This thesis seeks to understand how women pushed to the margins of society by gender and socio-economic status engaged with the economic sphere in late colonial India. Underpinned by a methodology that combines social history and feminist economic approaches to put forward a more inclusive agenda and framework for South Asian history-writing, it pushes back against the historical and historiographical peripheralization of women from lower castes and indigenous communities. Taking the 1940s—a period of war and famine and hence, of enhanced archival visibility—as a lens, it examines women’s engagement with paid work across formal and informal economies through three case studies: on women made destitute by the Bengal Famine who found ways of coping with displacement, including working in unregulated military labour and in prostitution; on women’s work in coal mines and their vulnerability to changing colonial labour legislation; and experiences of work, wellbeing, and the household economy in tea plantations.
By affirming and centring the notion of women as economic agents, it finds that their ubiquitous and persistent presence in the workplace both outside and within the home cements how they were directly and doubly important in propping up the late colonial Indian economy. There was complete dissonance between the lived realities of the poor and how women’s engagement with paid work was understood, represented, and constructed by the colonial state, capital, and middle-class society. Working women confronted gendered conceptions that under- and de-valued their labour while similarly-loaded perceptions regarding their roles within the family and their calorific needs played into the wage and entitlement scales assigned to them. Even so, they navigated socio-economic crises through a varied and multi-pronged engagement with the labour market. They survived, subsisted, and supported dependants by seeking out remunerated employment despite the manifold constraints placed on their exercise of economic agency.
