ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interactions between the rural labour market and domestic gender relations in drought-prone villages in Andhra Pradesh, India. The focus is on women’s rising share of agricultural wage employment in comparison with men, a trend occurring across the Indian subcontinent although rather more emphatically in the south than in the north (Bennett 1992). The central question that this study attempts to resolve is whether the feminization of agricultural labour has been an empowering experience for the women concerned. We examine this issue by first evaluating the factors responsible for women’s increased involvement in the labour market, then by comparing women’s status vis-à-vis men in the labour market and, finally, by examining the repercussions of this on women’s household status.
