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Gender Stratification

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Gender Stratification
In this paper, I am going to address gender stratification in relation to Marriage, Sexuality, and Reproductive health issues. I am going to use Monique and the Mango Rains written by Kri Holloway as ethnographic data, which she collected in Mali. My interpretations of gender stratification in Mali are women did not have the rights to choose their husband; women did not have ways to control the sex life and do not have ways to do birth control; women had to face extremely hard reproductive health issues.

To start with, I would like to give some background analysis about gender norms and stratification in Mali. Mali is landlocked in the West Africa and it is one of the poorest countries in the world. According to the book, there was even no toilet paper in the Malian villages. I couldn’t imagine how poor this country is, but I think the fact of “The right hand is considered clean, the left dirty” is quiet shocking (page. 7). In Mali, the social systems are Patrilocal and Patrilinieal. When people get married in Mali, the wife joins the husband in his father’s home or compound, where they form a family and raise their children. Normally, the household has a senior member to lead the family in terms of allocate resources and direct labors. Also, the descent follows the father’s line in Mali. According to the book, “The Minianka were patrilineal, where the woman becomes part of the husband’s family, and children carry on their father’s name and ancestral history of taboos and fetches”(page 48). In addition, the women in Mali had to live in a gender stratification environment. According to the lecture 1 on Week 7, Mali is ranked 86 out of 86 in the 2012 Social Institutions and Gender Index, which means women in Mali have really poor gender inequality for women. In 2009, Mali was ranked 99 out of 102, so the data didn’t change that

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