In Western Europe, industrialization brought far-reaching changes in the family-household system by separating the household from the workplace. Factories, especially, took work away from home and eroded the integrity of the household. The spatial separation between the household and the workplace became the foundation for a conceptual separation between the community and the market. Families were separated from trades, consumption from production, women's activities from men's. These

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... s, often expressed in the generalized formula of a "private-public" divide, have underscored a thoroughgoing gender division of labour far beyond the original divisions supposed to be rooted in biological reproduction. In industrialized Europe, the working-class household's needs could not be met from the combined economic activities of its members: men, women and children. Rather, the daily bread was to be "won" by individual wage earners and clearly the breadwinners were to be men. In contrast, the home became the site of women's reproductive activities devoid of assignable exchange value. Wives' and daughters' unpaid work was increasingly underwritten by family ideology and was eventually to be covered by the "family wage" paid to husbands and fathers. In South Asia this type of household arrangement did not take effect among the working classes in the early phase of industrialization and is still not yet widespread. No clear separation of the household and production was effected: the household's own productive functions proved tenacious and in poor households, especially, women combined consumption, wage earning and reproduction, often simultaneously. The notion of a male wage earner as the single source of the household's sustenancethe single male breadwinner -was not a ubiquitous one and the inception of the modern factory system.was not critical in this regard. Factory industry was introduced in India in the mid-nineteenth century. Yet the demand for a family wage was not heard until the 1920s and then only at the instigation of British labour reformers and activists. The notion of a "fair Wage" based on a family of five to be paid to individual male factory workers became concretized in industrial bargaining and state policies only in the 1940s and 1950s. Even then, the workers of the "organized" sector to whom these arrangements exclusively applied, were a bare 20 67 capital-intensive labour concentrated in the hands of men while women undertook labour-intensive tasks of low status and poor reward. 3 In the 1890s G.A. Grierson, a British revenue officer, attempted to quantify women's contribution to the household budget. According to his estimates, artisans in Gaya derived 44 per cent of their earnings from "supplementary" activities, of which women contributed at least 30 per cent. Women worked on the family farm, for hire in transplanting seasons and reared cattle. 4 In the household of the agricultural labourer, the "supplemental" income, amounting to 40 per cent of total earnings, derived primarily from women's miscellaneous activities. In small cultivating families, women not only worked on the family farm but provided about 20 per cent of the supplementary income by cattle rearing and grain processing. 5 We do not know how Grierson collected his data, so one cannot assume that his quantitative assessment is absolutely precise. But his figures do indicate the importance of women's labour in the maintenance of the household in Bihar at the close of the nineteenth century. In the early part of the nineteenth century, another British observer, F.H. Buchanan, had found that though women were paid very poorly for grain processing, their principal sustained work throughout the year, they made up for it by weeding. Among agricultural labourers, women's total earnings exceeded that of men. 6 By the early twentieth century, in Muzaffarpur, more than half the "supplementary" income of the agricultural labourer, crucial in the lean periods of March and October, was provided by women. 7 In Saran, for instance, women predominated in many occupations. 8 Even in Bengal, women were associated with a wide range of nonagrarian activities. 9 An accelerated agrarian crisis after World War I increased the-small and marginal cultivator's dependence on women's "supplementary" income. 10