Women's work

About: Women's work is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 1625 publications have been published within this topic receiving 33754 citations. The topic is also known as: woman's work.

The relation between child labour and mothers' work: the case of India

Abstract: The paper deals with child labour in developing countries. We address a problem that has recently drawn much attention at the international level, that is, how to invest in women’s rights to advance the rights of both women and children. We study the problem from a new perspective. In our theoretical model we assume that the child’s time is an extension of her/his mother’s time, and that she has to decide how to allocate it. We estimate two empirical specifications, both multinomial logit. The first one, in line with the standard approach in the literature, estimates a model of the probability of the different child’s states, conditional on her/his mother’s states. The second empirical specification, in line with our theoretical model, estimates the mother-child states jointly. Using a unique, rich and representative data survey for all Indian states and for urban and rural India (NFHS-2, 1998/9), we select our sample drawing information from the household data set and the women’s data set. Our results show that the presence of the mother in the family increases children welfare, in terms of educational opportunities and protection from work activities. All our results indicate that the mother tends to stay home and send her children to school the better is the father’s employment position and the wealthier is the family. However, we observe a perverse effect. If the mother works, since female job quality and wage levels are very low, also her children have a higher probability to work.

Interconnecting Work and Family: Race and Class Differences in Women's Work Status and Attitudes

Abstract: SHIFTING WORK-FAMILY REALITIES The interdisciplinary work-family field has grown apace in recent years, as scholars, writers, and policy makers have all focused renewed attention on women's work status and attitudes. Much of this resurgence, however, has addressed the behaviors and attitudes of middle- to upper-class white women and their decision to work or parent. But this narrow focus limits our research and theorizing and overlooks how women respond in creative ways by "interconnecting" (or "weaving together") their work and family lives (Garey 1999, 14). Although this work-family reality is relatively more recent for middle- to upper-class white women, it is a much older reality for many working-class or poor women and women of color. In this essay, I broaden the research focus to a more diverse group of women. My goal is to understand how different women respond to new work-family realities.1 STRUCTURAL CHANGES IN THE WORK-FAMILY LANDSCAPE New work-family realities are best reflected in the "structural mismatch" between changed family demographics and partially changed customs, norms, and organizational practices (Moen and Roehling 2005; Roos, Trigg, and Hartman 2006, 201- 2). Women's dramatic entry into the labor force, and changes in their pattern of participation, now mean that they more closely resemble men in their labor force participation. Blau and Kahn's (2005, 42) analysis of Current Population Survey data reveals that between 1980 and 2000 women's work status became less sensitive to both their own and their husband's wages, and they now supply their labor much as men do. Increased labor force participation has been most stark among married women and women with children, those most subject to work-family conflict. Dualearner families are now the most common household type: by 2000, 62 percent of married couples were dual earners, compared with 44 percent in 1975 (Costello, Wight, and Stone 2003, 203). Since 1970 women have also made significant inroads into more demanding "male" professional and managerial occupations (Reskin and Roos 1990). Careers are less likely to unfold in a predictable progression of jobs within single organizations, and workers move frequently across firms in boundaryless careers. Both men and women compete as ideal workers in an increasingly global market, scheduled around a 24/7 economy. The resulting time bind negatively affects workers, especially those with higher education and in time-intensive professional and managerial jobs (Jacobs and Gerson 2000). Entry into professional and managerial occupations is more likely to characterize the changing work prospects of white women, even though black middle-class women preceded their white counterparts into the labor market by many years (Landry 2000, 91). BEYOND SEPARATE SPHERES The popular and scholarly literatures rely on dichotomous language to describe work and family. Garey (1999, 8) faults researchers for relying on "separate spheres" terminology to describe women as either "work-committed" or "domestically oriented" (e.g., Gerson 1985), or as women who "live to work" or "work to live" (e.g., Mason 1988). More recent work (e.g., BlairLoy 2003) theorizes the existence of a "devotion to work schema," where "greedy workplace institutions" demand all our time and commitment, and a "devotion to family schema," where intensive mothering is a woman's major commitment, regardless of her work role. Blair-Loy argues that these cultural schemas powerfully shape women's attitudes and behaviors and are embedded in the beliefs of their husbands, the practices of employers, and workplace institutions more generally. In this view, women are seen as committed to either work or family, a cultural divide that emerges from a malebreadwinner-female-caregiver gender ideology that creates "naturalized" boundaries that working women must cross (Gazso 2004, 465). The changing landscape of the American (now global) labor market makes the choice between work and family largely the prerogative of the privileged (Johnson, 2002) and diverts our attention from the restructured realities of women's lives. …

Travel Writing in The English Woman's Journal (1858-1864): An Area of Leisure in the Context of Women's Work

Abstract: Feminist scholarship has rarely considered mid-Victorian women’s travel and travel writing in the context of the contemporary debate about women’s work and the associated question of women’s leisure. 1 It has also almost completely ignored the ample material to be found in women’s magazines: both travelogues and sketches of potential travel destinations. This article will focus on one of these magazines, the English Woman’s Journal, an important publication of the mid-Victorian women’s movement, and investigate its special take on female travel as a leisure activity within the magazine’s predominating discussion of female work. With the emergence of an organised women’s movement in Britain during the 1850s and ’60s, a controversial debate about female work came to the fore. It reflects a discursive formation in which gender, class, work, and domesticity were complexly entangled. The debate was particularly concerned with the situation of bourgeois women and their need to find “suitable” employment at a time when single women outnumbered single men and “gentlewomen” could not all be accommodated in the roles deemed respectable for their class: those of wife, mother, and homemaker. Men as well as women disagreed vehemently on whether, and to what extent, bourgeois women should step out of the domestic sphere. Whilst this facet of women’s history has received a fair amount of scholarly attention, the related issue of upper- to middle-class women’s leisure is yet to be explored. However, if understood as essentially a time of non-work, this leisure is significantly difficult to define. In a gender order which, for the middle classes at least, associated “proper” work with men and their associated businesses and professions, domains of leisure for men could be easily and clearly demarcated. 2 For the bourgeois woman, by contrast, boundaries between work and leisure were blurred, and the two areas