Women Workers In Rural Areas

The studies assembled in this volume are aimed at analysing the structure of women's labour force participation in India

The range of women's work and its contribution to the family economy studied here for the first time. Despite the growth of women's history and rural social history in the past thirty years, the work performed by women who lived in the nineteenth-century English countryside is still an under-researched issue. Verdon directly addresses this gap in the historiography, placing the rural female labourer centre stage for the first time. The involvement of women in the rural labour market as farm servants, as day labourers in agriculture, and as domestic workers, are all examined using a wide range of printed and unpublished sources from across England. The roles village women performed in the informal rural economy (household labour, gathering resources and exploiting systems of barterand exchange) are also assessed. Changes in women's economic opportunities are explored, alongside the implications of region, age, marital status, number of children in the family and local custom; women's economic contribution to the rural labouring household is established as a critical part of family subsistence, despite criticism of such work and the rise in male wages after 1850. NICOLA VERDON is a Research Fellow in the Rural History Centre, University of Reading.

Outlines the basic reasons for women's growing inequality and dependence especially in rural areas, and the concomitant food shortages and poverty in many developing countries. This book should be of interest to all those concerned with women's development.

Research on women's roles in rural development has found that women's contribution to the rural economy is commonly underestimated and that women may find it difficult to benefit from the development process. Within this context, this book looks at the Soviet experience of development as reflected in the lives of rural women.