The Journal of Peasant Studies

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Gender and class relations in rural India

Smriti Rao

To cite this article: Smriti Rao (2018) Gender and class relations in rural India, The Journal of
Peasant Studies, 45:5-6, 950-968, DOI: 10.1080/03066150.2018.1499094

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2018.1499094

Published online: 30 Oct 2018.

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THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES
2018, VOL. 45, NOS. 5–6, 950–968
https://doi.org/10.1080/03066150.2018.1499094

Gender and class relations in rural India

a,b
Smriti Rao
a
Department of Economics and Global Studies, Assumption College, Worcester, MA, USA; bWomen’s Studies
Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham MA, USA

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Rural Indian women’s labor force participation varies by class, with Reproductive labor; capitalist
the biggest decreases in this share occurring in households reliant accumulation; female labor
upon income from casual wage labor. This paper presents some force participation; rural;
preliminary evidence in favor of two hypotheses to explain this India
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.

Introduction
There is now a growing literature that tries to understand the decline in rural female labor
force participation rates in India, from a share of 39% of rural, working age women who
were not full time students in 1993–94, to 35% in 2009–10 and 30% in 2011–12 (Rangar-
ajan, Kaul, and Seema 2011). Given the relatively low level from which this decline has
occurred, this runs counter to expected trajectories of development observed in countries
ranging from nineteenth century Germany and the United States, to Mexico or China more
recently. India has also not witnessed the large streams of female rural-urban employment
migration that helped create a female wage labor force in these other countries (Rao and
Finnoff 2015).
There are competing explanations for this trend. The first is that a traditional normative
association between female seclusion and family status in India has resulted in female
employment in India being distress-driven (Eswaran, Ramaswami, and Wadhwa 2011;
Neff, Sen, and Kling 2012; Das et al. 2015). Decreases in female labor force participation
rates are therefore understood to imply a reduction in household economic distress,
and a voluntary ‘withdrawal’ of women from the workforce as economic mobility allows
more households to adopt norms of female seclusion and male breadwinners and
signal their increased economic status (Abraham 2013). The intensification of other ‘san-
skritized’ or upper-caste patriarchal norms, including dowry or son-preference, might
follow as part of the same efforts to signal social mobility.1

CONTACT Smriti Rao srao1@brandeis.edu Associate Professor of Economics and Global Studies, Assumption
College; Resident Scholar, Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University, Waltham MA, USA
1
‘Sanskritization’ describes the process by which Indian households make socio-economic status claims by adopting upper
caste norms such as female seclusion, particular forms of dowry, certain religious rituals etc. (Srinivas 1998).
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 951

Despite relatively high growth rates, however, there is also evidence of rising rural-
urban inequality, falling agricultural employment amidst uneven agricultural growth,
and low non-agricultural employment growth in rural India. As a result, the economic
mobility that is believed to drive status-signalling ‘withdrawal’ of women from the labor
force is not as widespread as overall growth rates would suggest (Reddy and Mishra
2010; Vakulabharanam 2010; Thorat and Dubey 2012; Vakulabharanam and Motiram
2016). An alternative hypothesis is that declining female labor force participation is a ‘dis-
couraged worker’ effect, in which a reduced demand for women workers is driving them
out of the rural workforce (Kannan and Raveendran 2012). The normative changes dis-
cussed above are also understood differently in this hypothesis. In an environment of
unstable and precarious economic lives, conforming to ideologies of female domesticity
and male breadwinning may become one of the few sources of honor and status for
men (Chowdhry 2007; Roy 2007; Qayum and Ray 2010; Anandhi 2017). Any intensification
of patriarchal norms could then be read as an attempt to counter losses in their economic
status.
The decrease in rural female labor force participation rates means a corresponding
increase in the share of rural women who report performing only reproductive labor. Fem-
inists have argued that analyses of labor force participation are incomplete without con-
sideration of changes in reproductive burdens (Folbre 2001; Razavi 2007, 2009). Yet,
neither of the two explanations discussed above explores whether shifts in reproductive
burdens affect the labor force participation of rural women. Social reproduction, or the
production and maintenance of human life itself, requires not just the act of biological
reproduction, but also the provisioning of basic needs (through the production of
goods and services such as cooking, cleaning, fetching water), care work (the care of chil-
dren, the elderly, the sick etc.), and the labor of reproducing and transmitting culture and
values that give human lives their meaning (Beneria and Sen 1981; Razavi 2007; Elson
2010). Gender relations help allocate such labor to certain subsets of workers, usually
women, with gender norms helping to sustain the idea that this labor lies outside the
economy, e.g. is for love, or should be for ‘free’ (Folbre 2001). Changes in the conditions
of such work, as well as changes in these norms, could thus drive changes in the extent
of such labor.
One objective of this paper is to incorporate this feminist insight into the debate on
rural women’s labor force participation in India, and build on a currently small literature
arguing that the decline in rural Indian women’s labor force participation is the result of
increases in women’s burdens of reproductive work (Naidu 2016; Siddiqui et al. 2017;
Naidu and Rao 2018). The second objective of this paper is to present a Marxist-feminist
theorization of the way that the labor of social reproduction is articulated with the particu-
lar forms of accumulation most dominant in rural India today. Feminists have theorized the
double burden created for women when women are drawn into the wage labor force as
relatively cheap wage workers. However, the data on rural women’s labor force partici-
pation in India suggests an outcome in which women’s unpaid reproductive labor plays
a more significant role than their wage labor.
This paper conducts an analysis of the gender division of labor by rural class position to
show that the share of rural women who report being out of the labor force varies
by class, with the biggest increases in this share coming amongst casual wage labor
households.
952 S. RAO

