Poverty, Work and the Financing of Single Women in Kampala

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Abstract
Opening ParagraphThis paper examines the financial position of all-female households in a poor area of Kampala, Uganda. The intention is to indicate the relative standards of living of households of various composition and to decide whether the practice of soliciting money from lovers is better viewed as a preferred alternative to employment or as an essential supplementing of inadequate incomes. If lovers are necessary to the maintenance of single women and their children in African cities, analyses of extra-marital sexual behaviour which rely only on arguments about marriage rules and roles and personal values are rendered inadequate. Securing a paying lover may be indispensable to a woman who wishes to live and bring up children in town, and the practice may tell us more about her wish to educate her children, or her dislike of rural life, than it does about her sexual and marital preferences. Love affairs, in short, may be more appropriately considered under the heading of domestic finance than as an adjunct to a discussion of marriage. The data which I present here do not reduce a lover's importance to a woman to that of a charitable institution or welfare state: women who are prosperous have love affairs, and sexual pleasure is celebrated. They do indicate, however, the difficulties faced by a woman anxious to remain in town if she is not prepared to take lovers and to select them at least in part according to financial considerations. I hope, too, that the method which I use for working out standards of living available to households may prove useful as a means of establishing comparability between living standards in different cities.

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