land and property have been among the greatest engines of wealth creation and power in human history. Land’s value has increased exponentially over the past two centuries as population growth and nation-building heated up competition for land. With it, landowners have enhanced their well-being, improved their families’ health and their children’s educations, and gained social and political power. How land is reallocated matters profoundly to who receives the benefits of the Great Reshuffle and what kind of society emerges in the decades and generations that follow. Not all land reallocation is created equal—not even those reforms nominally following a similar settler model, as we will see if we turn our attention several thousand miles north of the Agua Caliente.
The vast prairies of Canada had been only lightly touched by explorers and settlers by the time the country formed as a nation in 1867. They were mainly inhabited by indigenous Canadian peoples now known as First Nations. Settlers in Canada’s eastern provinces knew the area as part of “Rupert’s Land,” a massive fur-trading territory stretching from the Rocky Mountains in the west through much of Quebec in the east and from the border of the United States up to the Arctic Circle, all under the exclusive charter of the Hudson’s Bay Company.
Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. Macdonald, sought to expand the country’s borders by annexing these territories along with British Columbia, a remaining British colonial possession on Canada’s Pacific flank. Doing so would guard the new nation against encroachment from its relentlessly expanding American neighbor to the south.
To extend control over this land, the Macdonald government passed the Dominion Lands Act in 1872, a quintessential settler reform. The act opened the prairies to homesteading by eastern Canadians and European and American pioneers. It was modeled on the 1862 Homestead Act in the United States, in that it offered homesteaders 160 acres of land in exchange for a ten-dollar registration fee and a promise to farm the land and build a home on it.
But the Canadian approach to the Great Reshuffle diverged from the US model in a number of crucial ways. First, the method of actually parting indigenous populations from their lands took a slightly different course when Macdonald’s government signed a series of treaties with Canada’s First Nations to obtain land for immigration and settlement in the prairies. In practice, however, these agreements were sealed under duress. The increasing toll of western diseases, the decimation of bison, and the unyielding pressure of the Canadian government guaranteed that the First Nations could not easily resist. They signed in exchange for promises of government aid in the form of food and health assistance.1 The Canadian government used the opening to try to break their cultures and links to the land by sending their children to boarding schools and attempting to force them into sedentary farming communities.
The Dominion Lands Act departed from the US Homestead Act in another crucial way as well: it prohibited women from homesteading. The law backtracked slightly in 1876 to allow women homesteaders who were the sole heads of households, typically because they were widowed or had been deserted with dependent children. The United States maintained a similar exception for married women, who were otherwise not allowed to homestead. But in the United States, single women were eligible, and in Canada they were not.2
Barring single women from homesteading foreclosed one of the principal economic alternatives to marriage for the vast majority of rural Canadian women—and this policy outcome was by design. Most Canadian politicians believed, as Senator Robert Poore Haythorne put it, that “the future of the country lay wrapped up in the sanctity of the marriage state,” and that alternatives to marriage, or the ability to dissolve it through divorce, should be strictly avoided.3 Progress and stability in western Canada, including through the enormous project of settlement through homesteading, could be achieved most readily by adhering to the traditional Christian conception of marriage and gender roles.4 Allowing women to strike out on their own by homesteading land ran directly counter to these notions.
A “Homesteads for Women” movement arose in response, advocating that the prairies be opened up to women settlers. Canadian women petitioned for access to homestead land for years, but politicians repeatedly denied them. In fact, most women never had a chance to homestead, a situation that persisted throughout the duration of the program, which was largely shut down in 1930.
By the time the program ended, the Canadian government had given away over 100 million acres of land to men. It was one of the greatest wealth transfers to men in human history. Women were almost entirely shut out of the right to claim homestead land in the vast Canadian West. And it established a thick blanket of traditional, conservative gender relations from sea to shining sea in Canada.5
Women paid a steep price. For decades, their lack of land ownership precluded them from voting in early elections. They were dependent on men for their livelihoods and vulnerable to poverty in the case of a husband’s death or departure. And they lagged men in taking advantage of costly educational opportunities as the economy of the prairies transformed. In many ways, women in Canada are still catching up.
