Chapter 7: Women, Marriage, and Family

This chapter was extremely interesting to me. It definitely portrayed the hardships women in India face. The first thing that came to mind, besides the sadness that I feel for these women, is the thankfulness that I should feel yet I take advantage of every day. While in the United States today, women may not be completely equal in some ways to men, we have come so far. As a woman, I can vote, I can become educated, I can choose a career, I can decide who I am going to marry, and the list goes on and on. These are things that I so often take for granted, that the women of India today do not have the privilege of being a part of.

This chapter opened my eyes to the inequality of women in India. So often, I think of the oppression of women as something that used to happen but it isn't so bad today. Well, that's just not true. Today, women in India are disadvantaged with respect to inheritance and property rights. Women's wages are approximately half those paid to men. Less than 40% of women are enrolled in secondary school, and even less than that are enrolled in higher education. Women experience higher mortality rates in the early years due to infanticide, neglect, and abuse. I would have had no idea that infanticide still occurred in India today, except for the fact that I did a project in Cultural Anthropology a couple of years ago about infant infanticide in India. It is tragic that this still occurs today. Women are also eight times as likely to experience the death of a child in India as compared to mothers in the United States. These statistics and facts were absolutely shocking to me as I read this chapter.

The author says that "parents say they give extra affection to the daughter in order to compensate for the hard life she will live after she marries." I am not certain as to whether Indian girls receive extra affection, but from the reading I can see the hard life the women experience after marriage. The caste system restricts the choice of marriage partners, and marriages are still often arranged for women. I can remember looking at the newspapers in India and seeing the huge sections with available men and women so that a marriage could be arranged. After the marriage the bride must move in with her husband and his family. She must learn about the the family history from the mother in law. The husband's family makes decisions about work, the children's schooling, and even birth control. In many cases the family farm is the primary work site for most women. As a "good wife" a woman devotes herself to her husband's welfare through performance of religious ritual, household duties, and chastity.

It seems contradictory to me that so much oppression towards women occurs in India, yet India is one of the few countries that has had a woman as the head of state. Maybe this is an encouraging fact--that women will be able to be more equal and to have more opportunities in their country. Maybe Indian women will be able to slowly escape from the difficult lives they now live and in the future they will be more free and equal.