Women in the Urban Informal Sector: Perpetuation of Meagre Earnings

The argument of exploitation of women workers in the labour market notwithstanding, this article examines whether women in India are unable to participate fully in the labour market because they are required to combine their household activities with income yielding jobs. They are constrained to work in the neighbourhood of their residence (the location of the residence having been decided upon by male family members), and can access jobs only through informal contacts (which usually means they end up in jobs similar to those of the contact persons), both of which reduce their bargaining power considerably. The tendency for specialized activities to be concentrated in different geographic locations of a city further restricts the possibility of women workers being engaged in diverse jobs and thus aggravates the situation of an excess supply of labour in a particular activity. Constrained choice, limited contacts of women and physical segmentation of the labour market perpetuate forces that entrap women workers in a low‐income situation with worse outcomes than those of their male counterparts. Consequently with greater intensity of work they still continue to receive low wages, while residual participation in the labour market restricts the possibilities of skill formation and upward mobility. All of these factors offer a substantive basis for policy recommendations.     

Restructuring women’s work; labour market and household gender regimes in the Greater Latrobe Valley,Australia

This article examines the impact of economic restructuring on gender relations. It examines the implications of labour market change for households within a region, in this case the Greater Latrobe Valley, Victoria, Australia. The argument is that the unchanging gender structures of the labour market constrain the intentions and efforts of individuals within households to significantly alter household gender relations. The analysis considers how restructuring has reshaped the regional labour market since 1996, changing opportunities for both men’s and women’s employment. Despite these changes, the regional labour market continues to be underpinned by a ‘male breadwinner’ gender regime and significant occupational and industrial gender segregation. Drawing on four vignettes, the analysis shows that the impetus towards greater gender equality in the household is constrained by a stagnant and stable labour market gender regime.     

Migrant mothers,left-behind fathers: the negotiation of gender subjectivities in Indonesia and the Philippines

The distinct feminization of labour migration in Southeast Asia – particularly in the migration of breadwinning mothers as domestic and care workers in gender-segmented global labour markets – has altered care arrangements, gender roles and practices, as well as family relationships within the household significantly. Such changes were experienced by both the migrating women and other left-behind members of the family, particularly ‘substitute’ carers such as left-behind husbands. During the women’s absence from the home, householding strategies have to be reformulated when migrant women-as-mothers rewrite their roles (but often not their identities) through labour migration as productive workers who contribute to the well-being of their children via financial remittances and ‘long-distance mothering’, while left-behind fathers and/or other family members step up to assume some of the tasks vacated by the mother. Using both quantitative and qualitative interview material with returned migrants and left-behind household members in source communities in Indonesia and the Philippines experiencing considerable pressures from labour migration, this article explores how carework is redistributed in the migrant mother’s absence, and the ensuing implications on the gender roles of remaining family members, specifically left-behind fathers. It further examines how affected members of the household negotiate and respond to any changing gender ideologies brought about by the mother’s migration over time.     

Women's Work and Market Hierarchies Along the Border of Lao PDR

Contrary to claims by some neo‐liberalists that international borders are becoming irrelevant, market liberalisation can actually enhance the effect that borders have on the lives of the people living along them. This study examines how the opening of border trade between Laos and Thailand has influenced gender divisions of labour, and definition of women's work along the border zone. Studies were undertaken in two border areas in Lao PDR—Sayaboury province and Kammoune province. In the former, cotton‐weaving activities were studied and in the latter, sticky rice box production. The production and trading of these commodities brought crucial cash income to the women studied and their households. How the women benefited from these activities in terms of income and status depends on how other members of the family perceived these activities. However, the formalisation of the border trade has changed women's ‘sense of space’ and their relations with men and other women.     

The Discourse of Maendeleo and the Politics of Women’s Participation on Mount Kilimanjaro

Studies of participatory development and empowerment often fail to place people’s actions and motivations within their wider cultural, social, political and economic context. Drawing on fieldwork which looked at village‐based women’s groups on Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, this article deconstructs the dominant discourse of development on the mountain (maendeleo) to show how women’s participation in their local organizations is used as a strategy to boost their social status and financial gains. Local, national and global discourses on development, modernity and gender are reappropriated by Chagga men and women to produce a normative Chagga developmental subjectivity which women can demonstrate by participating in women’s groups. The over‐representation of better‐off and higher‐status women in these groups suggests that, in excluding the poorest women, participation in women’s groups is serving to legitimate, and perpetuate, existing inequalities within Chagga society.     

