Engendering social capital: women workers and rural–urban networks in Indonesia’s crisis

Recent approaches to social capital have cautioned against the view that social networks are resources to be called upon in times of crisis. We contribute a feminist perspective to this argument and call attention to the gendered power relations of social capital and social networks. We draw on field studies that examine women migrants’ rural–urban networks in two regions of Indonesia during the 1997–99 economic crisis period. Our findings direct attention toward the gender-specific limitations of social capital as a resource for development, and identify some ways in which the costs and benefits of social capital are organized by gender.