Relational Selfhood and Agency: Rural Women’s Experiences of Work and Family in Tamil Nadu

Abstract

Rural women’s economic participation in India functions simultaneously as an economic necessity and a site of contested identity formation, yet qualitative accounts of how these women reconcile relational and self-authored notions of selfhood remain limited. Drawing on forty in-depth, semi-structured interviews with informal-sector women across four blocks of Tiruvallur district, Tamil Nadu, this qualitative study examines how work and family jointly shape selfhood and everyday agency. Thematic analysis of the interview narratives generated three interlinked themes: the relational construction of selfhood through motherhood and provisioning, the practice of agency through control over earnings and low-visibility negotiation, and the dual role of family relationships as both constraint and enabler. Findings reveal that paid work did not displace relational identity but extended it, while simultaneously generating a parallel, self-authored identity marked by confidence, mobility, and public recognition. Agency proved domain-specific: women exercised deferred and negotiated decision-making around finances and mobility, but acted unilaterally on matters concerning children’s welfare. Hardship, including illness, alcoholism, and widowhood, unexpectedly loosened male gatekeeping and enabled women’s work, except where debt bondage entrenched dependency. Co-workers and self-help groups offered relational resources that compensated for constraints within the family. These findings extend feminist theorisations of relational autonomy and negotiated agency by showing that selfhood and agency are mutually constitutive, context-dependent processes embedded in the everyday negotiations of rural, informal work.