Craft Production,

Technological Change and UNIT 20 WOMEN AND WORK*

Industrialisation
Structure
20.1 Introduction
20.2 Debating Women’s Work
20.3 Identifying Women’s Work
20.4 Historiography of Women, Work and Colonialism
20.5 Colonial State and Policies Towards Women’s Employment
20.6 Workers’ Movements and the Raising of Concerns About Women Workers
20.7 Crisis and the Visibility of Women
20.8 Summary
20.9 Exercises
20.10 Suggested Readings

20.1 INTRODUCTION
Perspectives on studying the history of women vary. There are writings that integrate women’s
issues and concerns into mainstream history. Then, there are those who look at developments
through a gendered gaze and include women in the narrative in a perspective that can be
called women-and-history. Another stream of scholarly work tracks women’s history as a
separate sphere and discipline itself, producing path-breaking monographs on women’s
movements for rights such as the suffragette movement, the role played by women in the
French Revolution, and the significance of women in the anti-colonial movement in India.
Ideas such as transnational intersectionality, second-wave feminism, women in movements
rather than the women’s movement, as put forward by Sheila Rowbotham, and concepts
such as maternal imperialists, used to describe people like Annie Besant, are yet other
perspectives (Basu, 2010; Molyneaux, 1985; Rowbotham, 1993; Ramusack, 1990).
Women’s work has been a difficult field to study on account of the nature of the work
women are engaged with. The boundaries between the home and the workplace form a
grey area because of contestations on what can be described as work. The domestic
labour debate – whether the chores undertaken at home, such as cooking, cleaning, laundry,
housekeeping, caring for children, caring for the elderly, and other activities that together
enable the reproduction of labour, should be counted as work or not – has questioned the
very conception and computation of women’s work. For the historian of labour, the
connections between gender, work, protest, legislation, state and institutions, unions, and
culture provide some tools to effectively evaluate the role of women workers. Labour
history traditionally was centred on tracing the concerns of the working class and therefore
focused on issues such as patterns of recruitment, conditions of work, wages, unions, and
political organisations. The fact that men have dominated these spaces has led to a perception
that women were barely visible in the histories of struggle. The variation in the share of
women in the industrial workforce in the colonial period, over time and over India’s vast
physical and cultural geography, also acted to underestimate the influence of women
workers on nuancing colonial industrialisation. Reform measures for women workers
were perceived to be part of either the paternalism of state policy or the goodwill of
unions, rendering women passive beneficiaries of reform or bestowed rights, rather than
as agents of such reform or rights. Increasingly, this perspective is getting challenged by
history from below providing us with evidence of women workers’ presence and their
articulation of demands in a deeply patriarchal, colonial society.

20.2 DEBATING WOMEN’S WORK

Nascent, distorted industrial development in colonial India offered women little opportunity.
Work in factories, the modern workplaces of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, included
women reluctantly and when convenient, as also excluded them easily. It is looking at this
320 *
Dr. M.V. Shobhana Warrier, Kamala Nehru College, University of Delhi, New Delhi
history of such inclusion and exclusion that yields insight into matters such as the nature of Women and Work
work available to women, the strictures on their employment, and the reasons thereof. It can
be observed that differential, discriminatory wages for women originated at the point of their
visibility in the workforce. It provides us with the historical terms and references of social
structures, ideological apparatus, and economic conditions in which women’s participation in
the workforce emerged.
Recognising the work done by women has not been a straightforward affair. Women perform
two kinds of labour: the labour to produce and reproduce labour on a daily and on an
inter-generational basis, organised through families, and unpaid for; and paid-for work, wage
labour, performed in the field or at the factory. Is there a rationale, apart from patriarchal
convention, for valorising the latter and discounting the former?

