Female Garment Workers Spearhead a Cultural Revolution in Bangladesh

Female Garment Workers Spearhead a Cultural Revolution in Bangladesh

A cultural revolution is underway in Bangladesh. Middle class women, who traditionally stayed home after marriage, despite their much higher level of education, have been entering the labor force in unprecedented numbers since the mid-2000s. And poor women from the countryside are staying in school longer and aspiring not only to a job in garments, but also to a position as a driver, a police woman, or a garments supervisor.

Female line supervisors in a garment factory

Millions of young Bangladeshi women have moved, often on their own, from the rural villages of Bangladesh to the cities of Dhaka or Chittagong to take up a job in a garment factory. The work is repetitive, the hours are long, pay is low, and safety standards are at times hopelessly substandard, but these jobs have brought a generation of Bangladeshi women economic and social independence that their mothers and grandmothers never dreamt was possible.

Women have never enjoyed much status in Bangladeshi society. Girls are viewed as an economic drain on their families and are thus quickly married off, many before the onset of puberty, well over half before the age of 18. To arrange the marriage, the majority of families see themselves obliged to provide a dowry to the groom’s family.

Before and after marriage, the institution of purdah restricts women’s participation in public life and paid work, as well as their mobility. Particularly in the rural areas, women are often confined to the domestic sphere; many women do not even feel comfortable shopping in the public markets and may be subject to harassment if they do so. Domestic violence is common in Bangladesh, motivated primarily though not exclusively by dowry disputes. Bangladesh also holds the dubious distinction of being the country with the greatest reported incidence of acid violence in the world.

Things have slowly been changing for Bangladeshi women since the country was founded in 1971. The country’s now famous NGOs have focused their work on women, given women a legitimate reason to leave their homes, and sanctioned their micro-credit-based economic activity.  The country’s highly successful family planning program allowed Bangladeshi women to plan their pregnancies and also provided highly visible and “respectable” jobs for women in the rural areas with at least a secondary education.

But it has been the country’s readymade garment (RMG) industry that has brought about the most profound and far-reaching changes for Bangladeshi women. The vast majority of the over 3.5 million jobs provided by the sector are filled by women – the majority, poor rural women for whom there were no formal sector jobs previously.

Garments give rural women the means to support their parents and children

The economic security of a Bangladeshi family used to dependent entirely on its male members. Young girls were married off quickly, in part to relieve their families of the financial burden of supporting them. However, today a high percentage of garment workers send part of their income to the countryside to support their parents, siblings, and children; in some cases they are providing a home for one or both of their parents. The fact that women can now earn a regular salary and contribute to the family income has dramatically changed their status in the family and earned them respect. The industry has also provided incentives for families to educate their girls so that they can get a job; it has reduced the preference for sons.[1]

The RMG industry has given women an expanded range of life choices compared to almost all other women in the country: garment workers generally keep a part of their income for their own use and are able to take decisions about their own health care, the purchase of major assets, and their own clothes – something which may seem trivial, but is in fact highly important to women the world over. Many have a savings account or insurance policy in their own name. Garment workers generally marry later, often choose their own husbands, and delay childbearing. Some report that a job in a garment factory enabled them to leave an abusive marriage.[2]  

In fact, studies by leading Bangladeshi social scientists have repeatedly found that women working in the RMG sector “enjoy more benefits than [those in] most other forms of waged work available to them” and are far more aware than all other women in Bangladesh of their rights as workers. Women garment workers generally report feeling bolder, more confident, and more comfortable moving about unaccompanied in the public sphere.[3]

Simeen Mahmud, Lead Researcher at the Centre for Gender and Social Transformation at BRAC University in Dhaka, explains that the women who have migrated from the countryside to the city and daily stream through the city streets to and from work “have changed everything. They have legitimized women’s movement and made it safer for all of us.”