Dignity and Daily Bread

Dignity and Daily Bread compares the lives of women in the first and third worlds and examines how women have organized forms of production themselves. Covering a wide range of issues and areas, from cotton production in Bombay, conditions in Mexico and in some of the Far East economies, the contributors begin to break down some of the ideological barriers that colonialism and racism build among women. The immediacy of the accounts bring women's conditions in very different patriarchal societies to life, and underline the book's topicality in a time of global economic hardship. Dignity and Daily Bread will have considerable importance for women's studies and development studies.

Sheila Rowbotham has a background in economic and labour history and is the author of several books including Women's Resistance and Revolution (1973), Women's Consciousness, Man's World (1973) and Women in Movement: Feminism and Social Action (Routledge 1993). Swasti Mitter is an economist who has written extensively on homework, women and technology. She has published many books including Common Fate, Common Bond: Women in the Global Economy (1986), and Computer-aided Manufacturing and Women's Employment: The Clothing Industry in Four EC countries (1992).

Introduction 1 On organising women in casualised work: a global overview 2 Women in the Bombay cotton textile industry, 1919-1940 3 The conditions and organisational activities of women in Free Trade Zones: Malaysia, Philippines and Sri Lanka, 1970-1990 4 Weaving dreams, constructing realities: the Nineteenth of September National Union of Garment Workers in Mexico 5 Self-Employed Women's Association: organising women by struggle and development 6 Deindustrialisation and the growth of women's economic associations and networks in urban Tanzania 7 Strategies against sweated work in Britain, 1820-1920 8 Homework in West Yorkshire