20.3 IDENTIFYING WOMEN’S WORK

In the present Section our focus would be on constructing women’s work through data –
composition of labour and the field of employment
In pre-industrial societies, the labour of women constituted an integral part of harnessing hands
for a range of tasks, as part of family labour – from working in the fields to harvesting fruit and
tending to animals to processing the produce from animals and plants. This was over and above
her dedicated role as the housekeeper and caregiver for the family. In colonial India, most households
needed to deploy the labour of women in home-based activities that took care of the economic
needs of the family or, as part of family teams, in mines, fields, and construction, to just name a
few of the sectors that used the labour of the entire family. In traditional crafts such as cotton
weaving, women were involved in the processing of cotton and spinning. In the coal mines,
women and children were part of sorting and carrying the coal. It was only after the Acts made
in 1922 and 1929, that prohibited the employment of women and children for night work and in the
underground mines and other dangerous work that women exited at least formally from such
work.
Tirthankar Roy in a working paper provides data that suggests the need for the entire family of
a peasant to work if it were to take care of its economic necessities in the colonial period.
Tirthankar Roy (2018: 13) argues, “Family budget surveys yield somewhat more optimistic
results. Income data report higher figures, the average being Rs. 244 in South India for a family
of four, or a per capita income of Rs. 61. This is not out of line with the range of incomes
reported for Bihar, from Rs. 20 for a labourer to Rs. 91 for a cultivating landlord. In South India,
however, non-farm incomes appear to have been substantial, including income from handloom
weaving, palmyra jaggery, areca nut, and soapnut, livestock, and trade.” For women, whether
urban or rural, pre-industrial or industrial, the margin between wage work and intra-family
work was a thin one (Roy, 2016: 184).1
Nature, nurture, and women as the ideological underpinning of most social groupings further
guided women to be dedicated to the household, along with paid work. And, as some scholars
describe, this became the reason for the dual burden that the woman workers’ lives are all about.
At a general level, this perspective continues to shape our world even today, where certain
occupations are seen to be the natural domain of women and are either unpaid or poorly paid
even post-industrialisation. This burden of housework and care work did not result in freedom
from other forms of labouring that women were apportioned, alternately the former just camouflaged
women’s work. This is the invisibility of women’s work that feminists have long disputed, and
research has sought to unveil as unpaid labour, with evidence from different parts of the world.
The paucity of data on women’s employment is an area of concern for the colonial period in
India. Tirthankar Roy (2000: 1442-1447) argues, using census data to test de-industrialisation
that, “employment statistics began from 1881 whereas the competition between Indian traditional
industry and British modern industry began much before that date. Can it be said that
de-industrialisation happened in the early 19th century and that it slowed down from the late
19th century?” So that even if the census shows no strong sign of de-industrialisation, that does
1
Roy also cites evidence from Japan where too entire peasant families’ labour was deployed to
make ends meet as the artisanal market shrank. 321
Craft Production, not deny that a decline occurred before the census period?” Women figure in the census
Technological Change and records in a range of economic activities: from agricultural work to factories and from
Industrialisation home-based spinning to petty trade and commerce. There are various categories under
which women’s work is represented – from primary to tertiary, trade and industrial. The
debate on deindustrialisation with the colonisation of the Indian economy hinges on the
reduction of women’s occupational participation between 1881-1931, taken to be a sign of
industrial decline and reduced availability of jobs to women. Scholars such as Daniel Thorner
and Alice Thorner have pointed out the difficulties of quantifying women’s work with the
census, the auxiliary nature of the work of women, and the blurring of boundaries between
occupational work and other work that women do for the home (Thorner and Thorner, 1962: 75-
78). An example they cite, is one from Madras, where the number of women blacksmiths is said
to be 3000, ditto the number of male blacksmiths! (Thorner and Thorner, 1962: Chapter 6). Hand
spinning, a part-time activity within households for women, became obsolete, but nonetheless
