Precarity, Care, and the “Double Shift”: Intersectional Feminist Ethnographies of Women Flower Vendors in Kolkata

Women’s involvement in informal economies sustains urban life while remaining unseen and unrecognised in both domestic and economic spheres. This study explores the intersectional proportions of women’s labour in the flower markets of Kolkata, demonstrating how class, caste, gender, and family structures outline their capabilities of caregiving, work, and exclusion. This study situates women flower vendors within the broader debates on the feminisation of poverty and the precarity of labour. Despite enduring constant surveillance and the threat of eviction, their contributions remain largely invisible to policymakers. In Kolkata’s Mullick Ghat, the biggest flower market of Asia, women flower vendors’ labour continues to be framed as religious and customary, with market economies shaped by gendered expectations of caregiving, humility, and moral duty. Women’s earnings often supplement household income and, in many cases, serve as the sole source of financial support for their families. However, their autonomy remains constrained by domestic responsibilities and community norms that relegate their labour to an extension of household duty. The outcome is a “double shift”, in which women engage in both the physically demanding labour of flower vending and the reproductive labour of maintaining the household, leaving them with little time or recognition. This study examines the work of women flower vendors as essential for sustaining both their families and the wider urban economy. Their unpaid and underpaid labour supports their households and sustains the sacred and capitalist systems that rely on the daily flower trade. Qualitative methodology is implemented in this research, adopting an ethnographic approach and combining field observations and oral narratives to examine the lives of women flower vendors. This study explores the market structures, cultural perspectives, familial roles, and regional policies that support women, and focuses on the experiences of female flower vendors, situated within broader feminist considerations of informal labour. It deals with intersectional justice and the politics of social reproduction, highlighting how economic involvement, caregiving, and social life are extremely tangled in the lives of working-class women flower vendors in India’s urban informal economies.