PROSTITUTION IN NINETEENTH CENTURY BENGAL 161 Between 1858-73 the largest group of migrants from the surrounding districts to Calcutta were widows or rejected wives from low caste families of barbers, milkmen, malis, jugis, kaibartas and Haris. Most of these women, unable to find any other work, were forced into prostitution or into domestic services as maids. Although British accounts condemn them as being notoriously unchaste they were merely peasant and artisan women who had been thrown out of their traditional occupations without any other alternatives offered to them.9 After the passing of the Indian Factories Act in 1881 women and children were legally allowed to join the industrial workforce. As a result the British parliamentary reports of 1884-85 state that unlike the cotton mills of Bombay, the jute mills of Calcutta employed a larger proportion of women and children.10 Yet because of their association with low skill they were gradually concentrated in the lowest paid jobs in the mills. They were regarded mainly as a reserve supply of labour when male labour was short and the first to lose their jobs in a slump. The conditions of employment affected social and cultural attitudes towards suitability of factory work as an occupation for women. Lower wages and the perception that their earnings were secondary meant that women often entered the labour market when they had exhausted other alternatives. Sometimes they were pushed into the labour market by the inadequacy or deprivation of male earnings. Social reasons like widowhood, desertion or barrenness also forced women to seek work outside the village. Uncertainty of employment persuaded many men to leave their wives in the villages. Wives of better paid workers replicated notions of upward mobility by refraining from joining both the factory and domestic labour force. The affirmation of such domestic ideology tended to socially and economically marginalise those women who continued to work in factories or as domestic workers in the houses of the rich.11 Most of these women were regarded as part time prostitutes by their employers and co-workers.12 By mid-nineteenth century some of the Bengali bhadralok built themselves town residences and even brought their families from the villages. The social divisions of space, earlier limited to ritual consideration, were now construed into actual living space. The women's quarters became a refuge for a number of upper caste Hindu widows. These women who had earlier eked out a living by spinning and even observed the family rituals (of weddings and funerals) were now thrown out of their occupation by the importing of yarns from England.13 Forced to leave their village homes they either worked as cooks or maids in the houses of the rich or ended up as prostitutes in ^ Calcutta's expanding brothels. (In 1881 the number of women domestic