continued as a mechanism to survive, with the coming of factories as did threshing and polishing
of grain with the setting up of rice mills post-colonisation and commercialisation of agriculture.
The power-operated rice husking machines and their scuppering of work opportunities for women
is an area that has been studied by Mukul Mukherjee (1990: 180-198). Capital investment in
agricultural technology too would have contributed to the exit of women from such tasks, of
which they were traditionally a part. It also seems plausible that when traditional sectors were hit
with commercialisation, women who worked as part of families and crafts exited and then became
a minuscule section of the workforce that now were factory workers. This, to Tirthankar Roy,
explains the drop in the percentage of women in industry in the period between 1881 and1931.
Simultaneously, as can be seen historically in all societies, women continued to labour in those
sectors that are repetitive, labour-intensive, low-paying, and seasonal – agriculture notably being
one primary site of concentration of women’s economic activity.
Defining and quantifying the work of women overlap, as we have already mentioned, in
what is known as the domestic labour debate. The assumption is that the housework that
a woman commits herself to for long hours, while delivering labour that is important to
reproduce the family of the workers, cannot be counted as economic labour. However,
some scholars believe that domestic labour should also be part of the quantification of
women’s work. The lack of visibility of women’s labour remains a concern today. Jayati
Ghosh (2020), for example, argues that some kinds of work, identified with stipulated
codes in the National Sample Survey, eminently qualify to be counted as work, but is not.
To Tirthankar Roy, with the colonisation of the Indian economy and the evidence of nascent
industrialisation, there was the shift from self-employment to wage labour and in this
change to urban factories, the main migration was of single men while women continued
to work and live in the villages with the families. Tirthankar Roy has worked out the
figures of women’s employment for the period 1901-2001.
Women workers, 1901-2001 (numbers in millions, ratios in %)
1901 (UI) 2001 (IU)
Workers 43.0 127.2
Agriculture 27.5 91.1
Manufacturing 4.9 25.0
Wage Workers 14.8 66.2
Agriculture 9.4 49.4
Manufacturing 0.1 16.8
General labour 3.9 0.0
RatiosWomen Wage Workers/Wage Workers 46.3 38.9a
Women Workers/Workers 30.9 31.6
Women/Agricultural labourers 46.0 46.3
Women/Manufacturing workers 7.1 32.9
a: Agriculture and Manufacturing; UI: Undivided India; IU: Indian Union.
Notes: Categories included in wage workers in 1901 are farm servants, field-labourers, general labour, ‘operatives’ in
brickworks, stoneware, railways, presses, cotton gins and mills, jute mills, clothing units, silk factories, and mines.
Categories of wage workers for 1961 and 2001 are agricultural labour, mining, non-household industry, and construction.
Figures for 2001 include main and marginal workers. Source: Census of India, various years.
Source: Table 11.2 in Tirthankar Roy’s article Roy, Tirthankar (2016), “The Growth of a Labour Market in the
Twentieth Century” in A New Economic History, ed. Tirthankar Roy, Latika Chaudhary, Anand V. Swamy,
322 Bishnupriya Gupta, Routledge, p. 189.
Women were just 23% of the textile workforce in Bombay in 1926, barely 5% in Kanpur, Women and Work
and 10% in South India. In the jute industry, women were 20% of the workforce in
Calcutta during the interwar period (1918-1939). With the standardisation of wages and
increasing urbanisation, organised factory work became the male bastion in the cotton
textiles of Bombay, Madras, Madurai, and Coimbatore. Sunil Kumar Sen (1994: 2-3)
discussing the labour force of Bombay cites the decline of women in the workforce from
a quarter in the early years to twenty per cent from 1915 and even lower between 1934
and 1937. He attributes this decline to not just the unavailability of night work to women
and, with women losing jobs in the reeling departments but also because women workers
got married young, had to care for the young, and therefore were an unstable section of
the workforce.
Recent studies on women’s employment in contemporary rural India suggest that women
comprised over a third of workers in both agriculture and manufacturing and much lower
in services (Deshpande, 2005: 297). The share of women in Manufacturing industries
even as late as 1995 was just 11.5 % (Deshpande, 2005: 302).
Nandita Gandhi and Nandita Shah (2005: 320) raise a relevant point when they ask if
industrialisation is a gendered process. This is an important question to ask, for as we
noted at the outset, pre-industrial revolution societies included women’s labour not just in
the home but in a range of crafts and occupations as the circumstance might be.

