Paid-Unpaid Work Continuum of Women: Home-Based Workers and Self-Employed Women in the National Capital Region

Women's work is a continuum that intersperses productive work with reproductive work, unpaid work with paid work and all kinds of activities with leisure and self-care. She plans, manages and implements her work at home, often being responsible for all the three domains. Women from working-class families may seem to be making a "choice" in deciding the continuum, and delving deep, we find that it is more often a "coping mechanism" in "managing poverty" of all forms-income, time and opportunity. This paper explores how women's organisation of work is influenced by the interplay of three institutions-State, market and family, and how gendered division of work is reproduced in the process.