Aadya Gupta, Week 7

Commentary on: Dynamics of Sexual Division of Labour and Capital Accumulation: Women Lace Workers of Narsapur, by Maria Mies.

This article deals with the plight of women lace workers in Nursapur in Andhra Pradesh.The irony in the article is that these women produce luxury items that they will never use, whose high market value does not translate to higher wage rates for the workers. The sexual division of labour is not only polarising along the gender binary, but also polarising in terms of class.

The corporatisation of lace making- by breaking apart the finished product into small sections and paying wage rates per pattern- has condemned these women to a life of poverty. Seclusion and purdah is a sign of class/caste superiority in certain communities, but is also a way of controlling feminine agency. These oppressive norms have insidiously strong holds. These women are not even included in the census statistics, which makes them officially invisible, so the focus is on ‘men’ who seem to be the makers and producers of lace. It is interesting to observe how the Kapu women refused to do the field work that Harijan women did- even if it meant that they had to live in poverty just to have a higher status in the eyes of society. 

The true evil of the industry is that it has managed to convince these women they are good at nothing else but making lace. This also serves to divide women as a community amongst themselves- through classification into hierarchy.The process of pauperization of these poor peasants due to capitalism has another conclusion- the capitalist system is designed to suck you dry of your wealth- and then, left with no options, you end up taking the job the industry determines most profitable for itself and the most ruinous for its workers.

The dynamics of the division of labor between men and women has been constantly changing, but a common thread remains the exploitation of women by men. Men feed off women’s labor, which remains unrecognized and unregulated. The fieldwork for this article was done in 1978-79 period, implying that the current state of lace workers in Andhra Pradesh might have significantly changed since then. However, this article has opened my eyes to the various industries that exist in India that feed off the productivity of women, and the dire need for the regularization of the same.