective is that instead of one family strategy, we see a great variation of different, and sometimes even contradictory strategies by families and familymembers. These multiple strategies took place in the context of changing historical conditions and hegemonic ideologies

that legitimized inequality and subordination. In his well-balanced analysis of class and gender relations in the Colombian countryside Michael Jiménez has stressed the variable and ambiguous outcome of male and female strategies in order to guarantee the integrity of the peasant household. Pointing at the major contribution of women in the struggle against dominant landowners, he writes: "Paradoxically, however, women's involvement (...) strengthened a small holdereconomy that came to be dominated by men who eventually pushedor cajoled women back into purely domestic, familial tasks" (Jiménez 1989, p. 142). It is necessary to take into account such contradictory consequences of the interaction of class, family and gender strategies.

Thus, it is crucial to analyze the balance between these various strategies over time. We should know more about the changing balance of power within families, and its explanations. With respect to our analysis of the dominance ofpatriarchal ideologies, it is essential to know how much spacethere was for strategies that evaded or countered patriarchal dominance. In the Dominican countryside, the presence of a male-dominant ideology is obvious. It was clear between classes and within families. On the other hand, certain factors mitigated its practical consequences. First of all, until the beginning of our century, there was an abundance of land which potentially allowed peasant families to flee patriarchal control by the rural elite. Secondly, this elite was social and economically dominant but lacked the means to effectively control the peasantry. Landowners were therefore forced to reach some kind of an understanding with peasant producers. This reinforced the reciprocal nature of the paternalist relations between the two groups. Thirdly, no clear ethnic differences existed between them. This facilitated cordial relations and ruled out the discriminatoryand more repressive forms of patriarchal power visible in other Latin American regions.

Within the families, things were less clear. Patriarchal power was the basis of family relations. On the other hand, the labor of women and children was so important that the malehead of the family could not antagonize them too much. Male dominance was generally accepted, and strategies of women and

adolescents to counter it remained generally within its parameters. Women could only escape the repressive control of a husband by placing themselves under the control of other men, usually another male partner or their father. Establishing an independent household was hardly an option forDominican rural women. However, they did try to maintain formsof social or economic independence. They maintained their own social relations, often with their family and other women, andtried to safeguard a (small) separate income which could not be touched by the husband. It would be interesting to see whathappened to this partial autonomy with the social and economicchanges that the Dominican countryside underwent during the twentieth century. As far as I can see, it bolstered this autonomy, althoughwith widely diverging results. It allowed some women to take advantage of their increased freedom, devising new social and economic strategies for themselves andtheir children. At the same time, it relegated many women (andtheir children) to a poverty unknown before.

Notes:

. For literature on patriarchy, see: Bourque and Warren 1981; Reinhardt 1988;Kandiyoti 1988. Sommer (1983) has made an interesting analysis of the patriarchalimplications of twentieth-century Dominican novels.ii. This is different of what is called rapto in which the consent of the girl wasnot self-evident. This practice, of course, pitted men - father and abductor -against each other. For an Argentinian case study of this practice, see: Chasteen1989, pp. 126-7.iii. See also Lavrin 1978 and Kuznesof and Oppenheimer 1985. We should be careful,however, in our comparisons of these patriarchal systems. Although they sharecertain characteristics, they may be embedded quite differently in local cultures.The patriarchal system of the Russian countryside, described by Worobec (1991),appears for instance to have been much more formal and embedded in customary lawthan in the case of the Dominican Republic analyzed in this article. For anexceptional Latin American case: Potthast-Jutkeit 1991.. This was also the great difference with the situation in neigboring Cuba. As

Verena Martinez-Alier (now: Stolcke) (1974, p. 2) writes about Cuban marriagepatterns: "[T]he basic line of cleavage dividing Cuban nineteenth-century societywas race".. Scott and Kerkvliet (1975, p. 512) mention `protection' as one of the essentialelements of a patron-client relationship: "It means shielding the client both fromprivate dangers (banditry, personal enemies) and from public dangers (soldiers,outside officials, courts, tax collectors).". Guerrero (1991) gives a beautiful analysis of the negotiable nature of patron-

client relations on Ecuatorian haciendas. Also: Jiménez 1989.vii. Scott and Kerkvliet (1974, p. 501) write : "As long as the peasant sees hisrelation to agrarian elites as one of legitimate dependence (...) peasant `class-consciousness' is unlikely".

viii. Scott (1976, p. 193) dtates: "There is good reason (...) for holding thatrebellion is one of the least likely consequences of exploitation". . It is important to remember the dictum by economist John Kenneth Galbraith

(cited in: Young 1993, p. 122): "The household in the established economics, isessentially a disguise for the exercise of male authority".. These excerpts are the results of several interviews made in December 1986.xi. This attitude shows some striking similarities with the Caribbean dichotomy be-tween female respectability and male reputation described so vividly by Peter Wilson(1973). Still I believe that the strong patriarchal relations in de Cibaocountryside gave a specific color to its male-female relations.