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.

Segmentation in the Pre-Industrial Labour Market: Women's Work in the Dutch Textile Industry, 1581-1810

Abstract: This article analyses women's work in the Dutch textile industry in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within the framework of dual (or segmented) labour market theory. This theoretical framework is usually applied to the modern labour market, but it is also valuable for historical research. It clarifies, for example, how segmentation in the labour market influenced men's and women's work in the textile industry. Applying this analysis, we find that, even in periods without explicit gender conflict, patriarchal and capitalist forces utilized the gender segmentation of the labour market to redefine job status and labour relations in periods of economic change. Although this could harm the economic position of all women and migrants, it appears that single women were affected most by these mechanisms.

The Gender Ideological Clash in Globalization: Women, Migration, and the Modernization Building Project of the Philippines

Abstract: My article interrogates the local impacts of global economic processes on the socio-cultural geography of the Philippines. I argue that the development of an export-oriented Filipino economy incorporates a gender ideological clash resulting from simultaneously encouraging and discouraging female domesticity. This clash emerges from the economic dependency of the Philippines on women s work outside the home on the one hand, and a longstanding gender ideology that continues to locate women's gender responsibilities inside the home on the other hand. The dependence of the Philippines on remittances from women 's migrant domestic work magnifies this clash. My article looks closely at this gender ideological clash caused by working women s paradoxical positioning vis-a-vis the home, addresses why this clash occurs, describes its consequences for relations in the family, and, lastly, links it to a larger discussion of the status of women in globalization.

An overview of women’s work and employment in South Africa. - rev. ed.

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Reflections on Slavery, Seclusion and Female Labor in the Maradi Region of Niger in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Abstract: This essay argues that female participation in agriculture and limited seclusion in Maradi (Niger) today do not stem from the absence of agricultural slavery in the pre-colonial period but rather result from the resistance of the Katsinawa elite to the Islamic reforms of the Sokoto Caliphate and from the absence of rimji (plantation) slavery in the region. The abolition of slavery did not mark a watershed in the rise of seclusion, as M. G. Smith argues was the case in Nigeria, but rather triggered a series of reformulations of marriage and female hierarchy. Semi-legitimate and legitimate polygynous marriages permitted men and women of the wealthier classes to retain the labor of former female slaves as ‘concubines’ and later enabled them to use junior wives to perform the duties once carried out by slaves. Women countered the ambiguities of such marriages by asserting their worth through wedding ritual and later by adopting the veiling of elite women. As economic and cultural ties with northern Nigeria grew during the colonial and post-colonial periods, and as goods and services reduced some of the labor demands upon urban women, seclusion gained in popularity. By acquiescing to the dependency implicit in purdah women could protect themselves from the labor demands of others and could sometimes free themselves up to earn independent incomes of their own. Thus the recent adoption of seclusion in Maradi has not arisen out of a unilateral decision on the part of newly freed women to adopt seclusion as a sign of status, as Smith claimed for Northern Nigeria, but resulted instead from of a series of redefinitions, contestations and negotiations of marriage in which both men and women have been active.