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Gendered Exclusion: Domesticity and Dependence in Bengal*

Part of: Labour History and the Case against Colonialism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 February 2009

Samita Sen
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In Western Europe, industrialization brought far-reaching changes in the family-household system by separating the household from the workplace. Factories, especially, took work away from home and eroded the integrity of the household. The spatial separation between the household and the workplace became the foundation for a conceptual separation between the community and the market. Families were separated from trades, consumption from production, women's activities from men's. These separations, often expressed in the generalized formula of a “private-public” divide, have underscored a thoroughgoing gender division of labour far beyond the original divisions supposed to be rooted in biological reproduction. In industrialized Europe, the working-class household's needs could not be met from the combined economic activities of its members: men, women and children. Rather, the daily bread was to be “won” by individual wage earners and clearly the breadwinners were to be men. In contrast, the home became the site of women's reproductive activities devoid of assignable exchange value. Wives' and daughters' unpaid work was increasingly underwritten by family ideology and was eventually to be covered by the “family wage” paid to husbands and fathers.

Type
Research Article
Information
International Review of Social History , Volume 42 , supplement S5: The Rise and Decline of the Male Breadwinner Family? , September 1997 , pp. 65 - 86
Copyright
Copyright © Internationaal Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis 1999

References

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21 The decline in household grain processing is traced in Mukherjee, Mukul, “Impact of Modernisation of Women's Occupations: A Case Study of Rice Husking Industry in Bengal”, in Krishnamurty, J. (ed.), Women in Colonial India: Essays on Survival, Work and the State (New Delhi, 1989)Google Scholar.

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31 The definition of women's work changed in each Census. The Census of 1881 registered women in the husband's occupation. In 1901 and 1911 “women and children who work at any occupation, of whatever kind, not being merely an amusement or of a purely domestic character [were] entered” (emphasis added): Census of India (1901), VI, 1, p. 486. In addition, respondents often did not register women's employment. Census figures should be taken as rough guides.

32 The Magistrate of Tipperah, General Administration Report for the year 1884, para 21. Also see Banerjee, “Working Women in Colonial Bengal”, p. 289.

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71 Report of the Royal Commission on Labour in India, I, V and XI (London, 1931). Margaret Read was a member of this commission. She wrote three books which reflect such perceptions: Indian Peasant Uprooted (London, 1931); From Field to Factory (London, 1927); Land and Life of India (London, 1934).

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