Women, Wages and Intra‐household Power Relations in Urban Bangladesh

Abstract

This article examines the implications of women's access to income‐earning opportunities for their position in intra‐household relationships. For those who believe that such relationships are egalitarian, this issue may not appear relevant; for others, however, there is a divergence of views between those who offer an optimistic analysis of the effects of earning power for women's status, and those who provide a more pessimistic prognosis. In exploring this issue, the article makes use of first‐hand accounts of women workers in the recently emergent export‐oriented garment factories in Bangladesh, both in order to evaluate the ‘fit’ with theoretical insights of intra‐household relations from the social science literature, and to assess what the ‘everyday lived realities’ described by the women workers tell us about the workings of power within family‐based households in urban Bangladesh.