Page 325 - Essencials of Sociology

Work and Gender: Women at Work in India

Traveling through India was both a traditional Western
expectations, and some
pleasant and an eye-opening experience. diverge sharply from our gender
The country is incredibly diverse, the stereotypes. Although women in India
people friendly, and the land culturally remain subservient to men—with the
rich. For this photo essay, wherever I women’s movement hardly able to break
went—whether city, village, or country- the cultural surface—women’s occupations
side—I took photos of women at work. are hardly limited to the home. I was
surprised at some of the hard, heavy labor
From these photos, you can see that
Indian women work in a wide variety of that Indian women do.
occupations. Some of their jobs match

The villages of India have no indoor
plumbing. Instead, each village has
a well with a hand pump, and it is
the women’s job to fetch the water.
This is backbreaking work, for, after
pumping the water, the women
wrestle the heavy buckets onto their
heads and carry them home. This
was one of the few kinds of work
I saw that was limited to women.

I visited quarries in different parts of India, where I found men,
women, and children hard at work in the tropical sun. This woman
works 8 ½ hours a day, six days a week. She earns 40 rupees a day
(about ninety cents). Men make 60 rupees a day (about $1.35). Like Indian women are highly visible in public places. A
many quarry workers, this woman is a bonded laborer. She must storekeeper is as likely to be a woman as a man. This
give half of her wages to her master. woman is selling glasses of water at a beach on the
is built of sand.
Bay of Bengal. The structure on which her glasses rest

Women also take care of
livestock. It looks as though
this woman dressed up and
posed for her photo, but
this is what she was wearing
and doing when I saw her
in the field and stopped
to talk to her. While the
sheep are feeding, her job
is primarily to “be” there,
to make certain the sheep
don’t wander off or that no
one steals them.
© James M. Henslin, all photos