The Costs of Exclusion: Gender Job Segregation,Structural Change and the Labour Share of Income

While women's share of employment has risen in many countries over the last two decades, gender job segregation has worsened, with women increasingly excluded from ‘good’ jobs in the industrial sector. In this article, the determinants of gender job segregation are assessed using panel data for a broad set of developing countries covering the period 1991–2015. The effect of gender job segregation on all workers, via the labour share of income, is also analysed. The results identify two major contributors to gender job segregation — the rising capital/labour ratio and the ratio of female/male labour force participation rates — indicative of ‘crowding’ and exclusion as economies move up the industrial ladder. The analysis further indicates that the crowding of women into lower quality jobs has a negative effect on workers as a whole by dampening the labour share of income. Those processes are influenced by global and macroeconomic conditions and policies that have circumscribed the expansion of high‐quality jobs relative to labour supply, intensifying competition for ‘good’ jobs and weakening labour's bargaining power.     

History lessons for gender equality from the Zambian Copperbelt, 1900–1990

This article explores the historical causes and consequences of gender divisions of labour in the Zambian Copperbelt. Male breadwinner and female housewife stereotypes appear to have emerged as a product of imported Christian ideologies, colonial–capitalist concerns and an economic climate that largely enabled men to financially provide for their families. Reliant upon husbands for status and economic support, many urban women had little conjugal bargaining power. Gender divisions of labour also meant that people lacked first-hand evidence of women’s equal competence in employment and politics, who they thus often underrated and overlooked. Such perceptions seem to have perpetuated women’s exclusion from prestigious positions – a pattern sustained by macro-economic circumstances in the early decades of Independence. Compliance with the gender status inequalities promoted in pre-marital traditional initiation thus became necessary to marital and economic security, as well as respectability, which was not previously the case. While there were exceptions to these trends, the historical record illustrates the interplay between patterns of resource access, internalised gender stereotypes and cultural expectations.     

Women's Admission to Guilds in Early‐Modern England: The Case of the York Merchant Tailors’ Company, 1693–1776

The admission of women into the York merchant tailors’ is a remarkable episode in the history of post‐medieval guilds. Within England, the York experience was probably exceptional; across Europe more generally, it can be classified as a rare phenomenon. The article analyses male and female merchant tailors and apprentices in order to identify the gender‐specific characteristics of women guild members. It argues that the decision of the York Company to admit women illustrates that guilds could be flexible in their responses to female employment, depending on local conditions, particularly the attitude of the civic corporation. In consequence, generalisations about the relationship between guild regulation and women's work need to be tested against the results of specific case studies.     

Women's Work in Urban Bangladesh: Is there an Economic Rationale?

The general phenomenon that women in Bangladesh engage less frequently in market work than men is commonly explained as the lack of response of female labour to economic imperatives due to the overarching influence of purdah. However, this emphasis on a cultural rationale for gender-differentiated work behaviour diverts attention away from the deep-rooted economic inequalities at the societal level. This article examines women's work in urban Bangladesh from a female labour supply and demand perspective that is rooted in the socio-economic institutional context. The study finds that, despite the strong gender segregation of economic roles, women's roles are more flexible and lend themselves to changing household strategies more easily compared to men's. The evidence indicates that female labour market participation is largely the outcome of the supply effect shaped by the pattern of gender roles and gender-specific access to human capital. Consequently, women are relegated to low-skill market activities and have lower earnings than men, even without any overt discrimination in labour demand. The covert discrimination that leads women to pursue a different pattern of labour use than men is the fundamental gender bias of socio-economic institutions that govern household allocational decisions and dictate gender-specific behaviour.     

‘For the Elections,We Want Women!’: Closing the Gender Gap in Zambian Politics

This article examines the causes of women's rising political participation in Zambia. It argues that women's historical paucity in politics was largely the result of widely‐shared gender stereotypes. These are now weakening due to growing flexibility in gender divisions of labour, which has been catalysed by worsening economic security. By performing work previously presumed to be beyond their abilities and valorized because of its association with masculinity, such women are increasingly perceived as equally capable of leadership. This gradual erosion of gender beliefs has fostered women's political participation and leadership in Zambia.     

Gender Equality Policies in Rwanda: Public Relations or Real Transformations?

