Domestic Days: Women, Work, and Politics in Contemporary Kolkata

ISBN-13: 9780199461165 / Angielski / Twarda / 2016 / 352 str.

Samita Sen; Nilanjana Sengupta

Opis

Maids have become an inseparable part of the daily lives of amiddle-classa urban households in India. Despite the fact that increasing numbers of poor women are joining this profession, very little has been written about them, especially the part-time domestic workers, each of whom services a number of households at a time. They are not accorded their rightful status as workers either by the employers, their own families, the Government or traditional trade unions. Isolated in the privacy of employersa homes, the problem of recognizing their work or organizing them is the same as for women isolated in their own homes. Another important reason is that most such women are rendered voiceless by their social location: unlettered; staying in aillegala settlements; migrants; working to survive; performing afemininea work both paid and unpaid, and both devalued. This book is therefore about making the unheard heard. It draws from personal narratives of part time women domestic workers residing in two slum-settlements of Kolkata, who speak about their work, lives, dreams and despair. By moving between the workplace and the homes of the workers, this book makes a departure from general accounts of labour and talks instead about labouring lives.

Recenzje

Domestic days provides a welcome addition to the literature on domestic labour in India, and will be of interest to scholars and students from a range of disciplines, including sociology, social anthropology, gender studies, and South Asian studies.

O autorze

Samita Sen is Professor, Centre for Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata Nilanjana Sengupta is Assistant Professor at the School of Women's Studies, Jadavpur University, Kolkata