The historic transformations that have defined the Great Reshuffle around the world have refashioned power relations, bestowed extraordinary wealth on its beneficiaries, and, when done right, fired national prosperity. They have also by and large left women out. Prevailing patriarchal gender relations in many societies prior to the reallocation of land and its appreciation in value meant that women faced discrimination in gaining land access. But it is not just that women were sidelined, as they always had been. In many cases, land reallocation entrenched and even deepened gender inequalities and the marginalization of women. This has been true across the range of land reallocation policies. Country after country has doled out land to male heads of household, and in most cases women have lost as much or more than they have gained.
Because of this pattern, the Great Reshuffle has locked in a trajectory of heightened dependence by women on their male counterparts over the course of the past two centuries. It has made everything from gender wealth gaps to domestic violence and abortion practices that favor sons even more difficult to erase than they might have been otherwise. In the majority of societies where this has occurred, it is not distant history: it came to be entrenched just a few decades or at most a century back. In some societies that are still undertaking a Great Reshuffle, this pattern is still playing out, seeding further inequality for the years ahead.
To grapple with this foundational problem for modern societies, we will explore how it has manifested in three countries from different continents, time periods, cultures, and approaches to land reallocation. In Canada, politicians prevented women from independently homesteading the country’s prairies in the late 1800s and early 1900s, depriving them of a unique opportunity to gain autonomy and self-determination. In the state of West Bengal in India, a tiller reform and related programs aimed at helping sharecroppers in the 1970s ended up stoking intra-family strife and the favoritism of boys both as children and in utero. And in El Salvador, several episodes of land reallocation in the 1980s and 1990s put even more land and decision-making power into the hands of men and entrenched patriarchy.
There is no law or universal truth dictating that women will always lose out on opportunities to gain access to land or other assets that enhance their independence, autonomy, and wealth. The historical tendency in this direction is entirely socially constructed. Societies can choose a different path. And in recent decades, especially at the behest of a wide variety of powerful women’s movements, many societies have done just that. But history has consequences and cannot simply be reversed. Gendered patterns of land access and ownership through policies of land allocation and reallocation in the past two centuries have placed women at a distinct disadvantage in contemporary societies that is difficult to overcome.
SETTLING THE CANADIAN PRAIRIES
Canada formed in a very different way from its neighbor to the south. The United States formed out of revolution against the British Crown and valued ideals such as liberty and equality of opportunity and social relations. By contrast, Britain hatched the formation of Canada—independence never faced a vote or movement in Canada itself. The British instead set out to forge a fundamentally conservative society that valued hierarchical class relations, religious authority, and traditional social and gender norms.6
Canada was not inherently a natural fit for such a project, being far from culturally and socially unified at the time of its founding. Its population comprised large groups of disparate European immigrants and indigenous Canadians in addition to eastern colonial settlers who had arrived long before the country’s independence from Great Britain. Still, early conservative political leaders set out to spearhead a vision of Canadian confederation that would counteract radical egalitarian democracy and immoral and corrupting influences from the United States.7 They would do so by entrenching traditional gender roles, and one of their chief tools was Canada’s most valuable and abundant resource: land.
From the outset in Canada, land served as a gatekeeper for elite, male-dominated politics. Senators had to own considerable landed property to qualify for office, and the franchise across Canadian provinces was limited to men who met a property qualification.8 But land was not only a useful political tool to maintain the elite and male-dominated status quo. Early government men also used land to propagate and entrench a “traditional gender order” in society.9 The settlement of the Canadian prairies quickly became the central focus of this effort.
The most consequential policy on this front was the 1872 Dominion Lands Act—the act that cracked open the prairies to homesteading by offering settlers 160 acres of free land in exchange for a minor registration fee. With women barred from homesteading, the traditional gender order of Canadian society was locked in for decades to come.
There was no organized pushback against the gendered nature of the Dominion Lands Act at its passage.10 Women did not have the franchise at the time, and women’s rights campaigns were in their infancy in the Western world.
