‘If you build him, he will build’: Rural Tanzanian women’s agency through home construction

Abstract This study explores how rural women mobilize discourses and practices from their village community bank to shape the construction of both “house” and “home”. I argue that women in rural Moshi, Tanzania, centre themselves in house construction by foregrounding their skills in budgeting, saving, and making plans, and in the home by centring trust, transparency, and their own agency in developing more equal marriage partners. They apply community bank discourse and practice to other ways of relating to others—in this case, their husbands, but more broadly, to potential sponsors and advocates. In the literal building of houses together, wives in rural Moshi metaphorically build themselves into particular kinds of “modern” subjects and their husbands into “modern” partners and collaborators, though these discourses are not equally accessible.