Social Reproduction and the Agrarian Question of Women’s Labour in India

Sirisha Naidu and Lyn Ossome

Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy, 2016, vol. 5, issue 1, 50-76

Abstract: Using a social reproduction framework, this article explores how reproduction of rural working class households is rearticulated to capitalist production in India. Our analysis of the conditions in India reveals that the interaction of three institutions—market, state and household—has imposed the burden of reproduction on women. In turn, women’s work is dependent on private and common lands. This link, between the role of women’s unpaid labour in reproducing rural households and the fact that this work remains largely dependent on land, constitutes a failure of the Indian economy to provide decent livelihoods. It also reasserts gender equity as a contemporary and unresolved question in the midst of India’s agrarian transition and underscores the importance of instituting agrarian reforms and state intervention at levels sufficient for social reproduction.

Keywords: Social reproduction; gender; land and labour; domestic economies; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (11)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/2277976016658737 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:agspub:v:5:y:2016:i:1:p:50-76

DOI: 10.1177/2277976016658737

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Agrarian South: Journal of Political Economy from Centre for Agrarian Research and Education for South
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().