Historicizing Garment Manufacturing in Bangladesh: Gender, Generation, and New Regulatory Regimes

The contemporary Bangladesh economy is marked by sustained increases in women’s paid employment, a rise that began in the 1980s with complex and contradictory effects on the lives of women and communities. Today this increase in the numbers of employed women recasts gender relations and the gender and social contract, with wage employment leading to new sources of mobility and social, economic, and political freedoms for women, but also to contestation over rights and security, and, in some cases, to declines in women’s welfare. In this paper, I offer a window on the relationship between macro-economic changes in the Bangladesh political economy, the meso-institutional changes created by policy reform, and changes in women’s labor market relations. I highlight emergent relations…