20.4 HISTORIOGRAPHY OF WOMEN, WORK AND

COLONIALISM
Early history writings (Sukomal Sen, etc.), on the workers in colonial India concentrated
on aspects such as the composition of the workforce, union membership and issues taken
up by unions, nationalist involvement, the Communist party and workers’ struggles, in
general (Sen, 1977). Then there are those scholars who have tried to establish the close
relationship between labour and nationalism, particularly in the Congress policy towards
championing labour, which received added impetus during the 1937-39 ministry period
(Krishna, 1985). Some of the early pioneering studies on labour, such as that by Chitra
Joshi’s on the Kanpur Textile workers, situate the labour movement and the realignment
of community relations in the context of changes in the material structures such as wages
and the conditions of work. and look at the autonomous space of the labour movement
that takes shape under the Kanpur Mazdoor Sangh. Women were less than three per cent
of the workforce in the Kanpur mills, which precluded an examination, in her work, of
gender relations at the workplace (Joshi, 1982).
An early study on the textile labour of Bombay is by Dick Kooiman. His study highlights
the patron-client relationship that came out of the jobber system of recruitment. Raj
Narayan Chandavarkar is yet another significant scholar who has studied the making of
the Bombay working class, emphasising the workers’ connections in their places of
residence. Neighbourhood culture, he shows, nuanced politics, particularly during strike
times. Talking about how workers are pepped up to take higher workloads, he cites a mill
owner, S D. Saklatwala’s declamation to his male workers in 1939: “If a Lancashire girl
could manage six looms, – and ‘you know what type of girls you have in Lancashire’ –
and a Japanese girl, ‘perhaps with a weaker physical condition, manages 8 plain looms’,
how could a ‘hefty strong Indian ... claim that he cannot manage more than two looms?’
(Chandavarkar, 1994: 284). The challenge to Indian masculinity rides on and reinforces
the presumed inferiority of women to men.
The context is when in Bombay, men displaced women from departments earlier populated
by women, such as winding and reeling. Two pieces of protective legislation that
safeguarded women workers served as catalysts for their exit from the workplace – one
that made it illegal to employ women and children at night, and another that made it
mandatory for mills to pay women workers maternity benefits. Another reason ascribed
for the loss of work for women is technological change. A very rich representation of the
cultural, political, and social world of the workers in Bombay in the first half of the 20th 323
Craft Production, century is lucidly presented by Chandavarkar. However, when picketing of liquor shops is
Technological Change and discussed, or the strike committee and mobilisation are cited, the absence of women is
Industrialisation palpable but not quite comprehensible (Chandavarkar, 1994: 403-404. 416-417).
It is in Radha Kumar’s work that the implications of the emergence of Bombay as a
textile city for the employment of women are discussed in detail. The gendering of factory
occupations and the ideological basis of differential wages for men and women workers
are extensively discussed in this work (Kumar, 1982). The evidence for Bombay cotton
mills shows that most women who worked in the mills were single women and widows
while a few were from families of workers. Many of them were single migrants to the
city. This is in sharp contrast to the background of workers in the mill cities of the Tamil
regions of Madras Presidency, where women were mostly recruited from workers’ families
(Warrier, 1993). She makes a strong case for how unionisation and the idea of a family
wage concentrating on the idea of the male as the provider along with the reluctance of
the employers in the Bombay mills to pay women maternity benefits, as mandated by the
Maternity Benefit Act 1932, resulted in women losing mill jobs and their way of life in the
city of Bombay.
Samita Sen’s citing the jute industry shows the shift from a women-inclusive workforce to
a dominantly male one. From constituting 20 per cent of total workers late 19th century,
they hovered around 12-17% between 1890-1940 (Sen, 1999: 4). By the 1930s, mill owners
systematically recruited men and this led to women’s exclusion from the workforce.
Women workers were, single migrants, deserted, or widows who, she says, struggled
against both class and sexual oppression and were militant participants in strikes (Sen,
1999: 20, 29). According to Sen (1999: 53), the jute industry could do without employing
women as the male workers had their families in the villages where the women worked.
And in the case of the Jute mills, married women worked only during economic hardship,
and this helped keep women’s wages depressed.
Jan Breman (2004: 37), in his study of the Ahmedabad Textile workers, brings out the
