Indian women and the changing character of the working class Indian household in Natal 1860–1990

Abstract

The conventional literature on Indian women's lives in South Africa as elsewhere tends to ignore or gloss over their economic activities. While the bourgeoisie prize female seclusion, the working‐class household is itself a complex economic unit in which women play a highly significant part. Only looking at the participation of women in the wage economy obscures this part. It is possible to look at the Indian working‐class household and the economic activities of women in it in a rough historical pattern. As Indian family life developed outside the indenture system, Indian social, cultural and familial life in South Africa was recreated along new creolised lines in rural areas and in the urban periphery. Industrialisation meant that increasing numbers of men obtained factory and other employment, but this represented part of a broad family accumulation strategy in which women's work was effectively exploited. The joint family was as much an effective economic unit as a product or generator of family ideology. Finally, after World War II but particularly from the 1960s, Indian women themselves entered the job market in large numbers. This helped to cause the growing nuclearisation of Indian families and their enmeshing in new levels of consumerism. To some extent, the experience of going out to work has opened the horizons of Indian working‐class women, but wage labour is more significantly a strategy to maximise cash income in a male‐dominated nuclear family.