Women did, however, begin pressuring the government for access to homestead land outside the confines of marriage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They penned letters to newspapers, circulated petitions, and wrote their legislators. Their demands built from campaigns for women’s suffrage and efforts to win the legal recognition of land and inheritance rights for spouses not on a property title in prairie regions.11 One early petition, published in the Edmonton Bulletin in 1893, bore the headline “Spinsters Want Homesteads.”12 It made the case that spinsters (single women over the age of thirty) were as deserving of homesteading as widows. But the petition sparked little considered debate over the issue.
A decade later, Georgina Binnie-Clark became a vocal advocate for women homesteading. Binnie-Clark moved near her brother in Saskatchewan in 1905 and purchased land to start a farm with her sister because her gender made her ineligible for free homestead land.13 The sisters had great success farming. Georgina railed against government policy that favored men over women on the frontier. In her remarkable autobiography, Wheat and Woman, she made the case that single women could succeed as homesteaders and that the government should not disadvantage them against men.14 A woman “may be the best farmer in Canada,” she wrote. “She may buy land, work it, take prizes for seed and stock, but she is denied the right to claim from the Government the hundred and sixty acres of land held out as a bait to every man.”
Some legislators began to mull over the idea of extending homestead land to women—in part because of the potential benefits for men. One example is William Roche, a Conservative legislator from Manitoba. Roche raised the idea of women homesteading in a House of Commons parliamentary session to Frank Oliver, the Canadian minister of interior, with the argument that it could help to address the increasing gender imbalance in Canada’s western provinces. Men greatly outnumbered women in homesteading areas, and allowing women to homestead was viewed as a way to make it easier for these single men to find “help-meets.” Perhaps more importantly, it would encourage men with daughters to move to the plains. A women’s homesteading law would bring, as Roche quoted from a reverend who wrote a letter to the editor of a Winnipeg newspaper in 1910, “lovers and sweethearts that we could never get in any other way.”15
Roche posed the question to Oliver of whether he had considered “permitting ladies… the privilege of homesteading” on this basis. Oliver responded that while the matter had been raised to him frequently, “the purpose… in giving free land to homesteaders is that the land may be made productive.… The idea of giving homesteads to single women would tend directly against that idea.”16
This patriarchal and condescending position helped catalyze Canadian women to organize to petition for homestead land over the next several years. A petition circulated in 1911 called for homestead access for “all women of British birth [British-born and Canadian-born women] who have resided in Canada for six months… [and were] of the age twenty one years.” This petition won backing from important organizations, such as the National Council of Women, the Winnipeg Board of Trade, and many women’s press clubs, as well as prominent women activists, including Georgina Binnie-Clark. But when its author, Grain Growers’ Guide editor Isabella Beaton Graham, submitted a final version to Parliament in February 1913 with over 11,000 signatures—all men, given that women could not vote—the minister of interior ignored it.17
World War I quieted the Homesteads for Women movement by drawing attention to other issues and generating expectations that women would support the war effort within the home. But the movement never petered out for as long as the Dominion Lands Act operated. Women wrote letters and signed petitions to expand the act to them throughout the 1920s. As late as 1929 women were continuing to press unsuccessfully for homesteading rights.18
While the Homesteads for Women movement simmered, Canada gave tracts of pristine prairie land to hundreds of thousands of men, doling them out like hotcakes over the course of six decades. Eventually the land distributed in this way covered over 100 million acres of land. The program came to an end when the federal government transferred public land to the provinces in 1930, closing most remaining public lands to the act.19
depriving women from homestead land in Canada had enduring consequences. The inability of women to secure homestead land in their own names prevented them from exercising the franchise in the late 1800s and early 1900s in local elections. Property qualifications screened out these potential voters and silenced their political voices.20
Prohibiting women from homesteading also meant that they were not afforded access to the main economic opportunity in the Canadian prairies. Together with a lack of property inheritance rights, this rendered women vulnerable to poverty and hardship in the event of their husbands’ death or absence.21 And it made rural women on the prairies easier for the government to neglect during the Great Depression as grain prices plummeted and drought ripped across the plains.22
