ABSTRACT
Rural Indian women’s labor force participation varies by class, with the biggest decreases in this share occurring in households reliant upon income from casual wage labor. This paper presents some preliminary evidence in favor of two hypotheses to explain this particular intersection of class and the gender. The first, that an intensification of rural women’s reproductive labor may play a role in their falling labor force participation rates. The second, that alongside a loss of access to the commons, this outcome is made more likely in an accumulation context marked by processes of formal subsumption to capital.
