Women, Family, and Child Care in India: A World in Transition
Cambridge University Press
Edition: Illustrated, 4/15/1999
EAN 9780521591270, ISBN10: 0521591279
Hardcover, 344 pages, 23.4 x 15.6 x 2.1 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English
This book presents an in-depth study of 24 Hindu families, of different caste and class groups, who reside in a recently urbanizing part of India. Beginning with a two-year study of family organization and child-rearing practices in the mid-1960s, the author follows the lives of 132 children and their extended families over nearly three decades. The book focuses upon women - the socialization of girls and the significance of women's roles through the life-cycle in a society where the patrifocal extended family is predominant. The effects of caste and class upon women's lives are examined, together with the effects of recent schooling and delayed marriage. Longitudinal research makes it possible to examine the impact of recent urbanization and modernization upon groups of contemporary Indian women, whose voices and changing perspectives are captured in a series of intergenerational interviews that imply further change for Indian systems of family and gender.
Preface
1. Introduction
2. Field methods and longitudinal research in Bhubaneswar
3. The patrifocal family
growing up female in the Old Town
4. Variations and transpositions
being a wife, mother, and daughter in the New Capital
5. Caste, class and gender
to be poor and female
6. Going out to school
women's changing aspirations
7. Change and continuity in women's lives
a three-generational perspective
8. Systems of family and gender in transition.