The pervasive and officially reinforced notion of men as property owners and farmers and women as subordinate “homemakers” or “helpers” on the prairies also took a psychological and social toll on many women. Some farm women became grassroots feminists who sought greater recognition for their work, their own property rights to land, and a more level playing field with men on the prairies.23 But many isolated women quietly accepted the gender status quo, in effect contributing to the perpetuation of gender inequalities in prairie society.24
There were also long-lasting social and economic consequences. As educational opportunities expanded on the plains in the interwar period, men pursued higher education that facilitated skilled jobs and upward mobility at much higher rates than women, and women were more likely to learn basic homemaking skills to keep their farms and families stable.25 At the same time, women’s unpaid labor on the farm freed men to participate in market wage-earning opportunities as the rural economy diversified. But women lagged.26 Women born in the prairies prior to the end of the Land Dominions Act had the highest rates of poverty among Canadian women by the time they reached their sixties and seventies around the 1990s.27
At least part of women’s enduring lag in status and welfare compared with men in Canada is likely due to the fact that they have never caught up with men in terms of farm ownership. In a study of Alberta farmers in the mid-1980s, only 40 percent of farm women in the province reported having any legal partnership with their husbands in the family farm enterprise.28 Women’s land ownership still lags broadly across Canada. Barely one-quarter of agricultural landholders in Canada today are women.29
Many other settler reforms occurring at the same time as Canada’s were not much better. Although the United States and Australia at times allowed single women to claim land, married women whose husbands were alive and present typically could not acquire land. The case was similar in settler reforms throughout Latin America, where men also predominated in settlement and claimed the vast majority of land.
In Canada, the patriarchy of settler society passed into First Nations peoples. While First Nations had a wide variety of gender practices, by and large they were more egalitarian than European societies and conceived of gender mainly in terms of complementarities rather than hierarchies. Legislation such as the Indian Act of 1876 created new gender hierarchies and binaries, such as denying indigenous women the right to own land and marital property. Other practices did the same: boarding schools, for example, taught and reinforced domesticity among women. The result was that patriarchal attitudes spread widely throughout society.
As patriarchal and sexist as a society may be, it can become even more so when it sets out to use land power to stymie women.
INDIA AFTER PARTITION
Settler land reforms, as we’ve seen, can lock in racial and gender inequality, but it is not the only culprit. Nearly a century after Canada began its experiment in gendered homesteading, another former British colony—India—set out to reallocate land and ended up inadvertently achieving a similar outcome through very different means.
Over 80 percent of India’s population was rural at the time of its independence from Great Britain in 1947. Landholding was both vastly complex and highly unequal, underpinning rigid socioeconomic inequalities in caste, wealth, and gender. This made land reallocation a pressing issue for the new democracy.
India’s large population and long history of settled agriculture meant that there was very little frontier land available in the mid- to late twentieth century when the Great Reshuffle finally came to the subcontinent. Instead, India’s leaders and bureaucrats took up a plan to divert small plots from the holdings of large landlords into the hands of people who worked the land, while readying several related reforms to land access and use that were similar in spirit to tiller reforms.
The reforms India pursued rested on three fundamental planks. The first was the abolition of the much-despised landlords, known as zamindars, and the intermediaries who collected exploitative rents from a sea of rural tenants on their behalf. This reform favored the tillers who worked under the landlords’ thumbs. The second plank entailed setting maximum landholding amounts and redistributing land above those amounts from large landowners to the landless along the lines of a classic tiller reform. The third plank involved regulating land tenancy. Most Indians who worked in agriculture did so not as owners but as tenants, leasing their lands or sharecropping for an owner. Few of these farmers had secure rights or contracts, and consequently they often suffered from threats of eviction and other abuses, such as shifting payment terms from landlords. Tenancy regulations progressively shifted to their advantage, giving these farmers more autonomy and a greater share of the income they produced. The program mimicked a tiller reform in its effects but did not go so far as to actually transfer land ownership.
