Abstract
Alice Clark has been a long-term student of Indian society and of gender, beginning with an interest in social demography and history. With this background, she brings to her study of aspiring young women a depth and breadth that would not have been possible for a less engaged scholar. This book centres around the career aspirations of young urban college-going women in the cities of Allahabad, Vadodara, Mumbai and Bengaluru. Through their stories, Clark attempts to chart out progressive and hopeful directions in which gender, gender roles and gender structures might be transforming. Although her sample—given India’s vast and diverse population—is small, her intention is to capture some of the nuances of the change that is beginning to happen and to frame it within the larger forces of demographic shifts, economic growth and a broadening middle class. Her respondents belong to various sections of the middle class and come from varied caste groups.
Her case studies range from that of a young woman in the sex-selecting state of Gujarat, who—but for her father’s decision not to abort her—would not have been alive and dreaming of life as a career woman, to those of other young women, most of whom while charting out their own futures, remain rooted in familial bonds and responsibilities. Clark offers us detailed vignettes exploring various attitudes of these young girls as well as of their parents. Her interviews revolve around asking the young women about their educational and career choices (not all of which are of the predictable sort as in the case of a girl who wants to be a museum curator), their desires for the kinds of spouses and marriages they wish for themselves and their predictions for their post-marriage life trajectories. While they dream of careers, their feminist goals are non-existent or subdued.
Some important findings stand out in various chapters. A key finding is what she terms ‘status-raising as a father–daughter project’ (chapter 5), where she underlines the determining role of fathers in ushering their daughters into careers. If this appears odd in a patriarchal society in which sons’ careers are encouraged while for daughters it is a good marriage that must be achieved, it is becoming surprisingly true of middle-class fathers. Most girls who enter the highly competitive Indian Institutes of Technology in Delhi, to my knowledge, have been encouraged by their fathers who themselves are engineers or professionals in related fields. What Clark does not remark upon is that fathers continue to have higher agency as men in a patriarchal society where a man’s decisions have higher acceptance even if they are contrary to cultural norms. Witness the stories of girls excelling in sports: wrestling, tennis and badminton.
A related key finding is that educated non-working mothers wish to see for their daughters a future different from their own lives. Having given up on their own careers or been actively prevented from pursuing one by parents, in-laws or husbands, these mothers see possibilities of their daughters exercising higher agency in family life if they are armed with education and paid employment. Parents are, thus, co-travellers in the story of change in their daughters’ lives. Not to mention that earning daughters have become valuable to families in various ways.
Another important point Clark makes is that as family size grows smaller, the discrimination around goals for sons and daughters diminishes. Daughters in daughter-only families are seen as being equivalent to sons. Earlier, families used to move to towns and cities for their sons’ education; now they move for their daughters’ education as well. As population stabilises, this attitudinal change could snowball into a future of greater gender equality. Here the self-propelling force of education and its serendipitous or even unintended consequences has much greater significance than Clark dwells upon. Literacy and education among girls has been galloping at a much faster rate than that of males, despite the gap which is an overhang from the past. The 2010 figures for the ‘backward’ state of Uttar Pradesh show a startling reversal of males and females in higher education between the ages of 18 and 23. While the male percentage is 15.2, that of females has outstripped them at 17.4 (Table 3.5, p. 53). In all the other states from which Clark’s respondents are drawn and which already had higher levels of female education, the gender gap in education is narrowing. 2010 figures are already old and the speed of change is faster; hence, more young women are likely to achieve higher education. She remarks on the paucity of jobs for women and the constraints and barriers they face in their choice of employment.
Clark engages with theoretical frameworks ranging from Sen and Nussbaum to Bourdieu. Piggy-backing on Sen’s capability theory she creates an extension of her own—‘assertiveness capability’ which she refers to as the capability of a young woman to verbalise her hopes and desires. Most of the women she researched were able to visualise and convey their career and life hopes. Clark feels that such a selfhood is itself a capability that allows these girls to write their own futures with the active support of parents. While appreciating Bourdieu’s contribution to recognising types of capital and the role habitus plays in reproducing society, she is critical of his weighing in on the side of constraints to change, pointing to the development of a ‘professional imaginary’ among young women that might lead to significant change in their lives. The constraints of the habitus are flagged by women’s uncertain post-marital scenarios and the desire of most young women for family-arranged marriages within caste and class.
Clark sees a shift from one world view to another: from one that values raising no more than one daughter for whom a good marriage is to be arranged to one in which daughters are viewed ‘as potential objects of pride in themselves, like sons’ (p. 165). As in a long feature film, the narrative sometimes gets repetitive and the critical eye dulls; it would have been good to include some stories that reflected the lives of young women denied education and careers.