📰 New publication “When Women Farmers Protest Patriarchy and Capitalism”

Floriane Bolazzi, Kaveri Haritas and Isabelle Guérin have contributed to the book The Indian Farmers’ Protest of 2020-2021: Agrarian Crisis, Dissent and Identity edited by Christine Moliner (OP. Jindal Global University, India) and David Singh (University of East Anglia, UK) with a chapter entitled “When Women Farmers Protest Patriarchy and Capitalism”.

Abstract: This chapter explores the reasons for the massive involvement of women in the Indian peasant protest of 2020 and 2021. Agriculture has become highly feminised in recent decades and women now play a crucial but invisibilised role in the management of family farms, as wives of farmers, who are now absent because they are engaged in agricultural wage labour, as widows or as agricultural workers. But women remain largely discriminated against in terms of land ownership, wages and access to the range of government policies and benefits that target farmers. By introducing a more market-friendly agricultural model, the reforms would have further marginalised women. They would also have threatened the food security of farming families, for whom women are the primary caregivers. By engaging in the struggle, women have expressed the dangers of a capitalist and patriarchal agricultural model.

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