Negotiating responsibilities and relationships: Power, conflict, and decision-making in households of informal women workers

Abstract

In the South Asian context, the importance of male protection and provision lead women to comply with, rather than challenge, male dominance. Yet, even as social structures constrain the actions of women more so than those of men, they allow spaces where women can fulfill their own and their families’ needs. Based on case studies of different groups of women engaged in the garment and construction sectors and those who had given up wage work, I argue in this paper that women's ability to shift power relations at home depended on the kind of paid employment they were engaged in and its social recognition. The agency of women who had given up wage work and those in independent paid employment was shaped by different factors. The differences in their familial and kinship roles, stage-of-life identities, the class position of their households, the ability to mobilize their social networks and access to earnings impacted intra- and extra-household relations and women's ability to shift these relations.