dominantly male nature of recruitment that the textile industry, right from its inception in
1861, with the setting up of a cotton mill by Ranchodlal Chotalal. A few women found
occupations in those jobs that had to do with the preparation work at the mill, but they too
were eased out by the late 19th century in Ahmedabad.2 Some women continued,
particularly women from poorer families and lower castes, but with low wages and unskilled
work (2004: 24). There were a series of measures from 1891, when the Factories Act
passed that year limited working hours for women to 11 a day, causing women to petition
against the change, fearing loss of jobs. In 1922, the government prohibited night work
(7 pm-5.30 am) for women (2004: 58). The union raised the right of a worker to a family
wage, which would cover the cost of living for the worker’s family, in 1929. The owners
responded with the offer that men’s wages could go up, if rationalisation of work was
adopted, and women workers, whose husbands were employed and eligible for a family
wage, could be laid off (2004: 64-65). The process dragged on. The Textile Labour
Association’s attempt to get a better deal for male workers in 1935 completely alienated
women workers (2004: 65-67). Women workers, whose husbands worked at the mill, lost
jobs with the rationalisation (increased work efficiency and better wages) and increased
wages in the deal that AMA (Ahmedabad Millowners Association) made with the Majoor
Mahajan Sabha.
Sites of research on the gender dimension at the workplace are not just those that mark
the physical presence of women. The absence of women calls for an explanation or could
turn out to be illusory, a result of turning women invisible. If policy addresses women’s
concerns, that offers up research possibilities. That applies to protest action by women, as
well. Protests are examples of collective solidarity as well as differences that are integral
to plot the trajectories of their empowerment, and consciousness as both women and as
workers in a colonial environment. The woman worker’s everyday experience of work
conditioned their integration into the workforce as a worker on the one hand and
2
Jan Breman mentions that it is a protest by women workers when they were threatened with
324 dismissal due to the regulations making their work time lower than that of men.
simultaneously compartmentalised them mentally and socially as women and as women Women and Work
with ascriptive markers of caste and religious community. Thus, a social discourse and
mental universe came into being in which one can place the women workers’ meaningful
representation and self-imagination.
Research on the everyday practices at the cotton mills of Madras, Madurai, and Coimbatore,
in Southern India during the first half of the twentieth century finds, in the amalgam of
gender and caste relations that became critical during periods of strife, cultural notions of
the working class of the region defined and redefined (Warrier, 1993). In the initial period
of industrialisation, community networks were the only route maps connecting people to
work and work life. However, as networks of political associations, union formation for
and of workers, and special sub-committees for women workers came into being, the
opportunities available to workers changed dramatically. It is possible to delineate the
subjective experiences of women workers and map the meanings they make for themselves
at the workplace in various situations.
In the experience of work, ordinary workers (women as well as men) interact through the
institution of the union, as also autonomously, on occasions of protests, organised as well
as spontaneous. A few women trade union leaders offer striking examples of militancy
and sacrifice, one of them was martyred (Warrier, 1993). There emerged a set of cultural
practices among the mill workers that extended traditional, religious and social norms into
their work life at the mill, reflected in the kinds of demands that were espoused – holidays
for certain festivals, including puberty rituals of girl children, and religious celebrations
being notable. These created solidarities, as well as fragmentation.
Some scholars argue that employing women depressed trade union mobilisation, as they
were seen to be more amenable to discipline and control. In fact, the difference in the
intensity of trade union activity between militant trade union mobilisation in Madras, with
a history of innumerable strikes with a preponderantly male workforce, and less combative
Coimbatore, with a sizeable number of women employed in the cotton mills, has been
explained by Eamon Murphy on gender lines (Murphy, 1981). The fact of the matter is
that this analysis is based on man-days lost and strike figures; what that focus misses is
the visible, everyday resistance of women workers in the reeling and winding departments.
There is ample evidence of the militancy of women in strike actions in mills, strike breakers
would often be women on the front lines of the pickets blocking them (Warrier, 1993).

