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MARTHA C. NUSSBAUM*
Taking leave of Binod, Durga slowly, deliberately walks towards the shack of Sukhlal the contractor, who stared at her even yesterday and flashed ten-rupee notes.
What else can one do, she argues to herself, except fight for survival? The survival of oneself, one's loved ones, and the hopes that really matter. (MANIK BANDYOPADHYAY, "A Female Problem at a Low Level" [1963])
If the story is about the peasant wife selling her body, then one must look for the meaning of that in the reality of peasant life. One can't look at it as a crisis of morality, in the sense one would in the case of a middle-class wife. (MANIK BANDYOPADHYAY, About This Author's Perspective [1957])'
I
ALL of us, with the exception of the independently wealthy and the unemployed, take money for the use of our body. Professors, factory workers, lawyers, opera singers, prostitutes, doctors, legislators-we all do things with parts of our bodies for which we receive a wage in return.2 Some people get good wages, and some do not; some have a relatively high degree of control over their working conditions, and some have little control; some have many employment options, and some have very few. And some are socially stigmatized, and some are not.
The stigmatization of certain occupations may be well founded, based on convincing, well-reasoned arguments. But it may also be based on class prejudice or stereotypes of race or gender. Stigma may also change rapidly as these background beliefs and prejudices change. Adam Smith, in The Wealth of Nations, tells us that there are "some very agreeable and beautiful talents" that are admirable so long as no pay is taken for them, "but of which the exercise for the sake of gain is considered, whether from reason or prejudice, as a sort of publick prostitution." For this reason, he continues, opera singers, actors, and dancers must be paid an "exorbitant" wage to compensate them for the stigma involved in using their talents "as the means of subsistence." "Should the publick opinion or prejudice ever alter with regard to such occupations," he concludes, "their pecuniary recompence would quickly diminish."3 Smith was not altogether right about the opera market,4 but his discussion is revealing...