Women, work and the All-India Women’s Conference, 1930-1950

This paper explores the role of the All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC) in debates about labour regulation in the 1930s and 1940s. Established in 1927 with a primary focus of women and girls’ education, the AIWC quickly expanded its remit to campaign on a wider raft of issues from suffrage to child marriage. By the time of independence, the AIWC had authored the Indian Women’s Charter, a blueprint for women’s citizenship in the postcolonial state. Scholarship on the AIWC has predominantly focussed on campaigns relating to women’s status within the family and highlights campaigns around child marriage, inheritance and divorce (Chaudhuri, 2005; Sinha, 2006). This paper, by contrast, foregrounds the organisation’s engagement with issues relating to women’s labour and industrial welfare, including mine-working, maternity rights, child labour, living conditions and equal pay. The paper situates this strand of AIWC thought at the nexus of national, imperial and international debates and about women’s rights, industrial welfare and political sovereignty. As a correspondent of the International Labour Office and several international women’s organisations, the AIWC stance reflected globally circulating ideas. However, at the same time it channelled Indian anti-colonial priorities and responded to ‘local’ conditions. Tracing these currents in correspondence, reports and other organisational records, this paper sheds light on the processes by which the AIWC authored women’s labour rights from and for the specific conditions of decolonising India.