20.5 COLONIAL STATE AND POLICIES TOWARDS

WOMEN’S EMPLOYMENT
The colonial state’s policies towards reforming the conditions of work for workers were
shaped at times by pressure from trade union charters in India, British industrial interests,
demands from women’s organisations such as the All India Women’s Conference and the
Women’s India Association, and the nationalist movement. Legislative measures such as
the Maternity Benefit Act, regulations governing hours of work, the Act for exclusion of
women and children from underground work in mines and night work generally, and
guidelines restricting employment of women in those industries dangerous to their health
were taken. Restrictive specification of the avenues of work open to women was part of
the experience of industrialisation. In the colonial situation, however, weak enforcement
of the legislation compounded the situation. It was difficult for women to continue to be
part of the workforce once the pressures from legislation limited the scope of work.
Alongside, when the occupations in which women worked became part of the organised
sector and became well-paid, in a context of reduced work availability, they were pushed
out of the work where they had initially gained entry because they were good at it.
Through this experience at the workplace, women also came to express their expectations
of the workplace and their dissatisfaction with their being shunted out. This can be seen in
the cotton industry in both Bombay and the mill cities of Madras Presidency. In fact, these
measures and their impact on women’s employment and their responses as well as the
perception of different stakeholders make this an area of engagement. There are multiple 325
Craft Production, sites of women’s agency and activism in response to implementation or lack of
Technological Change and implementation of welfare measures, particularly on the managements’ reluctance to pay
Industrialisation maternity benefits, and lack of implementation of the spirit of equal pay for equal work
that unions so vehemently espoused.
Stories of migration of women with men as part of the shiploads of labour transported to
toil in the sugar plantations owned by British capital are part of diasporic lore and historical
record. Scholars, such as Carter studying family migration from India to the plantations in
Mauritius, argue that the official encouragement for entire families to migrate was as
much about cheap female labour as it was about facilitating the reproduction of labour in
the colony (Carter, 1992: 229-245). Some of the earliest areas of industrialisation that
engaged women as well were coal, textiles, jute, and plantations. Janaki Nair, discussing
labour legislation for women in the tea garden sector cites a range of works showing the
poor perspective of women’s employment during the colonial period. Though women
constituted over 40% of the workforce in the tea gardens and were mainly migrants in
Assam from Chota Nagpur, Central Provinces, Madras Presidency, and United Provinces,
there was no attempt to secure them or their livelihoods, resulting in high levels of mortality.
Entire families as well as single women worked in the gardens. The private alliances of
men and single women in the tea gardens were classified as “depot marriages” and there
was much debate on how to go about managing this and creating laws to maintain a
disciplined workforce. The working-class family as the ideal unit to best secure the needs
of large pools of labour became the norm from this point of view (Nair, 1996: 103-104).
So, the mechanisms to manage the recruitment of women without producing a crisis in the
family was patriarchally made, as married women could sign up for work only with the
permission of their husband. Also, the entire system of recruitment and laws about tea
garden labour was biased against women workers. Here is an example of a sector where
the use of women’s labour was essential both in terms of the nature of work as understood
as well as the temperament of the workers preferred.
Women’s employment continued in rudimentary, backward sectors of plantation capitalism
and mining sectors such as the coal and mica mines within the colony and outside, in other
British colonies, which are not part of our discussion in this Unit. In both these cases,
there was continuity in backward social relations and efforts were to recruit women both
in family set-ups and as single women to take care of the continuous increase in the
demand for the supply of cheap, pliable labour. Dagmar Curjel’s survey of coal mines in
Jharia which has been cited by Lindsay Barnes in her work on coal mining and conditions
of women, presents the depressing conditions of work and life. Added to the fact that
labour was paid for to the family by the sirdar, was the fact that little children too were
part of the labouring. Once the legislation on underground work excluding women and
children was first brought in 1922 and then again legislated in 1929, women’s work in this
sector continued, albeit invisible and primarily over ground. Loss of work underground for
women was discussed in detail but never was women’s right to work raised at this point
(Barnes, 1989).
Sunil Kumar Sen citing Grundy points out that, in 1897, some 6,618 women workers were
employed in the coal mines in Bengal. Between 1915 and 1921, there were six women to
a man working underground where women carried their young babies with them. But by
1938 women were just 11% of the workforce (Sen, 1994: 6).
We would like to clarify certain points on the notion of women’s agency in history. ‘Women
workers were neither passive nor fragile. Nor were they particularly protected during
strike action, as we shall discuss later. The ranks of the workers that we studied, in the
context of mills of Tamil Nadu, included such militant, active women as Ammuammal,
Thayammal, Sivanammal, and many others whose heroic struggle reshaped the work
environment’ (Warrier, 1993). Women’s struggles are not only those which brought them
material benefits but, importantly, also those everyday struggles at the workplace to defend
their dignity and rights.
In this, the issue of sexuality becomes a rallying point for women. ‘Women were visualised
326 as the accompaniment in the workforce to their spouses rather than as workers in their
own right. That certainly was the case with the women in cotton mills, who traditionally Women and Work
had been engaged in handloom, spinning and weaving but were now relegated to being
doffers, winders, reelers or waste pickers. The consequence of the feminisation of certain
occupations was also manifest in their being situated lower on the wage scale. But then,
reeling and winding, we see, were piece-rate departments, where payment was related
not to the hours worked, but to the volume of output, so that the worker’s earning depended
ultimately on her productivity’ (Warrier, 1993).

20.6 WORKERS’ MOVEMENTS AND THE RAISING OF

CONCERNS ABOUT WOMEN WORKERS
The emerging social processes of organising workers in colonial mill towns and mining
centres involved women, meaning that the workers’ movement depended on the mobilisation
of women and their representation in the day-to-day building of workers’ consciousness.
The collective action that unfolded was therefore influenced by and shaped by women
too. The demands that the women themselves threw up from their experience of work
became the rallying points of collective mobilisation in the local and at the larger levels of
organisational decisions, as we shall see below. These demands soon assumed the nature
of common demand charters that became almost the norm in the entire region of our
study. Thus, in some ways the script of the workers movement was as much inscribed by
women’s consciousness as men’s, a fact ill-considered in mainstream labour history. The
demand for equal wages, minimum wages, equal wage for the same work as also welfare
measures such as maternity benefits, menstrual leave, and creches for women workers
were articulated both in union charters and by women workers. One can see this in the
charter of demands, the demands of the AITUC and the Congress resolutions during the
anti-imperialist movement for freedom.
Women leaders emerged in the trade union movement too, particularly with the formation
of the All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC) in 1920. Maniben Kara, for example,
who worked in the Girni Kamgar Union in 1929 became the first woman elected president
of the AITUC (Sen, 1994: 43).