This paper presents two hypotheses to explain this outcome. First, that these are house-
holds who have the most limited access to land and the raw materials of social reproduc-
tion such as firewood and water, and thus households most acutely experiencing the
intensification of reproductive labor as a result of loss of access to the rural commons
(Levien 2017). The lack of national level data on time-use and on access to the
commons constrains the ability to fully test this argument, but as seen below, preliminary
evidence in favor of this hypothesis comes from the fact that there is a positive correlation
between women’s labor force participation and several indirect measures of access to the
raw materials of social reproduction.
Second, the paper hypothesizes that a theoretical framework that distinguishes
between capitalist accumulation based on increases in relative surplus value (and thus
through the ‘real subsumption’ of labor) and those based on increases in absolute
surplus value (or ‘formal subsumption’ of labor) may also help us to understand the
increases in women’s unpaid reproductive labor in rural India. The paucity of data on
women’s reproductive labor once again means that further research is required to test
this hypothesis. The argument made here is that such research may be critical to under-
standing the mechanisms of capitalist accumulation in rural India today.
While the paper draws on existing micro studies of rural India, the main source of quan-
titative data in the analysis is the National Sample Survey (NSS) quinquennial employment
unemployment surveys for rural India, from 1994, 2004–05, 2009–10 and 2011–12.2 The
analysis is restricted to the rural working age population (15–64 years).

Changing class and gender dynamics in rural India

The intersection between class and gender is at the heart of Marxist-feminist analyses.
There are, however, several difficulties with empirically trying to understand this inter-
section. The first is the fact that most class schema cover entire households, even
though there may be gendered differences in the actual occupations of members.
The second is the use of household-level asset holdings to create class categories,
despite the fact that there may be substantial intra-household inequalities in asset own-
ership (DaCorta and Venkateshwarulu 1999). The third, and perhaps most thorny, is the
fact that the labor of social reproduction, usually performed by women, has defied
attempts to subsume it into class categories (Beneria and Sen 1981; Razavi 2009;
Fraser 2016).
This section analyses the extent to which accounting for the intra-household gender
division of labor complicates our understanding of class dynamics. The class categories
used here were developed to be compatible with NSS data by Vakulabharanam (2010).
They are designed to capture the household’s relation to the production of surplus,
with distinctions between those who engage in wage labor, and thus produce
surplus without appropriating it, and those who appropriate this surplus (Vakulabhara-
nam and Motiram 2016). The data used to produce this categorization are: (i) the size of
the household’s land holdings; and (ii) NSS data on the ‘primary’ source of income of

2
Due to the absence of a question on the household’s primary income source in the 1999-00 Employment Unemployment
surveys, the 99–00 round cannot be included in this analysis. Furthermore, 2004–05 was an agricultural distress year,
marked by drought in many parts of the country. There may thus be some unusual deviations from trends in that year.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 953

Table 1. Household-level class status of the rural, working age population.

1994 2004–05 2009–10 2011–12
Rural Elites 34 33 30 30
Small and Marginal Farmer/Tenant 27 27 25 28
Agricultural wage workers (no land) 28 24 24 20
Non-Agricultural Wage Workers (no land) 11 14 21 22
Share of households primarily reliant upon agriculture 70 64 60 58
Share of all casual wage worker households 39 38 45 42

the household, which is used to classify households into different occupational types
based on the primary source of income.3
A simplified four class scheme is used here, dividing rural households into agricultural
casual wage workers, non-agricultural casual wage workers, small and marginal farmers
(less than 5 acres of land) and rural elites.4 This last category groups together large and
middle farmers, the rural non-agricultural self-employed (including money lenders and
other rentiers) and rural professionals.
Table 1 provides us with the share of the working age, rural population living in these
four different class categories of households from 1994 to 2011–12. At first glance, the
observed trends may seem like the expected transition out of agriculture. We see an
increase in the share of households reliant upon non-agricultural wage work, as well as
some increase in proletarianization – the overall share of those whose primary source of
income comes from some kind of wage work has risen into the low 40s. The category
of elites is also increasingly reliant on non-agricultural income, with large and middle
farmers falling from 16% of the working age population to 10%, and non-agricultural
petty commodity producers rising from 7% to 11% (data available upon request).
However, and this an important caveat, this data also shows that the pace of change is
extremely slow. Furthermore, based on the shares above, a majority of the rural working
age population still depends upon self-employment as their primary source of income,
with about 40% being small and marginal farmers or non-agricultural petty producers.
Last but not least, the wage labor that has expanded is casualized, with the share of salar-
ied wage labor households remaining at 2–3% over the years.
A gendered analysis of these class categories requires shifting away from a household-
based definition of class status and looking at the reported occupations of individual men
and women. As discussed earlier, data on land controlled by the household cannot be
meaningfully disaggregated by gender at present. We therefore categorize individuals
based only on their reported ‘principal’ occupation status (the work they do for more
than 183 days in a year).5