The legislative and administrative burden for land reallocation rested with Indian states under the constitution. States adopted a wide raft of reforms, which also varied in their extent. But it was the third plank—land tenancy reform—that would see the most action in India. The Indian state of West Bengal, wedged next to Bangladesh, pursued some of the most ambitious projects.
West Bengal seethed with peasant unrest and rural social movements in the late 1960s and 1970s. A nascent leftist insurgency advocated land occupations and land reallocation. After a period of political instability and conservative rule, the local Communist Party chapter charged into office in 1977. It promptly set to work on land reform as a defining issue and the following year announced Operation Barga: a bold effort to transform land use and agriculture in the state by bolstering the land rights and income of West Bengal’s several million sharecroppers.
This flagship program was wildly popular. It fueled impressive growth in agricultural productivity and a substantial reduction in poverty. The Communists rode its legacy and retained power over the state until 2011. But Operation Barga had a dark side: it supercharged male-biased inheritance motives among the mass of sharecroppers in the state by strengthening the heritability of their land rights. The result was that it exacerbated gender discrimination within a society where social norms and practices already heavily favored men.
within india, west Bengal is traditionally viewed, along with the state of Kerala, as a major success story for its rewiring of land use and land allocation. However, the road to reshuffling land was long and bumpy. Early land legislation in 1953 and 1955 had only mild impacts. These laws aimed at a tiller reform by setting maximum landholding sizes and reallocating land above the maximum to the landless. But because the maximum was set fairly high—and those with large landholdings were clever in evading the law, using tactics such as transferring pieces of land to family members and friends—the ultimate effect was blunted.30 These laws also impacted land tenancy, perhaps most notably by eliminating zamindars—the local landholding nobles who had collected taxes for the British in the colonial era from tenant farmers on their land. Land was transferred to the state, and tenants had the state as a new landlord.31
West Bengal enacted another land reform act in 1971 at the end of several years of rural unrest and fractious leftist politics. It had two parts. The first part was a tiller reform, which set a strict upper limit on landholding size of five to seven hectares (twelve to seventeen acres), with additional land to be reallocated among landless families.32 Landowner evasion and land transfers among family members watered down this portion of the law. However, it still transferred some 7 percent of the land in the state, far higher than the national average of a little over 1 percent.33
The second part of the law was even more consequential. This part was a tenancy registration program, which was later amended and implemented vigorously when a stable coalition of left-wing parties came into office in 1977. Known as Operation Barga, the program simulated a tiller reform in its effects on land access. A considerable portion of West Bengal’s overwhelmingly rural population farmed as tenants on the properties of landlords without any formal rights or protections prior to Operation Barga. Several million were sharecroppers.34 Landlords could evict tenants arbitrarily with no notice and without consequence, change payment terms at will, and take the bulk of the agricultural products that tenants produced. Operation Barga formalized tenancy arrangements, made tenancy rights heritable, created punishments for arbitrary eviction, and required landlords to provide proof of identity of tenants, rather than the other way around. The program also capped the portion of the harvest that landlords could claim from their sharecroppers at 25 percent.35
Land reform in West Bengal, and Operation Barga in particular, transformed the countryside. Farms of rice, potatoes, oilseeds, and other crops began to buzz with greater activity. Sharecroppers worked harder on their lands. They invested more in much-needed infrastructure, such as irrigation, and adopted new high-yielding seed varietals. Gradually they became wealthier.36 And they began investing more in the education of their children.37 Meanwhile, landlords were cut down to size, and their social and economic roles in local life were diminished. The program inscribed and registered roughly 1.5 million sharecroppers by the early 1990s.38
But Operation Barga intensified gender discrimination. A recent study shows that the program encouraged parents to favor sons over daughters at birth to ensure that at least one son could inherit family land rights.39 The study uncovered increased survival rates of young boys in families without a firstborn son but not in those with a firstborn son. It also documented increased survival rates of girls with firstborn brothers but not with firstborn sisters. The sex ratio at birth reflected this pattern too, suggesting gender biases in abortion choices.
