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.

Social and Cultural Perspectives on Women's Work: Comment on Loats, Hafter, and DeGroat

Abstract: The essays that make up this forum deal with gender and work identity across three centuries of French history. In methodology and subject matter, however, Judith DeGroat's essay contrasts sharply with the other two. Carol Loats's and Daryl Hafter's essays are representatives of what was once called "the new social history" but now might better be called "the old social history." DeGroat's essay falls clearly into the genre of "the new cultural history," which in another fifteen years will doubtless become in its turn "the old cultural history." Loats's and Hafter's essays both demonstrate admirably that there is still plenty of mileage left in the old social history paradigm. Both essays deal with work and family experiences of urban skilled workers in the institutional context of the Old Regime. Both use documents generated by female artisans pursuing their careers and interests as artisans -notarial records of apprenticeship contracts in Loats's case and guild and court records in Hafter's. Carol Loats develops a very specific argument, based largely on quantitative evidence. She finds that many of the apprenticeship contracts made by women in seventeenth-century Paris were made by married women whose trades were unrelated to those practiced by their husbands. This pattern, she points out, contrasts sharply with the "household economy" model assumed by most historians who have written on women's work in early modern cities. According to this model, work typically took place in family units, headed by a male whose profession defined the family's work activities and status. While men's work identities were supposedly chosen early and lasted for their

Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women's Work in a Changing World, 1300-1600 (review)

Abstract: dericalism, but that the laity and the clergy were cooperating, even to the exent that clerics joined many gilds. Bainbridge warns, however, that over the whole population, gilds cannot be seen as central to religious experience: the majority of the laity were too poor to participate. As well as providing church lights, gilds were central to many lay people's funeral rites. In a reconstruction of mentalite, Bainbridge suggests that the stages in a funeral and other commemorative rituals can be seen as 'markers in the passage of grief. In addition, she insists that w e should consider eschatological history over the longue duree, arguing that beliefs about the afterlife change in a cyclical pattern. As part of insurance for the afterlife, the dispensation of charity was an additional gild function. Charity directed to other members of the group was more important than that given by people of higher to those of lower status. Gilds provide many examples of the former. By the sixteenth century, however, the deserving poor became increasingly the recipients of charity. Where earlier, the poor reciprocated with prayer, now that this prayer was irrelevant, the medieval ideal of caritas declined. Bainbridge concludes her book with a fascinating discussion of the contribution of the gilds to local government, using this relationship to shed new light on such institutions as the parish, the diocese and the manor. In addition, she examines the gilds as a 'microcosm' of society, reflecting hierarchies, collective identities and corporations. Finally she traces the sixteenth-century abolition of the gilds, and the replacement of their function in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by the parish. Bainbridge has lucidly set out a great deal of new information about the late medieval gilds, explaining them both as a product and a reflection of their society. In places, her analysis is obscured by a mass of detail, and as a result, the important contributions of this book are less clear than one would wish. Bainbridge has added to the recent debate concerning the laity in late medieval religion with a welcome focus on institutional rather than individual piety. In addition, her book straddles the rather artificial divide between medieval and Early Modern England. It deserves to be read by all religious scholars of either era.

Gendered Societal Transitions: The Shifting Role of Women in the Table Grape Production Network from Archanes, Greece to Europe

Abstract: There have been major changes taking place in export horticulture over time that have been compounded by the recent economic crisis. Women and men have been affected differently by these changes. Women have played a major role as waged and unwaged labour but have also been significantly affected by these shifts. Although we know about the effects of the supermarket-led global production network (GPN) expansion on gender relations existing literature does not explore theoretically and empirically the gender implications of changing production networks. The thesis addresses this research gap by investigating the shifting role of women in the table (fresh) grape GPN from the town of Archanes in Crete, Greece to the European market and the implications for women?s labour agency across three periods. Thus, it addresses the research question: How has the relationship between women?s waged and unwaged work in the table grape GPN shifted across periods and what are the implications for gender and GPN analysis? It investigates changes across: 1) the period of the producer-led export market; 2) the period of the buyer-led GPN expansion; and 3) the period of crisis. A qualitative case study approach is used, utilising primarily interviews, focus groups and participant observation.This research builds on the GPN, feminist political economy and intra-household bargaining literatures to further develop a Gendered Global Production Networks (Gendered GPN) approach. An evolving Gendered GPN approach combines the GPN approach with a concept of gendered societal embeddedness which captures the interaction between commercial drivers and gendered societal relations. The thesis draws from the intra-household bargaining literature to incorporate a household level analysis of labour bargaining and fall-back positions to ?unpack? the concept of women?s labour agency. The thesis finds that while in the period of the producer-led export market women were unskilled labour, the expansion of supermarkets in period 2 offered skills and economic opportunities, enabling them to bargain in crisis even as unwaged labour in table grapes. Hence labour agency becomes more important in shaping women?s position in production networks than in the producer-led export market. Ultimately the GPN was still able to get high quality at low costs through female labour. Therefore commercial pressures influence gendered societal relations but also gendered societal relations influence commercial transitions. The findings show complex and non-linear forms of change characterised by tensions between commercial and gendered societal relations in a process of transition underpinned by shifts in women?s work and agency. I capture this with the concept of ?gendered societal transitions?. This helps to further develop a Gendered GPN approach to advance knowledge of non-linear gendered transformations as GPNs evolve.

A survey of available literature on rural women and women's work in agriculture

Abstract: Literature review is an essential part for research. Before starting research on a meticulous topic, one needs to map the types of available writings on the topic of research. Literature review helps in choosing a topic for research which has not been studied yet or less studied. It also tells the importance of research topic. This study assembles all the major categories of research on rural women and their work in agriculture. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3126/ijssm.v1i2.10284 Int. J. Soc. Sci. Manage. Vol-1, issue-2: 69-73

An Aspect of Informalisation of Women’s Work in a High-Tech Age: Turkish Sweatshops in the Netherlands

Abstract: Nearly half of the clothing output in Amsterdam comes from Turkish sweatshops which make use either of illegal foreign workers or of legal but unemployed Turkish, Moroccan and black African women and men. While the designing of garments is carried out with computer-aided machines on the main factory floors, it is the cheap, undeclared labour of ethnic contract clothing firms that provide the sought-after flexibility in the assembling stage. In this paper, the author documents the factors that explain the Dutch industry’s heavy reliance on “black” labour in lieu of computers.