Welfare Rhetoric and Maternal Bodies: Protective Legislation Debates in Colonial Bombay

Abstract

This chapter critically maps the ways in which Indian elites and colonial administrators of Bombay considered the well-being of women millworkers. Until the 1920s, working-class women were marginal to the colonial gender reforms and women’s rights discourse. The Draft Convention meeting of the International Labour Conference triggered concerns for the welfare of women workers in India, a member country. Consistently high local infant mortality figures and the pressures to conform to new international labor welfare standards prompted Bombay’s educated social activists to campaign for paid maternity leaves for female millworkers and nurseries for their infants. Their relentless campaigns drew attention to an aspect of women workers’ lives that colonial bureaucrats, millowners, and the textile trade union movement of Bombay had neglected. Despite its successes, the discourse of maternal and infant welfare failed to espouse a liberal vocabulary of women workers’ rights. Rather, it drew uncritically on the nationalist ideologies of gender. The maternity benefits debate exalted working-class women’s roles in social reproduction, undermining their identities as productive workers. Also, the debates re-emphasized the agency of middle-class, educated reformers in determining and resolving the problems of the working classes, ignoring millworking women’s own initiatives for improving their well-being.