Wow! eBook
Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy: Beyond the Weapons of the Weak
Author(s): Naila Kabeer (Author, Editor), Ratna Sudarshan (Author, Editor), Kirsty Milward (Author, Editor)
- Publisher: Zed Books
- Publication Date: 14 Mar. 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 312 pages
- ISBN-10: 1780324529
- ISBN-13: 9781780324524
Book Description
Organizing Women Workers in the Informal Economy explores the emergence of an alternative repertoire among women working in the growing informal sectors of the global South: the weapons of organization and mobilization. This crucial book offers vibrant accounts of how women working as farm workers, sex workers, domestic workers, waste pickers, fisheries workers and migrant factory workers have organized for collective action. What gives these precarious workers the impetus and courage to take up these steps? What resources do they draw on in order to transcend their structurally disadvantaged position within the economy? And what continues to hamper their efforts to gain social recognition for themselves as women, as workers and as citizens?
With first-hand accounts from authors closely involved in emerging organizations, this collection documents how women workers have come together to carve out new identities for themselves, define what matters to them, and develop collective strategies of resistance and struggle.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Women are exerting themselves across the world in wonderful ways. This is about more than combating vulnerability and oppression, although that is important enough. It is also about forging ways of living in which the human condition is enhanced. Women’s organisations are reviving a sense of solidarity and rescuing the meaning of equality, while giving new meaning to the ethos of freedom. This book speaks to that agenda, and should be widely read. –Guy Standing, SOAS
About the Author
Ratna Sudarshan is Advisor (Research and Projects) at the Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi, where she was Director from 2003 to 2011. She has researched and published on women in the informal economy, with a special focus on home-based work, social protection and local economic development; gender and education; research and policy linkage; and gender and evaluation. Other recent publications include a co-edited special issue (on ‘Evaluating gender and equity’) of the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 19, 2 (June 2012).
Kirsty Milward founded and co-manages Suchana Uttor Chandipur Society, an organization offering education focused on social and gender equality amongst the Adivasi communities where she lives in West Bengal, India. She is also a freelance consultant providing writing, editing and evaluation services and specializing in gender and rural development. She has a particular interest in various organizational formations inspiring action to advance social and economic equality. Kirsty has an MA in gender and development from the Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex.