3
There are important critiques of the use of land data to construct class categories (Patnaik 1976). Unfortunately, the limit-
ations of the NSS data (which does not include data on hired in/hired out labor) compel the use of this relatively blunt
categorization. For an explanation of the empirical categories used here and how they are calculated and constructed
please see Vakulabharanam (2010) and Vakulabharanam and Motiram (2016).
4
I retain the distinction between agricultural and non-agricultural wage worker here because the gender dynamics of these
two categories do appear to differ, as discussed below.
5
In the case of the NSS, those who do not report being in the labor force are then asked if they engage in ‘domestic’ work,
or in ‘domestic and allied activities’. While domestic work is not clearly defined, allied activities are listed, and include the
collection of firewood and water, the free collection of fruits and vegetables, kitchen gardening and so on. The term
‘reproductive labor’ thus covers those who report being principally engaged in only domestic, or domestic and allied
activities. Hirway (2012) provides a detailed explanation of these categories, as well as the critique that this data under-
counts women’s labor force participation.
954 S. RAO

Table 2. Principal occupational status of rural working age women.

WOMEN 1994 2004–05 2009–10 2011–12
Reproductive labor 58 53 59 61
Non-ag. self employed + helper 3 4 3 3
Ag. self employed + helper 15 17 12 11
Non-ag. casual wage 1 2 2 2
Agriculture casual wage 15 13 12 8
Salaried worker 1 2 2 2
Total % in agriculture 30 30 24 19
Total % non-reproductive labor 36 38 30 26
Student 3 6 8 9

We see that neither the shift to non-agricultural work, nor the increase in the share of
casual wage work observed for men, or for households as whole, is noticeable in the data
for women (Tables 2 and 3). The share of women in non-agricultural wage employment
remained miniscule at around 2%, while declines in agricultural wage work have meant
that the overall share of women reporting principal status wage work of any kind actually
fell from 18% in 1994 to 12% in 2011–12, with most of the decline occurring after 2004–05.
Furthermore, there is also a decline in the share of self-employed women, and while there
is an increase in the share of students for both men and women, in the case of women, this
increase does not account for all of the decline in labor force participation.
We then look at the reported principal status occupational categories for working age
rural women and men, cross-tabulated against household class categories. This time we
exclude all working age students, so that changes in the relative shares cannot be
explained by increases in shares of full-time students. We also exclude salaried workers,
given their very small share amongst women.
Unsurprisingly, the occupational status of men is closely aligned with the class status of
the household (Tables 4 and 5). Thus, for example, 90% of men in agricultural wage worker
households report performing agricultural wage work, but that percentage is under 50%
for women. This intra-household occupation gap is smaller for small/marginal farmer and
agricultural worker households, as compared to the other two, more non-agriculturally
reliant class categories. This is not because women have more diverse occupations than
men in the latter households, but rather because the shares of women engaged principally
in reproductive labor are higher. Across all four NSS rounds, it is also not women in rural
elite households but rather those in non-agricultural casual labor households who report
the lowest labor force participation rates. This may be due to the managerial role of
women in the large and medium farmer households who are part of the category of
rural elite (Rao 2011).

Table 3. Principal occupational status of rural working age men.

MEN 1994 2004–05 2009–10 2011–12
Reproductive labor 0 0 1 0
Non-ag. self employed + helper 11 14 13 13
Ag. self employed + helper 37 34 30 30
Non-ag. casual wage 6 9 11 12
Agriculture casual wage 25 20 20 17
Salaried worker 8 8 7 9
Total % in agriculture 61 54 50 47
Total % non-reproductive labor 86 85 82 81
Student 9 10 13 14
Table 4. Household class status and principal work status of rural working age women.
Small and marginal Small and marginal Small and marginal Small and marginal
Women Rural Elite Rural Elite Rural Elite Rural Elite farmer farmer farmer farmer
1994 2004 2009 2012 1994 2004 2009 2012
Reproductive labor 69 65 72 77 67 62 69 70
Non-ag. self employed + 7 10 8 7 1 2 1 1
helper
Agriculture self employed 20 22 18 14 30 35 29 27
+ helper
Non-ag. wage laborer 1 0 1 1 0 0 0 0
Ag. wage laborer 3 2 2 2 1 1 1 2
% in agriculture 23 24 20 16 31 36 30 29
Non-ag. casual Non-ag. casual Non-ag. casual Non-ag. casual Agricultural casual Agricultural casual Agricultural casual Agricultural casual
labor labor labor labor labor labor labor labor

THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES

Reproductive labor 70 71 77 80 48 44 52 59
Non-ag. self employed + 2 3 2 2 1 2 1 2
helper
Agriculture self employed 7 8 5 5 2 3 2 2
+ helper
Non-ag. wage laborer 10 10 9 8 1 1 1 2
Ag. wage laborer 11 9 6 5 48 50 44 36
% in agriculture 18 17 11 10 50 53 46 38

