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Of Homes, Hostels, and Addresses
Intergenerational Perspectives on Habitations and Women’s Singleness in Contemporary Kolkata
Abstract The essay examines selected working women’s hostels in Kolkata to demonstrate how urban women’s singleness is constructed through the spatial organization, administrative norms, everyday regulations, and interpersonal relationships of the inmates, as well as the specific histories and objectives of these institutions. From the 1940’s with increasing women’s participation in the workforce, these hostels came up, providing a supportive environment to women to work and live independently in the city. However, these hostels also bear the legacy of earlier organizations for single women, like “ashrams” for widows and shelters for destitute women or sexworkers that were established with a view to regulating the sexualities of unattached women. Using intergenerational perspectives of the inmates, the essay shows how these spaces understand single women’s lives, needs, and problems. While providing a means to live outside the regimes of the heteropatriarchal family and home, they create their own regimes of “acceptable” female singleness in the ways in which they normativize notions of women’s work, leisure, sexuality, and safety.
Keywords hostels; homes; Kolkata; working women; intergenerationality; single women
