A shift from home to the market: The marketization of reproductive labor in India

Commercial surrogacy marketizes life's work. In the era of neo-liberalism, women's work, which is often intimately performed within a heterosexual marriage in exchange of support, now remains a principal avenue to earn money. This form of feminization of labor has led to the emergence of markets for women's reproductive capacities. The present study stems from my ethnographic journey into the lives of the women who work as surrogate mothers in India. The narratives presented in the paper emerge from my prolonged fieldwork in Anand, Gujarat. It engages with the experiences, understandings, and the voices of these women, who I term reproductive laborers, in order to examine the notion of putting one's reproductive capacities in this intimate market for money.

FAKTOR YANG MEMPENGARUHI WAKTU KERJA PEREMPUAN DAN KESEJAHTERAAN KELUARGA PADA INDUSTRI KERAJINAN KAYU DESA MAS

The purpose of this study was to analyze the effect of work experience, number of family dependents and husband's employment status on the allocation of women's working time in the wood craft industry in Mas Village; the effect of work experience, number of family dependents, husband's employment status and allocation of women's working time on family welfare in the wood craft industry in Mas Village; and the role of women's work time allocation in mediating the effect of work experience and number of family dependents and husband's employment status on family welfare in the wood craft industry in Mas Village. Data were obtained using observation and interview methods, with a total sample of 97 people which were then analyzed using path analysis. The results showed that work experience had a non-positive or non significant effect on the allocation of women's working time, while the number of family dependents had a positive and significant effect on the allocation of women's working time, and husbands who had employment status had a lower allocation of women's working time than husbands who did not work; Work experience, number of dependents in the family has no effect on family welfare, while husbands who have employment status work have higher family welfare than husbands who do not work, and the allocation of women's working time has a positive and significant effect on family welfare; Work experience, number of family dependents and husband's employment status indirectly affect family welfare through the allocation of women's working time, in other words, women's work time allocation is an intervening variable that mediates work experience, number of family dependents and husband's employment status on women's working time allocation. . Meanwhile, the husband's employment status has no direct effect on family welfare.

Examining gender role attitude as a moderator of personality, social support, and childcare responsibilities in women’s work-life balance

The participation of women in the workforce creates challenges and problems. Those with various roles in their lives must be good at playing and balancing these successfully. This study focuses on the work-life balance factor by exploring the predictor factors including personality, family social support, and childcare responsibilities, as moderated by gender role attitude. A work/ nonwork interference and enhancement scale, mini-IPIP, gender role beliefs scale, and social support scale were developed for the data collection. A sample of 220 married female workers was identified using purposive sampling. The data analysis, which used multiple regression and a modgraph, shows a significant effect of personality, social support, and childcare responsibilities on the work-life balance moderated by gender role attitude. Four independent variables with significant influence are neuroticism, openness to experiencing family support, gender role attitude and there is a moderating effect on neuroticism and family support. The implication is the need to provide a comfortable work environment and arrangement of work patterns so that women's work-life balance can be achieved positively.

Ingenious Trade

Ingenious Trade recovers the intricate stories of the young women who came to London in the late seventeenth century to earn their own living, most often with the needle, and the mistresses who set up shops and supervised their apprenticeships. Tracking women through city archives, it reveals the extent and complexity of their contracts, training and skills, from adolescence to old age. In contrast to the informal, unstructured and marginalised aspects of women's work, this book uses legal records and guild archives to reconstruct women's negotiations with city regulations and bureaucracy. It shows single women, wives and widows establishing themselves in guilds both alongside and separate to men, in a network that extended from elites to paupers and around the country. Through an intensive and creative archival reconstruction, Laura Gowing recovers the significance of apprenticeship in the lives of girls and women, and puts women's work at the heart of the revolution in worldly goods.

Productive Bodies, Docile Women and Violence

Drawing on the Government of Ireland Collaborative Research Project, ‘Magdalene Institutions: Recording an Archival and Oral History’, this paper explores the nature of women’s experiences in Ireland’s Magdalene laundries though the lens of forced work. I argue that the perceived nature of the work done by the women—productive, respectable, ‘women’s work’—significantly impacted on how the abusive nature of the laundries has been considered by official bodies and wider Irish society. This paper focuses on work done in these institutions and how it was viewed, using interviews from survivors and those who visited the laundries. By exploring the links between work and respectability, productivity and morality, with particular attention to the ways this plays out upon the bodies of women, this article argues for an understanding of this work as a violent and disciplinary process, designed to produce the desired Irish Catholic female body: docile and productive, penitential and obedient.

Shakespeare's ‘Lady Editors'

The basic history of the Shakespearean editorial tradition is familiar and well-established. For nearly three centuries, men – most of them white and financially privileged – ensconced themselves in private and hard-to-access libraries, hammering out 'their' versions of Shakespeare's text. They produced enormous, learnèd tomes: monuments to their author's greatness and their own reputations. What if this is not the whole story? A bold, revisionist and alternative version of Shakespearean editorial history, this book recovers the lives and labours of almost seventy women editors. It challenges the received wisdom that, when it came to Shakespeare, the editorial profession was entirely male-dominated until the late twentieth century. In doing so, it demonstrates that taking these women's work seriously can transform our understanding of the history of editing, of the nature of editing as an enterprise, and of how we read Shakespeare in history.