20.7 CRISIS AND THE VISIBILITY OF WOMEN

That quantification of the work done by women at home is neglected was an accepted
fact then as it is now, but there is also the neglect of some work done outside the home as
well. For example, women who worked as caregivers of other humans and animals or
women who were part of missionary work in the villages. The increased use of women’s
labour in the cotton mills of South India happened against the background of the
mushrooming of mills during the inter-war period. The increased output of mills also meant
greater numbers of women in the mills initially but when night work was not available to
women, men, particularly young men, displaced women. There are other examples of
women being forced to take up work, especially on public works, on account of famine,
women being bought and sold in the market for sex, too, as during the Bengal famine.
Glimpses of women’s presence do not make a case for the low-level participation of
women in productive activities. On the contrary, we need to look at mechanisms to better
measure women’s involvement in work.
Studying the engagement of women in Famine Public Works in the late nineteenth century
in colonial North India, Madhavi Jha’s work shows how women secured the job of diggers
and how this was instrumental in colonial administrators bringing policies encouraging
women’s employment. In the process, there was a reworking of gendered notions of
work and wages, albeit as she says, only for a short while, in the region. Women became
diggers and men carriers!, A reversal of roles. Given the fact that this was relief work
during famine and, by and large, seasonal public work, the change was momentary (Jha,
2020). The point to note here is that women would have been part of agricultural work in
the rural countryside throughout the year as mentioned in the census figures and they
become visible in such famine-induced public works only in a period of economic stress, 327
Craft Production, when their familiar world was in crisis. Historical knowledge of women’s work is scanty,
Technological Change and because of the patriarchal mindset that undermined the very involvement of women in
Industrialisation productive activities in the everyday.
When Bertolt Brecht rhetorically asked who built the seven gates of Thebes, and mocked
the conventional answer consisting only of kings, he sought to foreground the role of
workers. However, the conventional narrative would lead us to believe that men alone
toiled to sustain and build communities and nations. What our brief discussion shows is
that women were not so much absent as invisible in the world of labour, pushed behind a
veil weaved of patriarchy. Yet, periods of stress such as famines or when wars, industrial
expansion or mass indenture of labour created demand for many extra hands, that veil
was rent in places to reveal labouring women, who were then summoned to visible work.
The task, thus, is to make women’s work visible on a routine basis, not just in times of
crisis or opportunity.
This is not a process of adding women to a static narrative; rather, the point is to reconfigure
the analytical framework for comprehending the world of labour to locate both men and
women, in their interactions at work and outside the workplace, as they produce and earn
their livelihoods. Women were not passive objects of patronising reform at the new
workplace, the factory. Rather, they demanded, and fought for dignity, equal opportunity
and wages, creating a vocabulary of freedom and equality that resonated in workers’
union charters, conventions of the International Labour Organisation, in nationalist
resolutions, and, finally, the Constitution of India.
“Family budget surveys yield somewhat more optimistic results. Income data report higher
figures, the average being Rs. 244 in South India for a family of four, or a per capita
income of Rs. 61. This is not out of line with the range of incomes reported for Bihar, from
Rs. 20 for a labourer to Rs. 91 for a cultivating landlord. In South India, however,
non-farm incomes appear to have been substantial, including income from handloom
weaving, palmyra jaggery, areca nut, and soapnut, livestock, and trade” (Roy, 2018: 13).

20.8 SUMMARY
Women played a key role as industrial workers in colonial India and were crucial to Indian
economic growth, but were practically ‘undercounted’ and ‘underpaid’, their labour
‘devalued’ and their earnings were marked as mere ‘supplementary income’. They were
often categorized as ‘unskilled’. The tax-collector of Lucknow William Hoey’s (1880: 88)
poignant remark sums up the pitiable conditions of women workers and their exploitation
during the colonial period: ‘Little girls 5 or 6 years of age may be seen sitting at the doors
of houses near Chob Mandi busily moving their tiny fingers, over a piece of tanzeb and
working butas (flowers) and helping home by their earnings which are little enough, only
one paisa for 100 butas.’

20.9 EXERCISES
1) Construct women’s work and employment through the data on composition of labour.
2) Critically examine women’s employability in colonial India.
3) Do you agree that paucity of data on women’s employment hinders analysis of
women’s employment in colonial India?
4) What are the difficulties in assessing the nature of work-employability of women?
5) To what extent were women considered inferior in the job market during the colonial
period.? Substantiate your argument by providing data and examples.
6) List various pieces of legislation passed during the colonial period to protect the women
workers’ interests.
7) ‘Industrial labour was mainly male and women’s wages were depressed during the
328 colonial period.’ Comment.
8) Briefly discuss the policies of the colonial government towards women’s employment. Women and Work
9) Discuss worker’s movements that raised concerns about the working-conditions of
women.