In essence, Operation Barga aggravated a preexisting bias toward passing land on to men rather than women by strengthening the ability to inherit land rights. The effects were largest for Hindu families, in which land rights were already customarily inherited and primarily passed through sons. The policy seeped into intimate choices over family planning and the gender-based treatment of young children.
Operation Barga is not the only land-related reform that has worsened the position of women within Indian society since independence. Land and tenancy reforms in the state of Uttar Pradesh also reinforced gender inequality within the families of beneficiaries. These reforms did not acknowledge the presence of women in farming, and well into the twenty-first century only male descendants were made principal heirs to land.40
Several studies also indicate that gender-progressive reforms to property inheritance laws from the 1970s through the 1990s had negative consequences. The Hindu Succession Act of 1956 stipulated that while sons and daughters both had rights to inheriting land that a father accumulated during his lifetime, only sons had a birthright to ancestral joint family property. Given that most land is jointly owned, this rule excluded women from land inheritance in most places.41 A handful of southern Indian states amended this law from the 1970s through the 1990s to extend women’s inheritance rights to joint property. However, these reforms did not actually increase the likelihood of women inheriting land. Instead, most families circumvented the law by “gifting” their land to their sons.42 At the same time, these reforms raised female child mortality rates, caused an increase in female suicides, and increased the incidence of wife beating.43 A countrywide reform to the act in 2005 brought gender equality to inheritance, but even that has not considerably enhanced women’s land ownership.
Land reallocation policies in India since independence, to the extent knowable, have had little to no appreciable impact on women holding land.44 Today women in India make up only 14 percent of landowners and own just 11 percent of agricultural land in rural households.45 Most of these landowning women gain land through their marital families, typically as widows. Consistent with this, women are more likely to inherit land as widows than as daughters, in spite of recent legal efforts to strengthen daughters’ claims to inheritance. And few women are co-owners in joint family property.
Meanwhile, by rocking the boat socially, ostensibly progressive land policies have actually backfired in certain instances as land became a more common object of dispute within traditional families and worsened gender relations. Greater land rights and ownership among the poor have raised the stakes over its control. Fathers fear losing control over their land if they cede it to married daughters, and daughters fear upsetting domestic life and damaging family relations if they claim their legal shares to land.
This situation has helped to fuel an epidemic of gender violence, discrimination, and suicide in modern Indian society, where nearly 65 percent of people still live in rural areas and depend on land for their livelihoods. One in three women report being the victim of domestic abuse.46 The country accounts for over one-third of the world’s female suicides, with family problems as the chief driver.47 It is the most common cause of death for young women.48 And India has long had a skewed sex ratio at birth in favor of boys as a result of male-preference sex selection—the country’s approach to the Great Reshuffle only made this problem worse.49
Patriarchy did not originate in land reshuffles. The story of gendered inequality is much older than the shifts in land ownership that followed the Great Reshuffle. But decisions about who gets the land can sharpen a society’s sexism, and land power can entrench patriarchy nearly to the point of invulnerability. India offers a stark view of how land power can exacerbate the ugliest forms of gender inequity.
EL SALVADOR’S WAR ON WOMEN
Gendered land reallocation doesn’t just reflect conservative social intents and build on existing gender hierarchies. It can actually set women back by targeting them directly.
On March 4, 1980, El Salvador’s ruling all-male military junta called a secret meeting. One of its members had just resigned, and a seasoned former politician who had been exiled to Venezuela joined it. The meeting agenda had one item: land reallocation. The junta gathered top personnel from the Salvadoran Institute of Agrarian Transformation and the Ministry of Agriculture at a hotel and barred them from leaving. Over the course of the next twenty-four hours, the group designed and published a radical plan to reallocate the country’s land from large landowners to peasants.50
The military then deployed some 10,000 members on the night of March 5 to transport an army of agronomists, land technicians, and troops to seize all large landholdings in the country by March 6. Landowners were stunned. After decades presiding at the pinnacle of El Salvador’s economy and political system, they lost control of their most powerful asset.
