Women in Tanzania are constantly constrained by the society around them. They work extremely hard building families, providing money, supporting their families and themselves, fighting a hegemonic patriarchy and simply living.... [ view full abstract ]
Women in Tanzania are constantly constrained by the society around them. They work extremely hard building families, providing money, supporting their families and themselves, fighting a hegemonic patriarchy and simply living. Angavu, Neema, Fatima, Imani, and Fila are five women from Iringa, Tanzania between the ages of 15 and 40 who opened up and told me their stories of hardship, strength, empowerment, Tanzanian feminism, and their feelings.
This thesis tells the stories of the lives of five women living in Iringa, Tanzania. I identify and analyze the constraints, otherwise known as, the dominant cultural scripts that influence and restrict these women’s lives. I try to understand the dynamics, the personal, and the greater cultural significance of these dominant cultural scripts. Then, I identify and analyze the strategies that women use to either resist or conform to these scripts. Throughout the thesis, I am constantly evaluating women’s feelings and attempting to empathize in order to connect and create a phenomenological ethnography. Eventually, I look at the relationship between these actions, strategies with female self-esteem for these women. Self-esteem in Tanzania can be defined as relational-esteem because I have learned that their relational-esteem (self-esteem) is interactional, dynamic, and based in between peoples, within relationships. It is the way to describe how women feel about themselves. I learned from these women, that their esteem, or good feelings about themselves is dependent on how they feel about fitting in, and on their relationships to others in their communities.
