Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute Industry
Author(s)
Sen, Samita
Abstract
This explores the migration strategy of the peasant household and its impact on the women’s work. The declining Income from land, labor and crafts impelled larger numbers of women to participate in general and field labor. But their economic contribution to the family was increasingly devalued. First, their work was defined as ‘domestic’ and, therefore, ‘unproductive’. Second, as labor was cheapened, the difference between men’s and women’s earnings sharpened. Samita Sen’s history of laboring women in Calcutta in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries considers how social constructions of gender shaped their lives. Dr Sen demonstrates how – in contrast to the experience of their male counterparts – the long-term trends in the Indian economy devalued women’s labor, establishing patterns of urban migration and changing gender equations within the family. She relates these trends to the spread of dowry, enforced widowhood and child marriage.
