Women’s Paid and Unpaid Labour

Detailed chapter description

Women’s labour is one of the clearest cases in which economic reality exceeds the boundaries of ordinary employment statistics. A woman may transplant paddy, tend cattle, sort makhana, assist a family loom, cook for a work gang, collect water and fuel, care for children and an elderly parent, keep household accounts and participate in a self-help group—all within the same week. Some of those activities generate wages or sales. Some produce goods for household use. Some support a family enterprise without an individual payment. Others reproduce the labour force itself by feeding, cleaning, nursing and caring. A history that counts only the first category systematically understates women’s contribution. This chapter therefore treats paid and unpaid work as connected parts of one labour system. It does not repeat Chapter 91’s analysis of the household as an economic institution, nor Chapter 93’s forthcoming analysis of marriage, dowry, inheritance and family structure. Its narrower question is how women’s work has been organised, measured, rewarded and rendered visible across Mithila, Vajji and Anga, with comparison to Nepal-side Madhesh. The argument is not that all unpaid work is oppression or that all paid work produces autonomy. Rather, remuneration, time control, productivity, social protection, asset ownership and bargaining power must be examined together. Labour statistics require boundaries: who is counted as employed, what reference period is used, whether production is for the market or for own use, and whether assistance to a family enterprise qualifies as economic activity. Women’s activities often sit exactly at these boundaries. A man hired to thresh grain for cash is easily classified as a worker; a woman threshing the household’s own grain, feeding labourers and storing seed may appear partly as a producer and partly as a non-worker depending on the survey concept. The first task of women’s labour history is therefore conceptual: classification is evidence, but it is not the economy itself.