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This article is concerned with a long-standing problem concerning the nature and value of women’s labour in modern India. The first part of the article offers a theoretical overview of the issues involved, arguing for an intersectional framework that would reorient a focus on women through questions of gender, class, caste and sexuality. Issues relating to the prominence of the domestic sphere, stigma and public labour, and the abjection of sex work are brought into this frame. The second part of the article uses the method of exploring women’s life narratives or autobiographies to investigate this problem through the places occupied by labour in a life story, drawing on the writings of Rashsundari Debi, Binodini Dasi, Baby Kamble, Baby Haldar and Nalini Jameela. The third part of the article reflects on the insights gleaned, in particular on the kinds of conflicts that structure women’s relationships in the world of labour and on the further questions this raises for feminist analysis.

The current moment of higher education reforms in India has yet to receive sustained attention from scholars and activists. Historically speaking, women's education occupied a central place from the nineteenth century to the first decades of India's independence, but, curiously, lost prominence with the onset of the women's movement and the introduction of women's studies in the academy in the 1980s and since then. Although the participation of women in higher education shows steady improvement and a narrowing of the gender gap, the article examines national-level data to reveal the complex and elusive forms being currently assumed by gender discrimination. This includes recognising that disparities among women from different social groups are greater than those among men of the same groups. Secondly, many of the contexts where gender gaps have closed are also characterised by adverse child sex ratios due to practices of sex selection. Taken together, the current era of expansion in higher education demands analysis from a gendered perspective.

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