Both these books focus on the situation of poor women. Emphasizing oppression within the household, they highlight the trivialization and invisible status of women’s intrahousehold work. Using an interdisciplinary approach, the two books cover some ground in common.
In Invisible Hands some thirteen papers study the nature, ideology and context of home based work as well as strategies to improve the conditions of home based workers. This book is the first of five volumes, each being a collection of papers presented at the Regional Conference for Asia on ‘Women and the Household’ (N. Delhi, 1985) co-sponsored by the International Sociological Association and the Indian Association for Women’s Studies. In their introduction, Menefee Singh and Kelles Viitanen point out that few accu¬rate statistics exist on home based women workers, although the number of such women is not only massive but increasing. Home based producers are simply not recognized as workers in most national data gathering systems.