Suchergebnisse

AbstractHistories of feminism in the past three decades have focused on the debate between equal rights and separate spheres, but have been less attentive to the many strands of socialist feminisms, which sought to build bridges between the women's movement and other social movements for freedom, equality and justice. Dorothy Sue Cobble addresses this gap, exploring the lives and works of social democratic women activists in relation to the equal rights versus separate rights debate. Reflecting the "global turn", Cobble explores many transnational connections. Picking up on these two themes – socialist feminism and global networks – I focus on the South Asian case.

AbstractThis paper engages with Rajnarayan Chandavarkar's argument that the importance accorded to the intermediation of sardars/jobbers in colonial labour arrangements followed from the perception of the Indian peasant as static and immobile, requiring especial effort at recruitment, but that, over time, employers grew resentful of the power and control acquired by these intermediaries. Drawing on this insight, the paper examines the role ofsardarsin the recruitment system of the Assam tea plantations and the ways in which they were promoted by the planters and the state in an attempt to loosen the stranglehold of professional contractors. Thesardarswere presented as the solution to abuses of Assam recruitment and portrayed as non-market agents recruiting within the closed world of kin, caste and village relationships. Towards the late-nineteenth century, however, a nexus developed between the contractors andsardars, which successive legislative interventions failed to break. Moreover, the notion that thesardarwould be a more benign agent of recruitment was repeatedly proved false.

In India, investigations into patterns of industrialisation and the formation of industrial labour began during the colonial period, soon after the inception of modern industry in the mid-nineteenth century. After Independence in 1947, the development of a 'working class' became the primary focus of enquiry into conditions of industrial labour.

An examination of the diverse patterns of women's migration challenges abiding stereotypes of Indian history: the urban worker as a male "peasant-proletariat" and women as inhabiting a timeless rural past. When men opted for circulation between town and country, wives and children undertook the actual labor of cultivation for the survival of "peasant-proletariat" households. Men retained their status as heads of the family and, even though absent for long periods, their proprietary interests in the village. Yet towards the end of the nineteenth century, many unhappy, deserted, and barren wives, widows, and other women were able to escape to the burgeoning cities of Calcutta and Bombay and the coal mines, where they experienced new processes of social and economic marginalization.Much attention has been given to women's migration to overseas colonies and the Assam teagardens. Such migration has been seen as doubly negative, not only harnessing women to the exploitative contract regimes, but also subjecting them to sexual violation. A general assumption is that women were deceived, decoyed and even "kidnapped," since there was no possibility of "voluntary" migration by women. Such a view of women's recruitment was produced by a variety of interests opposed to women's, especially married women's, migration, and eventually influenced the colonial state to legally prohibit, in 1901, women's "voluntary" migration to Assam plantations. This provision was an explicit endorsement of male claims on women's labor within the family.