955
 956
S. RAO
Table 5. Household class status and principal work status of rural working age men.
Small and marginal Small and marginal Small and marginal Small and marginal
Men Rural Elite Rural Elite Rural Elite Rural Elite farmer farmer farmer farmer
1994 2004 2009 2012 1994 2004 2009 2012
Non-ag. self employed + 37 49 50 52 4 5 4 4
helper
Agriculture self 55 46 44 40 91 91 91 90
employed + helper
Non-ag. wage laborer 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 2
Ag. wage laborer 5 2 2 2 3 2 3 3
% in ag 60 48 46 42 94 93 94 93
Non-ag. casual Non-ag. casual Non-ag. casual Non-ag. casual Agricultural casual Agricultural casual Agricultural casual Agricultural casual
labor labor labor labor labor labor labor labor
Non-ag. self employed + 5 5 6 5 2 1 1 1
helper
Agriculture self 7 6 5 4 4 4 4 4
employed + helper
Non-ag. wage laborer 73 82 77 80 4 3 3 4
Ag wage laborer 13 6 11 9 91 90 91 91
% in ag 20 12 16 13 95 94 95 95
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 957

While agricultural wage work for women has declined across the board, after 2004–05
principal status agricultural self-employment also declined across all four class categories.
In fact, the loss of agricultural self-employment (rather agricultural wage labor, which was
small to begin with) explains most of the decline in female labor force participation
amongst elites and small/marginal farmers. And unlike in the case of men, these declines
are not compensated for by increases in either non-agricultural wage employment, or
non-agricultural self-employment, despite the attention paid to micro-credit and female
entrepreneurship. There is no class category in which women reported increasing
shares of non-agricultural work of either kind.
However, while the biggest increase in the share of women reproductive laborers was
in agricultural wage laborer households, this was closely followed by non-agricultural
casual wage labor households. And here there were declines in the shares of women
non-agricultural wage workers as well. Given that non-agricultural casual laborer house-
holds are a growing share of the rural population, the declines within this category
account for a significant share of the overall decline. The smallest increase in the share
of women reporting reproductive labor was in the households of marginal farmers and
tenants.
There are two conclusions that emerge from this analysis. The first is that while
some miscounting of women’s reproductive labor may indeed be occurring (Hirway
2012), it does seem to vary systematically across these class categories in ways that
do not appear to be coincidental. The increases within casual wage labor households
are especially noteworthy. Second, the fall in agricultural employment has hit
women workers especially hard, particularly because of their exclusion from the rural
non-agricultural economy, which is now the main source of job growth in rural India
(Thomas 2014).
The evident impact of declining agricultural employment gives weight to the ‘discour-
aged worker’ hypothesis as a possible explanation for the decrease in female labor force
participation rates. But the discouraged worker hypothesis does not explain why women
have not been absorbed by the rural non-agricultural sector. I argue that such an under-
standing requires attention to the current context of capitalist accumulation in India, and
women’s reproductive labor burdens within that context.
Since 2004–05, almost all the job growth in the rural non-agricultural sector has
occurred in construction, with some expansion of petty trade. Rural manufacturing, on
the other hand, has shrunk for women (Thomas 2014). Work in petty trade requires
access to capital, which women often lack, and daily wage work in construction requires
commuting to work places that are far from home, and constantly changing. As I argue
below, the fact that these spatially and temporally fragmented forms of work are the
primary option for workers in rural India is a result of India’s particular context of capitalist
accumulation. But these kinds of work raise particular challenges for women trying to
perform reproductive labor. The manufacture of ‘bidi’s, or the processing of food,
however exploitative, could be home based in a way that construction work cannot. Fur-
thermore, the shares of women reporting principal status reproductive labor have
increased the most in the two class categories, non-agricultural and agricultural laborer,
where households have little access to land other than through the rural commons.
These are the classes most dependent upon the commons to access the raw materials
of social reproduction (firewood, water, free fruits and vegetables etc.). As argued
958 S. RAO

below, their burdens of reproductive labor may be less easily reconciled with the forms of
employment available in rural India.
In trying to understand the intersection of class and gender in rural India then, we need
to account for the particular form of capitalism in rural India, as well as the role that
women’s reproductive labor plays in the changing class dynamics of the Indian country-
side. Women who report performing reproductive labor for the majority of the year
constitute by far the largest category of workers in rural India today. Any explanation of
what is happening in the rural economy that fails to include this large group is thus
incomplete.