This article examines Rwanda's gender equality policies with the intention of contributing to the ongoing debate in the literature on the meaning of gender equality initiatives in authoritarian states. The article evaluates the transformative potential of Rwanda's gender equality policies with reference to deep‐rooted societal norms and practices within which gender inequalities are embedded. To this end, the article draws on in‐depth interviews conducted in Rwanda with a range of stakeholders, as well as on documentary research. It explores the factors informing the Rwandan commitment to gender equality, and the positive developments this has brought about, before identifying five trends that threaten the transformative potential of Rwandan gender equality policies. The authors conclude that while a strong political will and target‐driven policies offer opportunities for promoting gender equality, the transformative potential is jeopardized by the dominance of an underlying economic rationale; the neglect of the ‘invisible labour’ of women; the formalistic implementation of gender policies and their focus on quantitative results; the limited scope for civil society voices to influence policy; and the lack of grassroots participation.     

Contested Meanings: Protection and Resistance in Labour Inspectors’ Reports in Twentieth-Century Greece

Reports written by Labour Inspectors responsible for the implementation of protective labour legislation in Greek industry during the period 1913–34 are analysed both as discourses that construct new industrial relations and as sources that provide evidence of workers’ resistance. To account for their difficulty in implementing labour laws, Inspectors defined themselves as agents of ‘progress’ struggling against the ‘backwardness’ of the working masses, especially as expressed in gender attitudes. Yet the reports also provide evidence of divergent cultural meanings and unravel the multiple ways in which men and women workers negotiated their identities.     

Resolving Risk? Marriage and Creative Conjugality

The idea of rural women as risk‐averse food producers has been powerful and persistent and constitutes one of our most enduring generalizations. This contribution begins with some critical thoughts about the prevalent consensus on women and risk behaviour and goes on to discuss some counter examples of risk‐taking women farmers in Zimbabwe and Zambia. It argues that risk behaviours of these kinds are strongly related to the character of marriage and forms of conjugality, and considers more broadly how insurance and dependence are gendered. There is a danger of overdrawing, and exclusively emphasizing, household and marriage as sites of gender subordination and thereby losing sight of the value to women of domestic groups and the existence of class‐based solidarities and emotional investments, across gender, which are intertwined with gender subordinations. To recognize these (and other) positive aspects of institutions of kinship and marriage, without simultaneously endorsing subordination, requires a focus on change and women's agency within such institutions, and the happy thought that there is no such thing as the status quo. This study therefore considers myths made within different but overlapping contexts; first the idea of women as reliably risk averse (as well as disadvantaged in access to insurance) which holds sway in international development organizations and some gender analysis; and second, the myth of households as composed of entirely separate individuals with opposed gender interests, in which marriage is predominantly a contract legitimating the exploitation of women. Marriage works as a safety net for women in many contexts, as a form of insurance, but it may become an impediment to accumulation — a feature shared with other social security institutions.     

The Structure of ‘Revealed‘ Preference: Race,Community and Female Labour Supply in the London Clothing Industry

This article takes as its starting point the overwhelming concentration of Bangladeshi women in the homeworking sector of the clothing industry in London. This pattern forms a contrast to the large numbers of male Bangladeshi workers also concentrated in the garment industry but who are to be found mainly in the factories and sweatshops. The article uses the accounts given by the Bangladeshi homeworkers themselves for their concentration in this form of work to explore different theoretical explanations of female labour supply behaviour, focusing in particular on questions of choice and constraint, culture and economy. The study suggests that the ‘preferences' revealed by the labour market behaviour of Bangladeshi women cannot be attributed solely to them, but must be seen in terms of bargaining and negotiation with other, more powerful members of the family. Furthermore, the intra-household decision-making process is itself embedded within a broader institutional environment which determines the access enjoyed by different groups to socially-valued resources. For Bangladeshis, a key factor in this broader environment is the operation of racially-based forms of exclusion from the mainstream opportunities. Consequently, community solidarity and networks represent important symbolic and material resources for members. However, these resources are distributed in highly gender-specific ways, with very clear implications for women's place within the community. The article argues therefore that any attempt to explain Bangladeshi women's concentration in homework has to move beyond a focus on either individual circumstances or cultural norms to an exploration of the interaction of racism, community identity and gender relations in shaping women's labour market options.     

Work,Gender & History in the 1990s and Beyond

By the end of the 1980s, having amply demonstrated that the study of class could no longer be separated from the study of gender, feminist historians were advocating a new gendered history of work. At the beginning of the 1990s, American historian Ava Baron identified four problems that women's labour history had left unresolved: the need to move women's labour history out of its ghetto; an explanation for the mechanisms of sexual difference in labour relations; the theorisation of women's and men's ‘consent’ to oppression; and an understanding of the differences among women. The quest for a gendered labour history required new conceptual tools and new theoretical approaches. This paper tests this agenda against research on work and gender in the last decade of Gender & History. The moves toward the interrelation of public and private, work and family, as well as toward the construction of identities calls into question whether work remains a distinctive historical field.     

