Onions Are My Husband or Birth and Fortune

Onions Are My Husband: Survival and Accumulation by West African Market Women

Author: Gracia Clark

In the most comprehensive analysis to date of the world of open air marketplaces of West Africa, Gracia Clark studies the market women of Kumasi, Ghana, in order to understand the key social forces that generate, maintain, and continually reshape the shifting market dynamics.
Probably the largest of its kind in West Africa, the Kumasi Central Market houses women whose positions vary from hawkers of meals and cheap manufactured goods to powerful wholesalers, who control the flow of important staples. Drawing on more than four years of field research, during which she worked alongside several influential market "Queens", Clark explains the economic, political, gender, and ethnic complexities involved in the operation of the marketplace and examines the resourcefulness of the market women in surviving the various hazards they routinely encounter, from coups d'etat to persistent sabotage of their positions from within.

Booknews

Economic anthropologist Clark focuses on the women in the marketplace in the city of Kumasi, Ghana. She looks at such aspects of their lives and livelihood as getting into the market, the regional web, buying and selling, the control of resources, negotiations, and home and husband. Based on interviews conducted on seven consecutive days in July 1979. Paper edition (unseen), $22.95. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Table of Contents:

List of Illustrations
List of Tables
Preface
1. Stepping into the Market
2. The Regional Web
3. Persistent Transformation
4. Buying and Selling
5. Control of Resources
6. "We Know Ourselves"
7. Queens of Negotiation
8. Multiple Identities
9. Home and Husband
10. The Market under Attack
11. Surviving the Peace
Appendix: Survey Methodology
References
Index

See also: Cheers or Miss Mary Bobos Boarding House Cookbook

Birth and Fortune: The Impact of Numbers on Personal Welfare

Author: Richard A Easterlin

In this influential work, Richard A. Easterlin shows how the size of a generation—the number of persons born in a particular year—directly and indirectly affects the personal welfare of its members, the make-up and breakdown of the family, and the general well being of the economy.
"[Easterlin] has made clear, I think unambiguously, that the baby-boom generation is economically underprivileged merely because of its size. And in showing this, he demonstrates that population size can be as restrictive as a factor as sex, race, or class on equality of opportunity in the U.S."—Jeffrey Madrick, Business Week