Dispossession and social reproduction in rural India

One key feature of Indian capitalism is the extent to which access to the commons has
decreased as cities have expanded, special economic zones have been constructed, mining
permits issued, and highways and dams built (Maringanti et al. 2012; Jenkins, Kennedy, and
Mukhopadhyay 2014; Levien 2015). This is in addition to the degradation of existing
commons, as well as water and forest resources on private land (Jodha 2008; Naidu 2016).
We do not currently have good data that would allow us to track this shift at the
national level, but the Agricultural Census of 2010, which provides data only on the utiliz-
ation of operational holdings, shows a decrease in the share of such holdings used as
pasture land or as long term fallow land, and an increase in the share of operational hold-
ings used for non-agricultural purposes (Department of Agriculture, Co-operation and
Farmer’s Welfare 2016). Even those with access to agricultural land may then find it
harder to access water or firewood. A full discussion of dispossession processes is
outside the scope of this paper, but the main focus here is the impact upon the gender
division of labor in rural India: a decrease in the ability of rural households to access
common property forest and water resources that results in increased work burdens for
women6 (Jodha 2008; Levien 2017).
Micro and macro data confirm that the procurement of the raw materials of social
reproduction (fuel, water, food inputs) takes up a large share of women’s time in most
of rural India (Garikipati 2008; Hirway and Jose 2011; Hirway 2012). Almost 70% of rural
Indian households (and 80% of agricultural labor households) rely on biomass for
cooking fuel – which means procuring firewood or making dung cakes, both of which
are time intensive processes. While 83% of rural households have access to safe drinking
water, this comes in the form of sporadic (and thus time sensitive) supply to a hand pump
or tap in the village, unless the household has access to a tube well. NSS data on repro-
ductive labor indicates that slightly more than 50% of rural principal status reproductive
workers reported performing activities such as the collection of water and firewood, or
what the NSS calls allied activities (Naidu and Rao 2018). The longer these activities take
as a result of reduced access to the commons, for example, the more likely it is that
women might be forced to reduce certain forms of care work, quite apart from certain
forms of paid labor. Thus children, the elderly, and the sick may have to fend for them-
selves for considerable periods of the day (Roy 2007).
6
Roy (2007) reports from her study of migrant workers in Kolkata that one rural woman interviewee reported commuting to
the city to collect twigs and paper that she could use as firewood back in her village. In her village, she reported, she did
not have access to even that.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 959

Alongside reduced access to the raw materials of social reproduction, the fact that wage
work increasingly takes the form of fragmented forms of non-agricultural wage work,
serves to increase the spatial and temporal disconnect between reproductive labor and
‘productive’ work (Massey 1994). While water and firewood could be found on one’s
own agricultural land, or the land of agricultural employers, in the case of non-agricultural
work such overlaps are less likely. Increased temporary, circular migration that creates mul-
tilocational households further contributes to the difficulty of ensuring social reproduction
(Garikipati 2008). Last but not least, demographic changes, and an increase in the hours of
schooling of young girls (who once assisted their mothers in performing this labor), have
likely accentuated this disconnect even further (Razavi 2007).
The fact that women do indeed participate when the conditions of work are more
stable is indicated by two (admittedly highly aggregated) pieces of evidence. First, in
the 2011–12 NSS data, women’s labor force participation is positively correlated (corre-
lation coefficient: +0.069, statistically significant at the 1% level) with the state level
share of industrial employment. The relatively high and increasing share of women
workers in NREGA (MNREGA 2017) is also notable. This, along with the fact that there is
a higher share of women’s labor force participation in the ‘rural professional’ class, indi-
cates that when work is ‘decent’ and can be reconciled with reproductive burdens,
women are indeed participating in the labor force.
The agricultural census data mentioned earlier provides an imperfect estimate of the util-
ization of land reported as operational holdings in each state. Merging state levels averages
for land utilization with the 2011–12 NSS data, the share of such land used for non-agricul-
tural purposes is negatively, and statistically significantly (at 1%) correlated with women
reporting labor force participation (−0.11), while the share of land left as pastures and as
long term fallows is positively correlated with female labor force participation (0.16). While
again highly aggregated, this is the relationship that we would predict if the ability to
access water or firewood were a constraint on women’s labor force participation. Studies
of women’s NREGA participation also show that the proximity of work to the home village
is an attractive feature of the program for women, suggesting that the ability to manage
reproductive work is a significant determinant of the ability of women to engage in wage
employment (Khera and Nayak 2009; Sudarshan, Bhattacharya, and Fernandez 2010).
Finally, Naidu and Rao (2018) find that higher shares of ‘basic’ food expenditure (expen-
diture on unprocessed foods) by households correlate with lower female labor force par-
ticipation, and that greater state subsidization of food costs through the Public
Distribution System (PDS) increases female labor force participation (see also Das et al.
2015). While there is a need for more field research on this subject, they argue that a
‘reproductive squeeze’ is forcing women to intensify reproductive labor, thus affecting
women’s ability to engage in such wage work.
There is thus some preliminary evidence to support the hypothesis that women’s repro-
ductive labor may indeed have increased, given the degradation of, and reduced access to,
the rural commons. But there is a need to theorize how this intensification of reproductive
labor is articulated with the larger context of capitalist accumulation. The theoretical argu-
ment this paper makes is that it might be useful to consider the distinction between formal
and real subsumption to understand the ways in which the intensification of women’s
reproductive labor helps to sustain a ‘formal subsumption’ model of capitalist accumu-
lation, which in turn reduces the likelihood of women participating in the labor force.
960 S. RAO

Social reproduction and capitalist accumulation

Feminist Marxist analyses have been concerned with both how gender sorts men and
women into different locations within surplus production and appropriation processes
as well as how gender and class relations reciprocally affect each other. However, feminist
economists have more fully explored both questions in contexts where workers are sub-
sumed to capital in real terms.
In his discussion of ‘formal subsumption to capital’, Marx points out a key difference
between formal as opposed to real subsumption. While in both cases the bases of depen-
dence between employers and workers are primarily economic, in the former case, we see
the extraction of surplus by capital without its direct intervention within, and technological
transformation of, the labor process. As he points out, ‘capital thus subsumes under itself a
given, existing labor process’ in contrast to real subsumption of labor which ‘revolutionises the
kind of labor done and the real mode of the entire labor process’ (Marx 1976, 1021). The
emphasis, as a result, is on the extraction of absolute rather than relative surplus value, as
with
a given level of development of the productive power of labour and a mode of labour which
corresponds to this productive power, surplus value can only be created by prolonging labour
time, hence in the manner of absolute surplus value. (Marx 1976, 1032).

