From Rags to Riches Looking at Poverty from a Gender Perspective

Abstract

This article takes up the theme of 'gender and poverty', but looks at it from the vantage point of women living in an increasingly opulent setting. The case study comes from a small rural community in south-eastern Iran. The selected region has some distinct features which make it interesting for exploring this particular conjunction of social forces: relative opulence generated through agricultural export earnings, on the one hand, and powerful gender discriminatory relations sanctioned by local custom and reinforced through state policy, on the other. The article will explore the contradictory implications that the rising levels of household income have had for women. lt does so by using two different, but related, ways of capturing how women have fared in the context of these socioeconomic changes.