This study investigates the functioning of the domestic economy of smallholder cotton farmers with the overall aim of interrogating female agency, based on ethnographic fieldwork in Burkina Faso in the mid-1990s. The thesis addresses the following interrelated research questions: How were the smallholder domestic economies organized and how did they function? What were the mechanisms for economic inequality and social stratification? To what extent did women benefit from cotton farming? What economic strategies were available to women? And finally, how could female agency be conceptualized in relation to the domestic unit under male headship? Permeating the analysis is the insight that domestic economies of many West African farming societies consist of separate but interconnected economic domains, the “common” economy of the farming unit and the “individual” economies of its male and female members. It demonstrates that women have vested interests in both the common economy and their individual ones, since women’s individual undertakings, to a large extent, are motivated by their gendered responsibilities towards the domestic group. The study argues for an agency concept that captures the different modes in which women exercise agency, both as individuals and as members of social bodies.

Studies of artisanal brewing throughout Africa point to the same mechanism: women brew beer for a predominantly male clientele. Hence, the beer trade makes money flow from men to women.

In this study from a Bobo village in the cotton zone of western Burkina Faso, I explore the strategies women employ to earn money by brewing: I am interested in how gender intersects with other social structures, creating different spaces for women to act strategically. Based on a detailed description of the brewing process and of the commercialization of beer, I highlight the choices women make in order to succeed with their trade. Indeed, even if the structures of authority within which women make their choices are male-dominated, women in Bala are not powerless, on the contrary. I show that women differ in their ability to make a profit from brewing depending on their ability to manoeuvre within and between, on the one hand, their position within the intersecting structures of gender, age and generation (within the household), and, on the other hand, gender, kinship, alliance, class and ethnicity (outside the household).