El Salvador’s large landowners were not the only losers. As in Canada and West Bengal, women lost too. Many women lost land in the broader umbrella of land reallocation policies in the subsequent decade. At the same time, women struggled to qualify as beneficiaries of the junta’s land policies that wrote right around them. The government doled out land to male heads of household and repeatedly passed over women. By the end of the 1980s, a country beset by gender inequality and discrimination had managed to deepen it considerably.
Just a few decades prior, El Salvador’s economy and its gender relations were stifling. As of the early 1960s, the majority of the population lived in rural areas and worked in agriculture, but nearly 40 percent of the land was held by less than 0.5 percent of the largest landholders.51 The bottom 85 percent of landowners collectively held only 15 percent of the land. By the late 1970s, the majority of rural families were landless.52 Many worked on the large estates of powerful and wealthy interlocking family clans.53 The poor understood their position: the conservative government brutally repressed a mass revolt and land invasions in the early 1930s and ignored or undercut them for several more decades.
Women played traditional gender roles and faced discrimination on many fronts. Patriarchy and machismo put women in subordinate roles in the household, economy, and society.54 Few women, aside from widows or elite women, had independent access to land or other resources that they could use to shape their livelihoods and their families.
The status quo started showing cracks in the 1970s. State repression began radicalizing civic organizations. Rural protests and land invasions of large properties increased despite government crackdowns and threats from paramilitary groups that operated on behalf of landowners.
A dissident military faction toppled the government in 1979 and set up a revolutionary junta that declared a land reform. Government turnover amid a brewing civil war in the ensuing years drove twists and turns in the policies, but there was one constant: men got the lion’s share of land and women lost out. Women would only start to gain more land than they lost after civil war ended in the early 1990s and a new era of more gender-progressive—though still not gender-equal—land reallocation dawned.
the military junta’s 1980 land reallocation program envisioned three phases of reform. The first phase, implemented on those fateful few days in early March, expropriated some 470 estates larger than 1,200 acres and refashioned them as worker cooperatives.55 The cooperatives inscribed the permanent laborers who had previously worked the land on those estates. Those new cooperative members decided key issues, such as land allocation, worker pay, and profit-sharing, among themselves.
El Salvador’s cooperative reform encompassed one-fifth of the country’s farmland and a similar share of its agricultural workers.56 A second phase sought to expand the first by expropriating and reallocating medium-size landholdings, but it never got off the ground, and the government called it off in 1982.
Despite the cooperative reform’s laudable immediate consequences for rural workers, it heavily disadvantaged women in practice and eroded their position within society relative to men. The reform granted cooperative access to one member per beneficiary household. Because social custom dictated that adult men served as heads of households in mixed-gender homes, men predominated heavily over women as cooperative members.57 Even women who did serve as heads of households were underrepresented in cooperatives. Women headed 22 percent of households in rural areas of El Salvador but constituted only 12 percent of reform beneficiaries nationwide.58
The intrepid women who managed to win cooperative membership became second-class citizens. Cooperatives gave some members access to individual parcels of land. But whereas 82 percent of men gained access to individual land, only 65 percent of women were able to do so, and their land was typically smaller in size and of poorer quality.59
The minority status of women within cooperatives likely further eroded their initially tenuous position by giving them a limited role in decision-making. Although there are no comprehensive studies of how El Salvador’s land cooperatives impacted women’s progress, similarly constructed and gender-exclusionary cooperatives in Peru and Nicaragua from the same period show how women’s wages and productivity within cooperatives came to lag behind men’s, in part owing to a gendered divide in technical knowledge, access to resources, and land use patterns.60
The next round of reform in El Salvador was a far more gradual tiller reform, starting in April 1980. The United States played an important role in designing and advocating this reform. It had key similarities to the tiller reform that the United States had implemented in South Vietnam during the Vietnam War.61 The goal was to convert peasants who rented their land as tenants into landowners. The government negotiated to pay landowners for their land and then attempted to pass the costs on to beneficiaries on an extended payment plan. This program suffered from poor advance planning, resistance from landowners, and administrative problems, but ultimately transferred about one-third the amount of land that was allocated through the cooperative reform.
