. URBAN WORKING WOMEN 125 together. On the one hand, employment of female labour is restricted to the most monotonous tasks, particularly where fine work and delicate handling is involved—the electronics industry, dressmaking, canning, and so on. Women are rarely employed in supervisory capacities, even in these industries. Women are also employed as nurses, teachers, typists and secretaries, that is, in jobs where they carry out the jobs of looking after children and serving men. Hence the preservation of the bourgeois family with its inherent inequality between husband and wife and the perpetuation of ideas like "Women's place is in the home." Housework has thus a vital role under capitalism: A social formation must reproduce continually the conditions of its own production. This means concretely that three different reproductions must take place: (a) in the means of production (b) in the forces of production (labour power) and (c) in the relation of production...Within capitalist relations, domestic labour is integral to the second and third of these reproductions.2 Jobs for the Girls In the proletarian family, it is the husband who engages in social production, and brings home the wage that is just sufficient to feed and clothe him, his wife and his children. The job of transforming the wage into consumable substances, of returning the fed, washed, rested and sexually satisfied worker to the factory everyday, and of bringing up the children who will form the next generation of workers, is carried out by the housewife. Capitalism propagates the idea that this is indeed the 'natural' function of the woman and makes sure that the opportunities made available to work for a wage on her own are restricted in number and, as far as possible, to those jobs which are a socialized version of her domestic function. Thus, instead of bringing increasing numbers of women into social production, modern capitalism has institutionalized the subjugation of woman in its own way, and defined her work, even outside the domestic sphere, by low status and dependence on men. And so also the woman, unexposed to the contradictions between classes in production is a conservative force, helping 'to reproduce the relations of production', that is, 10 maintain the status quo. In the early part of British rule in India, they employed thousands of Indian women in mines, plantations, textile mills, and construction work. Through the destruction of domestic handicrafts the British started the process of increasing pressure on agricultural land, and although the conditions in these new areas of employment were miserable, large numbers of women came to the plantations, mines and cities. But the job opportunities for women remained meagre in the cities; so men came alone to seek jobs, and prostitution has been a ubiquitous feature of urban areas ever since. The main problem for women in Indian cities is still the lack of jobs. The following list of occupations was quoted of female earners, "in order of importance" in 19612: for Bombay, textile workers,