I’ve been in Goa for the last two weeks, interviewing a range of very different women for the book and hearing some amazing – if heart rending – stories.
Sangeetha’s story is shared over at the Gender Blog. This photo shows her, second from right, with two of her three children. She now earns £14 per MONTH. Click the article link to read more …
Day one of the interviews for Mother India went extremely well, with my two different but extremely charming and articulate interviewees speaking very frankly into my mini-recorder (which, thankfully, worked!). It was fascinating to hear them talk so freely and fluently about their lives to dates, their hopes for the future, their thoughts in a broader sense on the Indian economy and the part that women have to play in it.
I asked them both about the recently reported news story that there’s no such thing as a glass ceiling for women in India – and, somewhat to my surprise, they agreed with the sentiment, suggesting that the capacity of Indian women to progress is limited only by themselves and their self-belief, rather than by corporate “gender asbestos” as Avivah Wittenberg-Cox calls it.
Tomorrow, I fly to Goa, where I’m hoping to talk to some rather different women – those who travel to India’s smallest but richest state in order to work for six months and to profit from the many thousands of tourists who flock there.
