CLASS, GENDER AND AGRARIAN CHANGE 17 studies on the effect of the Green Revolution technology on women, work, and status in agriculture are examined. I A number of now well known studies on the impact of the Green Revolution have shown how it quickened the pace of class differentiation and polarization among the peasantry, strengthening the economic position of the rich peasantry, and began an accompanying trend towards concentration of holdings and increasing proletarianization and pauperization of those displaced from the development process.2 However, the effects of the increasing penetration of capitalist relations on women in rural areas have not been fully studied. Peasant women are not a homogeneous group. Women belonging to agricultural households fall into different classes, perform different kinds of work, and technological change has had a differential impact upon them.3 As Stoler has argued, the question of class relations is "analytically prior" to any investigation of male and female relations within classes. Sexual inequality must be examined within the context of class inequality for in a stratified society both gender and class determine access to strategic resources. "Female autonomy and social power are a function of access to strategic resources within the domestic and social sphere which is defined differently for each class within the peasant society".4 However the concept of gender must be distinguished from that of class. Otherwise we will merely be noting that there are parallels between the effects of gender and the effects of class. Some feminist writers have rightly pointed out that women's oppression should be traced not merely to the rise of private property and capitalism but also to the patriarchal system preceding capitalism.5 Bringing in the concept of "reproduction" to distinguish gender relations from those of class and using the household and family as the locus, they point out the importance of recognizing the two-fold process of production and reproduction in history and the dialectical relation between the two processes which creates "gender9 ? as a social category for women. Thus, the sphere of production makes use of preexisting gender hierarchies to place women in subordinate positions at each different level of interaction between class and gender. This viewpoint, while not diminishing the importance of class, shows how poor women are subject to a "double oppression". Concepts of class and gender provide us with a framework for examining the status of female agricultural labourers in India today. Status would for our purposes then be a composite whole consisting of social ard economic factors which combine to create the situation within which FALs live and work. Such an approach avoids treating status as merely a cultural norm or "given" in a society, but not accounted for, or narrowly located in the structure of material production alone. If we use these concepts to examine the impact of the new techno"