In these passages, Marx does not discuss the role of unpaid labor in increasing absolute
surplus value, but the emphasis on absolute rather than relative surplus value provides
us with a way for us to think about the role of women’s reproductive labor in this particular
capitalist formation.
In Marx, formal subsumption precedes real subsumption, and it is with the latter that
capitalists centralize production, and accumulation processes accelerate. But while some
parts of the Indian economy, particularly in urban India, have seen substantial growth
via real subsumption of capital, the rural informal economy discussed in this paper is a
reminder that formal subsumption can be a successful accumulation strategy that persists
without a transition to real subsumption (Jan 2012). The argument made here is that
women’s reproductive labor has been central to sustaining that outcome.

Women’s labor and acccumulation by real subsumption

One way to increase the rate of accumulation is through the increase in relative surplus
value that results from women entering the labor force as relatively docile and cheap
workers (Elson 2010). This may occur in a context where women have access to education
or reproductive rights and thus are productive enough to be effective competition for
male workers. The development of household technology that can reduce reproductive
labor and the state subsidization of education, healthcare and access to water and fuel
likely need to be part of this process.7
An increasing reliance on the second strategy sets up a reproductive crisis of the
‘double burden’ form, particularly when it comes to the labor of care (Hochschild and
Machung 2012). Such a reproductive crisis could be solved by the complete
7
It is possible for such a reversal of course to be restricted to one group of women (of a particular race or caste or class)
while another continues to be restricted to unpaid labor.
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 961

commodification of care work and its complete integration into capitalism. However, as
Nancy Folbre (Folbre 2001) has shown, it is precisely the emphasis on love and duty
within this sphere that makes it especially resistant to being embedded further into capit-
alism. This reproductive crisis could also be solved by a reconfiguration of the gender div-
ision of labor and the norms surrounding it, whereby care work becomes more equally
shared by all members of the household. But the relative autonomy of gendered power
relations means such a renegotiation is rarely easy or smooth. Indeed, in the case of a
majority of poorer households in the US it appears to have failed, leaving single women
to bear an intensifying double burden of care work in the home and wage work
outside it (Fraser 2016).
The puzzle in the Indian case, however, is that NSS data appear to indicate a
decrease in the ‘double burden’ as more women are classified as performing principally
reproductive labor, even as capitalist profits grow. Part of the story may be the mis-
classification of women’s work (Hirway 2012). But the fact that women’s work status
appears to vary by household class category suggests that there may be something
more to learn.

Women’s labor and formal subsumption

Rural India is, in the language of mainstream economists, a highly informalized economy,
with the rural self-employed dominated by small and marginal farmers and non-agricul-
tural petty commodity producers (based on the prior class categorization, altogether
they account for about 40% of those who are working age), the former of whom may
also engage in temporary migration for wage work. Wage workers are almost all casualized
(also about 40% of the working age population, according to Table 1), working in agricul-
ture, construction, and micro manufacturing units, while also engaging in migration that is
circular and temporary. These rural workers and petty producers thus engage in a portfolio
of livelihood generating activities. One characteristic of these activities is the limited
degree of capitalist intervention within the production process, that attempts to centralize
production and bring about revolutions in technology (Das 2012).
In his discussion, Marx was referring to the formal subsumption of wage workers. Thus
he refers to the peasant who ‘becomes a day laborer working for a farmer’ or the situation
where ‘the former slave-owner engages his former slaves as wage laborers, etc.’ (Marx
1976, 1020). Without substantial technological transformations, these are workers from
whom surplus would then be extracted primarily through increases in the work day
and/or reductions in the value of labor power. In the case of formal subsumption, Marx
also comments on the fact that workers engage in a diversity of occupations with
‘perfect indifference towards the particular content of the work’ (Marx 1976, 1034).
Micro studies of rural casual wage workers indicate that the work they do has many of
these characteristics: stagnant productivity and methods of work; changing locations
and forms of ‘footloose’ work, long work days and dangerous conditions of work, and
the use of (interest bearing) wage advances and debt to push down the effective wage
(Breman 2010; Pattenden 2016).8
8
See Das (2012) for a description of how, as an outcome of class struggle, agricultural wage workers in Kerala may be better
described as really subsumed to capital, with unions setting wage and work conditions and the increasing use of tech-
nology by employers.
962 S. RAO