'They Never Trusted Me to Drive': Farm girls and the gender relations of agricultural information transfer

This research explores the ways in which the gender relations of family farming influence the transfer of agricultural information and knowledge resources to farm girls, a rarely studied population. The study is based on a sample of 32 female farmers from southern Ontario, who were interviewed extensively about their experiences growing up on family farms, and about their lives as adult farmers. Their accounts underscore the fact that the gendered division of labour evident on North American farms constrains the information passed on to farm girls (and women) in particular ways. Farm girls do not share fully in the occupational inheritance of agriculture - they are frequently excluded or marginalised from important agricultural resources, including information. This exclusion comes about through the ongoing social processes of agrarian patriarchal culture, operating both inside and outside of the agri-family unit. In particular, the study illustrates how the social construction of agriculture is heavily reinforced by certain types of myth-making, which work to disadvantage farm girls and women.     

The Company Owns the Mine but They Don't Own Us: Feminist Critiques of Capitalism in the Coalfields of Kentucky in the 1970s

This article examines women's involvement in the Brookside Mine strike of 1974, which captivated US audiences and provided women with an unprecedented public platform to challenge the class and gender system undergirding coalfield capitalism. During the strike, female kin of miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, started a club to support striking miners and their families and to organise picket lines; they were joined by women from across the region and country. With the strike as their foundation these women generated a women's movement that revealed the specific ways class and gender inequality shaped their lives, defined by the heavy‐duty care work characteristic of the coalfields. This article argues that the Brookside women's support of striking miners was fundamentally about gendered class inequality: the denigration of working‐class, female caregivers alongside the devaluing of men's labour. Using collective memory and individual experience as their interpretive devices, the Brookside women forged a class‐conscious feminism. In it they exposed the traumas of coalfield capitalism, shone a light on women's unpaid care work (one of the foundations of corporate capitalism) and destabilised the gender and class hierarchies that defined coalfield communities.     

Engendering the New Enclosures: Development,Involuntary Resettlement and the Struggles for Social Reproduction in Coastal Tanzania

This article engages with the feminist concept of ‘social reproduction’ to arrive at a richer understanding of the gendered processes and outcomes of contemporary large‐scale land acquisitions, or the ‘new enclosures’. It focuses on the case of a recent land deal for industrial sugarcane production in the Coast Region of Tanzania and the resultant process of involuntary resettlement. It critically analyses people's struggles for land in the face of imminent displacement, and the gendered ways they experience the erosion of their pre‐existing modes of social reproduction. It argues that enclosure of rural landscapes does more than immediately strip peasants and pastoralists of their means of production and turn them into wage labourers. It gradually uproots them from their socio‐ecological knowledges, cultural practices and historical memories, which are rooted on the land and articulated through gender. The highly uncertain processes of enclosure and displacement also force rural women and men to renegotiate their livelihood strategies and intra‐household gender relations.     

Hauling Down the Double Standard: Feminism,Social Purity and Sexual Science in Late Nineteenth‐Century Britain

Nineteenth‐century feminism and the related social purity movement, and the emergent scientific discourse of ‘sexology’, are usually seen as antagonistic. Both trends, in fact, were in profound opposition to the widespread assumption that the double moral standard was an embodiment of ‘natural’ transhistorical law. This article suggests that feminist agitation against the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s (and other manifestations of the deleterious legal status of women) overtly attacked unthinking social assumptions about sex and gender, destabilising concepts about the naturalness of the existing sexual system and creating the context for the pioneers of sexology to interrogate even further accepted notions of gender and sexuality.     

A Voice in the Nation: Women Journalists in the Early Nineteenth‐Century South

Recent work on southern women and intellectual life in the nineteenth‐century South has focused on women novelists. Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to literary periodicals as important vehicles through which women earned financial reward and often regional or national reputations as authors and editors. Perhaps most significantly, southern women viewed periodicals as opportunities to speak out boldly on politics and current events, much more so than in the novel. The wide availability after 1820 of magazines and newspapers, made possible by their low cost and portability, provided the perfect forum for women who wished to push against traditional gender boundaries. In examining southern women’s contributions to early nineteenth‐century periodical culture, one sees a vital part of the foundation being laid for later movements for women’s suffrage.