Like the cooperative reform, the tiller reform favored men over women. Much of the land that it impacted had been farmed by small landowners who rented it out or sharecropped it. Widows and single women featured prominently within this group. Consequently, women made up 36 percent of those expropriated through the tiller reform.62 But for reasons similar to the cooperative reform, women had a hard time becoming beneficiaries of the tiller reform. In the end, 10 percent of the beneficiaries were women, and the reform had the effect of tilting land ownership in the countryside more toward men.
El Salvador’s civil war came to an end through a negotiated settlement in 1992. The peace accords sparked another round of land reallocation. This time women’s organizations formed to demand fair treatment on the basis of gender. The most prominent voice was a group called Las Dignas (The Dignified), which was affiliated with the country’s main guerrilla group, the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (known by its Spanish acronym, FMLN).63 Many of the group’s members held high-ranking positions within the FMLN and had long fought for social transformation in Salvadoran society and against the marginalization of women.64
Las Dignas asserted that women heads of household should have priority in land transfers. They also argued that land should be allocated to individuals rather than households so that women with partners would receive land directly. Their demands were in part met. The program that emerged from the peace accords was a tiller reform that operated based on cooperation between the government and the market. Ex-combatants from both sides and the FMLN’s civilian supporters received land. Private landowners, as well as cooperatives with space for more members, willingly sold off plots to land applicants, with a new national Land Bank to serve as a broker between the parties. The program doled out land to nearly 40,000 beneficiaries in the decade after the war’s conclusion, encompassing more than 10 percent of the country’s agricultural land.65
Women fared much better in this new round of land reallocation than in the previous one, constituting 34 percent of beneficiaries. But the fact that this figure was still far from gender parity reflects the difficulties in achieving equal treatment for women. Local government functionaries and FMLN cadres who executed the land transfers still prioritized male heads of household and imposed requirements like literacy and possession of official documents, such as birth certificates or voter registration cards, which disproportionately precluded women from receiving land.66
This third wave of land reallocation was El Salvador’s last significant attempt at such a policy. Taken together, the struggle to reallocate land in the country had served to place women at an enormous disadvantage within society by depriving them of access to a critical asset that shapes long-term well-being.
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despite their very different settings and structures, a settler reform in Canada, a tiller-like reform in India, and a varied series of reforms in El Salvador all had the same ultimate effect: they discriminated against or ignored women and in doing so deepened their marginalization within society. While a patriarchal outcome was hardwired into the design of Canada’s settler reform, it was not an explicit goal in India or El Salvador. Nonetheless, the men who designed the programs in India and El Salvador would not have been much perturbed by the outcomes that favored men. Their motivations and goals were far more deeply rooted in political and economic concerns. Women were an afterthought.
The power of land makes it a potent tool for change. But time and again, countries have failed to manage land reallocation in a way that yields positive transformation. Those failures are all too apparent when it comes to gender. As the Great Reshuffle swept the globe over the past two centuries, governments handed out wave after wave of land to men at the expense of women.
This tendency has cut across all types of reforms and across the political spectrum. At times it has reflected inherently patriarchal and conservative priorities, as in Spain’s settler reform under General Francisco Franco, which also rewarded male heads of household, skirting women and leaving them dependent on men for their livelihoods. Italy’s post–World War II tiller reform achieved much the same result. Yet cooperative and collective reforms by putatively left-wing governments have typically had similar effects. Men came to dominate decision-making and won the most lucrative and powerful positions within cooperatives and collectives, and in doing so made women second-class citizens in Peru in the 1970s, in Nicaragua in the 1980s, and in other nations. Several collective reforms, such as those in China after World War II, and in Russia after World War I, have made notable efforts to avoid this trap. But even those efforts at elevating women’s access to land have foundered at the foot of both remaining gender discrimination and authoritarian politics, which prevented anyone from truly thriving off the land.
Gaining land is like riding an escalator to status and power. Land reallocation policies the world over have put men on the escalator and left women to take the stairs. But the Great Reshuffle did not stop there. It has also consigned large portions of the population, both men and women, to an unsustainable, extractive relationship to the land and its resources. Land power, after all, is not just about who gets the land, but about how it is used.