But the rich debates around the nature of Indian capitalism and the Indian agrarian
transition have shown the limitations of an approach that equates capitalism with wage
labor and discounts the diverse forms of surplus extraction that may exist in contemporary
rural India (Bernstein 2006; Lerche 2011; Shah and Harriss-White 2011; Jan 2012). While
there may indeed be petty producers whose production decisions can be considered inde-
pendent of capital, although articulated with it (Adnan 1985; Harriss-White 2012), there do
also appear to be many whose economic activities proceed under the ‘command of
capital’ (Banaji 2010) even in the absence of an explicit wage labor relationship, with
the difference between the two groups being one of degrees (Harriss-White 2016). Thus
self-employed small farmers may be in debt to agents of large agricultural seed and fer-
tilizer corporations (as well as banks and micro-credit agencies linked to international
capital via stock markets), while petty traders repay advances made to them by the con-
sumer goods companies whose wares they sell (Reddy and Mishra 2010; Harriss-White
2012; Guérin, Venkatasubramanian, and Kumar 2015). Those self-employed in rural man-
ufacturing may be engaged in producing ‘bidi’s, or woven goods, or processing food
inputs for a larger corporation via a sub-contracting processes (Raju 2013). In each case,
surplus is being extracted by capital, without formal relations of wage labor being
present. Usurious rates of interest and rents extracted by merchants able to squeeze
petty producers’ input and output prices feature prominently in descriptions of agrarian
crisis and would seem to be particularly dominant mechanisms of surplus extraction in
rural India (Reddy and Mishra 2010; Vakulabharanam 2010).
One potentially useful way of thinking about rural Indian capitalism, particularly as a
way of understanding the connection to women’s work, could therefore be that capital
generates surplus not just through the real subsumption of wage laborers freed from
the means of production, but also through processes of formal subsumption: using
wage advances and debt to lower the effective wages of some rural casualized wage
laborers and extracting interest and mercantile rents from the self-employed.
There are two aspects of this accumulation context that are especially important for
theorizing the role that women’s reproductive labor plays: the emphasis on increasing
absolute rather than relative surplus value, and the diversity of occupations and locations
that labor processes may involve, which leads to spatially and temporally fragmented live-
lihood strategies.9
As feminists have pointed out, intensifying the unpaid labor of social reproduction is
one way to extract absolute surplus value (Mies 1998; Elson 2010). Thus in self-employed
households making payments to moneylenders or merchants, an intensification of unpaid
work may help the household survive otherwise untenable conditions. The same may be
true of casual wage laborer households where debt and wage advances reduce the
effective wage received.
This context can become a vicious cycle for women in that formal subsumption may
lead to more ‘footloose’ kinds of wage work, making it harder for women to participate
in such work and still fulfill their obligations of reproductive labor. Work that requires mul-
tiple migrations, or changing locations and times of work are much harder to reconcile

9
Such transient and varying kinds of labor are also much more likely to be mis-classified as non-work, thus increasing the
share of women reported as being out of the labor force. This is especially true for women, but also for men, whose
circular migration is being undercounted in NSS data (Breman 2010; Shah and Harriss-White 2011).
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 963

with reproductive labor (Garikipati 2008). Furthermore, loss of access to commons may
make a reconciliation between wage work and reproductive labor even more difficult
by decreasing access to the raw materials of social reproduction.
One solution to this conflict is for reproductive labor to be technologically transformed,
since it cannot be completely abandoned in a context where single, childless women and
men are a rarity. The second solution is for reproductive labor to be replaced by market
substitutes/state provisioning, or to be redistributed by gender and age, the latter
being more likely in the Indian case. The third solution is that reproductive labor takes pre-
cedence over wage work. One way of interpreting falling female labor force participation
rates in rural India is that they represent the dominance of this third solution. The hypoth-
esis presented here for consideration is that the larger accumulation context may help us
understand this outcome.
As feminists point out, such a prioritization of reproductive labor is not automatic, and
patriarchal power is exercised to discipline women who choose otherwise, sometimes at
the expense of the economic interests of the household (Jackson and Rao 2009; Kapadia
2017). However, the argument here is that this particular accumulation context makes it
less likely that capitalist expansion will be accompanied by an increase in wage work
for women. Indeed the situation in India is precisely that such wage work is not increasing
enough even for male bread winners.
This particular outcome also, of course, preserves and calls upon structures and norms
of the family to a greater extent (Mies 1998). This may help us understand the strength of
patriarchal family structures despite the widespread changes in the Indian economy. The
universality of marriage for relatively young women and men, the fact that it still takes the
form of intra-jati arranged marriages, the fact that shares of ‘joint’ families remain high, to
mention some examples of sanskritized gender relations discussed earlier, are all evidence
of this strength (Chowdhry 2007; Rahman and Rao 2004). While playing a status signaling
role, these structures also help to constitute and preserve nominally independent units of
production that are then formally subsumed to capital in a variety of ways. They would
also help to sustain normative and material pressures on women to continue to subsidize
the value of labor power through unpaid reproductive work.
In an interesting example of how family structures could enable surplus appropriation
of the formally subsumed kind, the explosion of for-profit microcredit companies in rural
India (many of which were listed on the Indian stock exchange) provided a new mechan-
ism of surplus extraction (ultimately accruing to large financial firms in India and abroad)
that explicitly drew upon the structure of the family as a unit despite, on the surface,
seeming to create public groups of women outside of the family. As feminist critics
have noted, these ‘self-help groups’ (SHGs) of women often comprised of family
members (and were thus mono-caste) who reproduced family hierarchies of power
within the SHG, and used the same mechanisms of self and other-exploitation as within
the family (shame, guilt, honor, respect for age), to ensure the repayment of loans10
(Guérin, Kumar, and Agier 2013).

