Description: Starting in 2020, twelve states in India have rolled out unconditional cash transfers to nearly 118 million women. Wages for Housework is the first book-length study of these transfers, addressing their pros and cons to argue that cash transfers offer much-need economic recognition of women's unpaid domestic and care work.
Review Quotes: "What makes Wages for Housework truly exceptional is that it takes women's lived experiences seriously, listening closely to how women themselves understand cash transfers, autonomy, dignity, labour, and citizenship. At a moment when feminist politics globally is struggling to articulate alternatives to right-wing governance, this book offers a bold, empirically grounded, and theoretically rigorous vision of what a feminist care manifesto might look like. It is an indispensable resource for scholars of feminism, development, law, political science, and economics and vital for anyone seeking to imagine a more just social contract centred on care, dignity, and life-making labour." -- Prof. Leopoldina Fortunati, Senior Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication, University of Udine
"In recent years, unconditional cash transfer schemes for women have been rolled out across much of India, reversing an earlier reluctance to join the first wave of cash transfer programmes across the Global South. The political popularity of such schemes has led many commentators to focus on their instrumental usage to mobilize women as voters in India. Kotiswaran's much needed intervention pushes us to ask what it would take to instead visualize these schemes as the foundation of a feminist welfare state. The book offers a compelling feminist perspective on a rapidly feminizing welfare regime." -- Dr. Louise Tillin, Professor of Politics, King's College London"Does the proliferation of unconditional cash transfers to women in low-, middle- and high-income countries mean that social contracts are being remade at last to recognize the centrality to human well-being of unpaid domestic and care work? Are feminist values and women's realities leading to a new theory of welfare states? Drawing on in-depth investigations into the explosion of such transfers in recent years in India, this brilliant book answers these questions using the theory of social reproduction. It nuances debates about care work and the consequences of its socialization, cutting across political party lines and ideologies. Lucidly and provocatively written and an absolute must-read for all political economists concerned to find new pathways out of current theoretical impasses and policy and action conundrums." -- Prof. Gita Sen, DAWN