Gender and class relations in rural India

ABSTRACT

Rural Indian women’s labor force participation varies by class, with the biggest decreases in this share occurring in households reliant upon income from casual wage labor. This paper presents some preliminary evidence in favor of two hypotheses to explain this particular intersection of class and the gender. The first, that an intensification of rural women’s reproductive labor may play a role in their falling labor force participation rates. The second, that alongside a loss of access to the commons, this outcome is made more likely in an accumulation context marked by processes of formal subsumption to capital.

KEYWORDS:

• Reproductive labor
• capitalist accumulation
• female labor force participation
• rural
• India

Acknowledgements

The author acknowledges very helpful feedback from Vamsi Vakulabharanam, participants in the Political Economy workshop at UMass, Amherst, two anonymous reviewers, and the guest editors of this special issue.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Smriti Rao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7554-1384

Smriti Rao is Associate Professor of Economics at Assumption College, and Resident Scholar at the Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.

Notes

1 ‘Sanskritization’ describes the process by which Indian households make socio-economic status claims by adopting upper caste norms such as female seclusion, particular forms of dowry, certain religious rituals etc. (Srinivas 1998).

2 Due to the absence of a question on the household’s primary income source in the 1999-00 Employment Unemployment surveys, the 99–00 round cannot be included in this analysis. Furthermore, 2004–05 was an agricultural distress year, marked by drought in many parts of the country. There may thus be some unusual deviations from trends in that year.

3 There are important critiques of the use of land data to construct class categories (Patnaik 1976). Unfortunately, the limitations of the NSS data (which does not include data on hired in/hired out labor) compel the use of this relatively blunt categorization. For an explanation of the empirical categories used here and how they are calculated and constructed please see Vakulabharanam (2010) and Vakulabharanam and Motiram (2016).

4 I retain the distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural wage worker here because the gender dynamics of these two categories do appear to differ, as discussed below.

5 In the case of the NSS, those who do not report being in the labor force are then asked if they engage in ‘domestic’ work, or in ‘domestic and allied activities’. While domestic work is not clearly defined, allied activities are listed, and include the collection of firewood and water, the free collection of fruits and vegetables, kitchen gardening and so on. The term ‘reproductive labor’ thus covers those who report being principally engaged in only domestic, or domestic and allied activities. Hirway (2012) provides a detailed explanation of these categories, as well as the critique that this data undercounts women’s labor force participation.

6 Roy (2007) reports from her study of migrant workers in Kolkata that one rural woman interviewee reported commuting to the city to collect twigs and paper that she could use as firewood back in her village. In her village, she reported, she did not have access to even that.

7 It is possible for such a reversal of course to be restricted to one group of women (of a particular race or caste or class) while another continues to be restricted to unpaid labor.

8 See Das (2012) for a description of how, as an outcome of class struggle, agricultural wage workers in Kerala may be better described as really subsumed to capital, with unions setting wage and work conditions and the increasing use of technology by employers.

9 Such transient and varying kinds of labor are also much more likely to be mis-classified as non-work, thus increasing the share of women reported as being out of the labor force. This is especially true for women, but also for men, whose circular migration is being undercounted in NSS data (Breman 2010; Shah and Harriss-White 2011).

10 At the same time, these family structures also meant that groups stopped short of demanding complete dispossession in order to secure payments. They may indeed have colluded with each other to play different microcredit companies off against each other, using new loans from one company to repay old loans from another, ultimately leading to the bankruptcy of some of these microcredit firms.