10
At the same time, these family structures also meant that groups stopped short of demanding complete dispossession in
order to secure payments. They may indeed have colluded with each other to play different microcredit companies off
against each other, using new loans from one company to repay old loans from another, ultimately leading to the bank-
ruptcy of some of these microcredit firms.
964 S. RAO

Furthermore, to the extent that capitalism is the only system entirely devoted to the
generation and appropriation of surplus (Harvey 2005), mechanisms of extraction of
surplus within formally subsumed labor processes may be perceived as less dehumanizing,
or alienating, than more direct capitalist exploitation through wage labor ‘outside’. Roy
(2007), Qayum and Ray (2010) study women slum dwellers in urban India and report
women’s awareness of the conditions that they work under, and their distaste for the
kind of wage labor they are engaging in, particularly where there is little enforcement
of laws that regulate the conditions of work such as working hours, pay and exposure
to various forms of harassment by superiors. Anandhi (2017) finds the same for Dalit
women in rural and urban Tamil Nadu.
Just as norms about maternal love and duty have generated resistance to further
commodification of reproductive labor in western contexts of advanced capitalism,
these sanskritized gender norms may make it difficult for Indian capital to successfully
recruit the armies of cheap female labor that appear to be an important precondition
for accumulation by expanded reproduction. As seen above, norms about gender div-
isions of labor may even be used by women to avoid more direct capitalist exploitation.
And it does not appear that the Indian state or Indian capital are strongly contesting this
outcome. There is some degree of mobilization of public opinion around women’s edu-
cation, but the majority of families seem to expect the returns to such education to
occur in form of improved marriage alliances, rather than employment (Klasen and
Pieters 2015). All this means that if there is an attempt to mobilize women as cheap
wage workers in the future, it is unclear if gender relations will be flexible enough to
respond.

Conclusion
It is increasingly clear that while India is undergoing a significant economic transform-
ation, this does not resemble the expected agrarian transition. Even as capitalist
profits grow, there has been little expansion of high productivity, salaried wage work.
Instead, rural as well as urban Indians engage in multiple, transient, low productivity
and technologically stagnant livelihood generation activities that combine self-employ-
ment and wage work, including ones that involve circular and temporary migration from
rural to urban India and back again. Amidst these changes, however, there has been a
decline in the share of rural working age women in the laborforce. The 61% of working
age rural women who reported being principally engaged in some form of reproductive
labor in 2011–12 constituted the single largest category of workers in rural India. They
are perhaps also the group that is least researched, so that we do not yet fully under-
stand the role that their labor plays in shaping forms of surplus accumulation in India
today.
An empirical analysis of NSS data reveals some interesting variations in the shares of
rural women performing reproductive labor by class, with the highest shares of such
workers in households reliant upon income from non-agricultural wage labor. Along
with agricultural wage labor households, these households also saw the highest increases
in this share after 1994.
This paper presents two hypotheses to explain this particular intersection of class and
the gender division of labor. The first, that an intensification of rural women’s reproductive
 THE JOURNAL OF PEASANT STUDIES 965

labor may play a role in their falling labor force participation rates. The second, that along-
side 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. These are presented here
as hypotheses that require better data on time-use and access to the commons in order to
be explored more completely.
The paper suggests three ways in which women’s reproductive labor may be helping to
sustain these particular mechanisms of surplus extraction. As has been shown in other
contexts, the intensification of women’s unpaid work helps households to survive other-
wise untenable conditions and sustain the continuing extraction of absolute surplus
value (Elson 2010). Second, the loss of access to, and degradation of, common property
water and fuel sources for households with little access to land can increase the time inten-
sity of reproductive labor. This also increases the difficulty of combining reproductive labor
with labor force participation, either restricting such women to the labor of procuring
water, fuel and food products, or making some forms of formal subsumption, wherein
surplus is extracted without an explicit wage labor relationship, more likely. This
outcome is also more likely to preserve the family unit as the nominally independent
unit of production and consumption. This means potentially greater recourse to intra-
family inequalities of gender in the process of ensuring the generation of surplus, and
greater appeals to patriarchal norms that undergird these inequalities.
This paper thus theorizes a particular intersection of class and gender relations that may
result both in ‘missing’ female employment, as well as a material and normative strength-
ening of certain patriarchal forms of gender relations. Time-use data that can be disaggre-
gated by class would be very useful to further investigate and validate these arguments. If
future research bears out this argument, it may be that understanding rural Indian
women’s reproductive labor, which has barely been studied and is treated as marginal
even to discussions of women’s own falling laborforce participation, is central to under-
standing capitalist development in India.

Acknowledgements
The author acknowledges very helpful feedback from Vamsi Vakulabharanam, participants in the
Political Economy workshop at UMass, Amherst, two anonymous reviewers, and the guest editors
of this special issue.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID
Smriti Rao http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7554-1384

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Smriti Rao is Associate Professor of Economics at Assumption College, and Resident Scholar at the
Women’s Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.