Women as Souvenir Vendors: An Effort to the Achievement of Gender Equality Through the Strengthening of the Economic Base of the Family

The purpose of this writing is to describe one of the efforts of the women in Bali who do jobs as souvenir vendors. In this type of job they sell any kinds of merchandises in order to fulfill the family necessity. This job is ideally and usually done by men for the reason of quite tiring and time-consuming for the achievement of the targeted income per day. In Bali however, the number of women who involved in this job is numerous. In the midst of her role as a wife as well as housewives, a woman has to prepare quite lots of things for the family, and she also has to work as a souvenir vendor. Usually, the women do this job during the day, exactly from 10 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. This indicates that, besides as a woman she does her duty as a wife and a mother by doing almost all of the house or domestic work. In fact, there is an expectation of being equalized when a woman has the ability and opportunity to earn a living or as breadwinners. In her family this condition will bring prestige since the position of women is to follow the ideology of patriarchy (it is known as purusa in Hindu belief) and this makes the Balinese Hindu women are quite difficult to achieve gender equality. Nevertheless, the women in Bali (Balinese Hindu women) are able to achieve the position of being equalized by strengthening the economic base of the family, including as souvenir vendors.