Women in agrarian society

Women and men worked side by side in the fields. Men tilled and ploughed; women sowed, weeded, threshed and winnowed the harvest.

Artisanal work, like spinning yarn, preparing and kneading clay for pottery, and embroidery, depended heavily on women's labour.

Because of high mortality (from malnutrition, frequent childbirth and death in childbirth), there were fewer women, and wives were valued as workers and child-bearers. So in many rural communities a bride-price was paid to the bride's family, and the remarriage of both widows and divorced women was considered legitimate.

Women sent petitions to the panchayat, for example against husbands who neglected them or were unfaithful. But in the records, women were identified only as someone's mother, sister or wife, not by their own names.

Among the landed gentry, women had the right to inherit property, and some sold or mortgaged land. In eighteenth-century Bengal, the most famous zamindari, Rajshahi, had a woman at its head. Women worked, but without full freedom.