Background
Sarabhai was born in Ahmedabad in 1885 into the Sarabhai family, a wealthy family of industrialists and business people.
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Anasuya Sarabhai
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She founded the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (Majoor Mahajan Sangh), India"s oldest union of textile workers, in 1920. She undertook an unsuccessful child marriage at the age of 13. Whilst in England she was influenced by the Fabian Society and got involved in the Suffragette movement.
Once back in India, she worked for betterment of women and the poor.
She opened a school. She decided to get involved in the labour movement after witnessing exhausted female mill workers returning home after a 36-hour shift. She helped organise textile workers in a 1914 strike in Ahmedabad.
She was also involved in a month-long strike in 1918, where weavers were asking for a 50 per cent increase in wages and were being offered 20 per central Gandhi, a friend of the family, was by then acting as a mentor to Sarabhai.
Gandhi began a hunger strike on the workers" behalf, and the workers eventually obtained a 35 per cent increase.
Following this, in 1920, the Ahmedabad Textile Labour Association (Majoor Mahajan Sangh) was formed. Sarabhai was called Motaben, Gujarati for "elder sister". Sarabhai died in 1972.