20.10 SUGGESTED READINGS

Barnes, Lindsay (1990) Women, Work and Struggle – Bhowra Colliery, 1900-1985,
JNU, New Dehi, Unpublished Thesis.
Basu, Amrita (ed.) (2010), Women’s Movements in the Global Era: The Power of
Local Feminisms, Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Breman, Jan (2004), The Making and Unmaking of a Working Class: Sliding Down
the Labour Hierarchy in Ahmedabad, India, Amsterdam University Press.
Chandavarkar, Rajnarayan (1994), The Origins of Industrial Capitalism in India:
Business Strategies and the Working Classes in Bombay, 1900-1940, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Carter, Marina (1992), “Strategies of labour mobilisation in colonial India: The recruitment
of indentured workers for Mauritius”, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol 19:3-4, 1992,
pp. 229-245
Deshpande, Sudha (2005), “Some Dimensions of Female Employment in India” in Bharti
Ray ed. Women of India: Colonial and Post-colonial Periods in D.P. Chattopadhyaya
edited Volume, History of Science, Philosophy & Culture in Indian Civilization, vol.
IX, part 3, New Delhi: Sage.
Gandhi, Nandita and Nandita Shah, (2005) “Women Workers and Industrial Restructuring
in Two Industries in Mumbai”, in Bharti Ray ed. Women of India: Colonial and
Post-colonial Periods in D.P. Chattopadhyaya edited Volume, History of Science,
Philosophy & Culture in Indian Civilization, vol. IX, part 3, New Delhi: Sage.
Hoey, William (1880), A Monograph on Trade and Manufactures in Northern India,
Lucknow: American Methodist Mission Press.
Ghosh, Jayati (2020), “Time Poverty and Women’s Work” in Praveen Jha, Avinash Kumar
and Yamini Mishra (ed.), Labouring Women: Issues and Challenges in Contemporary
India, New Delhi: Orient BlackSwan.
Jha, Praveen, Avinash Kumar and Yamini Mishra (eds.) (2020), Labouring Women:
Issues and Challenges in Contemporary India, New Delhi: Orient Black Swan.
Jha, Madhavi (2020) ‘“Men Diggers and Women Carriers”: Gendered Work on Famine
Public Works in Colonial North India’, International Review of Social History, vol. 65,
Issue 1, pp. 71-98.
Joshi, Chitra (1982), Kanpur Textile Labour, Some Structural Characteristics and
Aspects of Labour Movement, Ph.D. thesis, JNU, New Delhi.
Krishna, C.S. (1985), Labour Movement in Tamil Nadu, 1918-1933, unpublished
dissertation, JNU, New Delhi, 1985.
Kumar, Radha (1982), City Lives: Women Workers in the Bombay Cotton Textile
Industry, 1919-1939, M.Phil dissertation, JNU, New Delhi, 1982.
Molyneaux, Maxine (1985), “Mobilization without Emancipation? Women’s Interests, the
State, and Revolution in Nicaragua”, Feminist Studies 11, 2 Summer: 227-54.
Mukherjee, Mukul (1990), “Impact of Modernisation on Women’s Occupation” in Women
in Colonial India, ed. J.Krishnamurthy, Delhi : Oxford University Press, pp. 180-198.
Murphy, Eamon (1981), Unions in Conflict, New Delhi: Manohar.
Nair, Janaki (1996), Women and Law in Colonial India: A Social History, New Delhi:
Kali for Women.
329
Craft Production, Rowbotham, Sheila (1993), Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Activism, (New
Technological Change and York: Routledge)
Industrialisation
Ramusack, Barbara (1990), “Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies:
British Women Activists in India, 1865-1945,” Women’s Studies International Forum
13, 4: 309-21
Roy, Tirthankar (September 2018), “Inequality in Colonial India”, Economic History
Working Papers, No: 286, London School of Economics.
Roy, Tirthankar (2016), “The Growth of a Labour Market in the Twentieth Century” in A
New Economic History, ed. Tirthankar Roy, Latika Chaudhary, Anand V. Swamy,
Bishnupriya Gupta, Routledge.
Roy, Tirthankar (2000), “De-industrialisation: Alternative View” EPW, April, 22-28, Vol.
35, No. 17, pp. 1442-1447.
Sen, Samita (1999), Women and Labour in Late Colonial India: The Bengal Jute
Industry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sen, Sunil Kumar (1994), Working Class Movements in India, 1885-1975, Delhi: Oxford
University Press.
Sen, Sukomal (1977), Working Class of India: History of Emergence and Movement,
1830-1990, Kolkata: K.P. Bagchi & Co.
Thorner, Daniel and Alice Thorner (1962), Land and Labour in India, Bombay: Asia
Publishing House.
Warrier, M.V.Shobhana (1993), “Class and Gender: A Study of Women Workers in Cotton
Textile Mills of Madras, Madurai and Coimbatore, 1914-1951, Unpublished Ph.D Thesis,
JNU.

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