ABSTRACT

In the previous chapters, I have integrated an analysis of women’s experience of employment with their attitudes towards marriage and the demands of their households. I have also attempted to show the internal workings of their households and how their experiences of work, family and gender relations have changed from those of their village mothers. In this chapter, I focus on four women in order to locate their personal struggles in the context of the expanding opportunities facing them and their families, and the moves that they take to reinvent themselves in response to these. Their migration for wage work in the city has given them new possibilities and yet low wages and urban motherhood has its own constraints. Two of the women in this chapter are single mothers. One was abandoned as a pregnant single woman and the other was divorced after the birth of her third child. The other two are married working mothers. Although these four women share some commonalities with the other women in this study, their narratives are selected not because they are typical or representative. On the contrary, they are presented here in order to show the diversity and the richness of their lives.