Abstract
This book is an ethnography about urban and educated young women working in the cafés, call centers, shopping malls, and offices and living in small one- or two-bedroom apartments with their families in Dakshinpuri, a neighborhood in South Delhi. The book places young working women between the ages of 19 and 23 against the backdrop of changing class formations and politics in the post-1990s era of India’s liberalization with changing conceptions of modernity. Some of the questions that the author attempts to answer are: Does economic independence mean gender equality? Does the precarious nature of work result in liberating women both economically and culturally or is it constraining and imposing a new code of behavior that continues to control women albeit from a Western perspective? Their goal is to move up into the middle class from the lower class, and the author uses the concept of middle lives as the women navigate through the workplace, the home, and the world outside. The pink-collar type of work in the globalized work environment is an illustration of the feminization of precarious work. Women’s position is often seen as one of stagnation and boredom, and the work itself becomes monotonous; however, monetary returns are greater than those in other jobs that they can be considered for. Simplistic notions of employment have only one kind of rationale for women working outside, and they experience both exploitation and some form of liberation or empowerment.
Asiya Islam met the working women for interviews across several sessions in cafés, malls, offices, and NGOs that they worked in rather than in their family homes. She found that women work for a variety of reasons including family survival, gaining capital for their own business, changing lifestyle, owning property, and being able to live a single life. Islam, the book’s author, argues that by imbibing middle classness, there is reproduction of inequalities that seems to unfold. The self-identification of these women as not rural, not “B grade,” or not heroines is an important aspect of their assertiveness.
The book is divided into seven chapters and begins by introducing the women as the cast by providing vignettes of their lives with a tone of everydayness mixed with an analytic texture. The second chapter maps mobility of the women as they learn and become comfortable with speaking English to access the global service sector. We see how the women navigate different worlds in the workplace and home, and this theme continues in the third chapter where the public sphere is the arena for negotiation to financial independence, personal consumption, and navigating modes of transport. Chapter 4 examines how technology has made the young independent through smartphones and distanced from older forms of communication. Women resist early marriages and postpone the burden of domestic responsibility by actually contributing to the household expenses. They are constantly redefining gender and class boundaries through their dress and grooming, as well as showing how their personalities have changed. Chapter 6 shows how there are no binaries in real life but an oscillation between the real and the transient, as employment may be short-lived due to unhappy work or pressing responsibilities at home. Jobs in the modern world are not high-paying for these women and are quite precarious. But by changing jobs, they continue to resist the pressure of marriage and motherhood. The final chapter is set on the backdrop of conversations with unemployed women and schoolgirls who are aspiring for education and employment, investing in the hope for some freedom and disinvesting in marriage and family.
The book is an interesting read and contributes to the growing literature on the intersections between gender, class, and social location among young urban women in the globalized world. It shows the private in the public, the home and work colliding and conflating, and the ways in which education and employment are the means to a new world of opportunities. For readers of Gender and Society, it makes sense of the increasing chaos of the new forms of work and its vulnerabilities, as well as opportunities for self-fulfillment. The book is easy to read and accessible to both undergraduate and graduate students. It can be used for those working in the area of gender, class, and urban transformations. The narratives are detailed using a feminist methodological lens and will appeal to readers beyond academia. It compares with the growing empirical work on women and globalization in South Asia using ethnography and narratives moving beyond the category of the new middle class, to understand both changes in and reproduction of identities such as gender, class, and caste in globalization, development, and modernity in India.