ABSTRACT
The title of this book is drawn from a demonstration of poor women which occurred in Gujarat, India, in the summer of 1987. Women marched through the streets of Ahmedabad demanding ‘Dignity and Daily Bread’. They were small vendors who wanted the right to sell their wares in the city without having to face police harassment. Mobilised by the Self-Employed Women’s Association, their demonstration was not a conventional trade union protest against an employer. Nor could it be defined in terms of the community-based ‘social movements’ which have attracted the attention of many political theorists in the last decade. It was rather a protest of workers against deep-rooted political, social and economic forces. The women’s action raised the question of the interests which determine laws and the design of cities, the allocation of space to gain a livelihood, the distribution of public resources in favour of one group or another. To women vendors of Ahmedabad, the question of access to resources appeared linked with the issue of unequal distribution of economic power; the protest, in many ways, reflected a demand for entitlement and participatory democracy on behalf of the city ‘s poorest workers.
