Abstract
This article contributes to the literature on wife abuse by using the patriarchal bargaining framework, which highlights the issue of agency as women strive to achieve their goals within the constraints of family and culture. Study participants were recent South Asian immigrants to the United States. Narrative analysis revealed that patriarchal constraints in natal families, culture, and expectations of benefits gained through marriage influenced many of the women to migrate for marriage. When husbands enforced extreme patriarchy with abuse, women’s personal efforts to contain abuse were largely ineffective. However, advocacy agency interventions did help some women break out of extreme patriarchy.
Introduction
Prior studies of domestic violence among U.S. South Asian immigrants highlight the patriarchal constraints that create women’s vulnerability to abuse (Abraham, 2002; Dasgupta, 2007). In South Asia, despite decades of activism against abuse, it remains normative for husbands and their relatives to abuse wives, and legislation against domestic abuse is largely ineffective (Ahmed-Ghosh, 2003; Banerjee, 1999; Kapur & Crossman, 1996; Mitra, 2002). Brides traditionally move into extended families headed by fathers-in-law, and are subordinate to all men and senior women in the household (Kandiyoti, 1988), where brides’ failure to conform to culturally accepted behavioral norms justify abuse. Norm violations in such a context range from disobedience, not doing housework, ill temper, and disrespect shown to family members; often in-laws join husbands in disciplining wives (Purkayastha, Subramanium, Desai, & Bose, 2003).
Several practices for setting up marriages contribute to South Asian women’s disadvantaged, devalued position in marital families. Women are typically married off to grooms selected by their families (arranged marriage), or when there is self-selection, sanctioned by their families. Caste status and religion are important social considerations that play a dominant role in the selection of eligible partners; they also limit women’s options in the marriage market (Banerjee, 1999). Potential grooms and their families in general view women as commodities in these marriage settings. Women’s worth, as brides and as individuals, often depends on their material assets including all income from employment and dowry that they bring to the marriage in exchange for “marrying up” (Bhopal, 1997). Besides bringing assets, women traditionally trade domestic service, companionship, sexual access, and reproduction for men’s economic support (Nathanson & Schoen, 1993).
Researchers (Abraham, 2002; Dasgupta, 2007) have recognized the influence of traditional cultures on abuse and women’s strategies to cope with the abuse. We extend previous work in this area by using the framework of patriarchal bargain to understand (through narratives of women) how they enter and cope with abusive marital relationships embedded in specific cultural contexts. The patriarchal bargaining framework has been used to explain, for example, why women accommodate gendered practices of religious traditionalism, veiling, and constraints on sexual behavior (Chong, 2006; Kandiyoti, 1988; Nathanson & Schoen, 1993). This framework has proven to be very useful in documenting the reasons for women’s choices, but it has not been applied to marital violence in general, and specifically to analyzing experiences of women from South Asia who engage in marriage migration to United States. To understand women’s agency within the constraints of marital relationships, we use the patriarchal bargaining framework to examine marriage formation in the country of origin and women’s coping strategies in U.S. contexts where laws and advocacy are much more favorable for women.
We are interested in understanding how patriarchal family arrangements and culture were related to South Asian immigrant women’s abuse and their strategies for coping with it in the United States. Specific questions for our study are How do patriarchal arrangements in the homeland and natal family influence women to marry and to migrate? Do these influences on marriage make women vulnerable to abuse? After marriage, what are the forms of patriarchal gender arrangements in families with and without abuse? What strategies do women use to minimize family discord and abuse, and maximize achieving their goals? Do women’s strategies support or alter patriarchal arrangements or abuse? How does a U.S. socio-legal context that includes a South Asian advocacy agency affect women’s strategies and outcomes?
The questions that we explore in this study are grounded in the “ethno-gendered” approach, first developed by Abraham (1999) to understand domestic violence in the immigration context through the lens of gender and ethnicity. This ethno-gender approach is particularly relevant to studying domestic abuse among South Asian immigrants, as the abused wives are at a double disadvantage in the new country: They are subordinate according to patriarchal gendered cultural norms and, as an ethnic minority, they are also subordinate to the dominant norms that define their identity as ethnic minority women (Abraham, 1999, p. 453). The women self-identify as ethnic minorities regardless of their class identity in their home country. It therefore is relevant to understanding their strategies to deal with abuse, and how they navigate the strategies to work toward their goals. Studies have shown that immigrant women’s damaging experiences of domestic abuse are exacerbated by their vulnerable status in the new country due to limited language skills, dependency on their spouses for financial support, and lack of knowledge of the laws (Menjivar & Salcido, 2002).
Adding the patriarchal bargaining framework to the context of gender and ethnicity promises to enhance understanding of the reasons that some women marry and immigrate to the United States. In addition, the patriarchal bargain framework holds promise for revealing how the gendered norms and expectations for women shape their choices and strategies to deal with and break with abuse once they are in the United States.
The Patriarchal Bargain
In a seminal article, Kandiyoti (1988) argues that women cope within patriarchal constraints with strategies that involve making bargains. She calls women’s strategy to maximize financial security and life options within constraints of the patriarchal bargain, defined as a difficult compromise between acting with unrestrained agency and accommodating to the constraints on agency due to “rules and scripts regulating gender relations” (Kandiyoti, 1988, p. 286). Research on patriarchal bargains can reveal the nature of rules and scripts women are expected to follow, as well as women’s different strategies for managing within expectations. Women use varying strategies to cope with patriarchal arrangements in families and communities as they “contest, negotiate, participate in and reproduce patriarchal relations” (Shankar & Northcott, 2009, p. 425; also see Gerami & Lehnerer, 2001).
Women’s resources, constraints, and potential benefits of alternative outcomes explain women’s patriarchal bargains. Gerami and Lehnerer (2001) and Shankar and Northcott (2009) agree that women at times support patriarchal arrangements because they expect long-term benefits. Thus, some women tolerate negative treatment by in-laws when they first marry, expecting that when they assume the mother-in-law role, they will have power over their sons’ wives (Kandiyoti, 1998). Even women who receive informal power through women’s groups and networks, and who gain economic resources by working outside of the home, may accept patriarchy if it brings rewards such as the promise of long-term financial security (Kibria, 1990). Accordingly, women experience considerable pressure that keeps them in marriages that do not promise financial security and/or that expose them to abuse that threatens their physical and emotional well-being (Fernandez, 1997; Kabeer, 2000; Sen, 1999; Standing, 1991).
Theorists and researchers sometimes ignore women’s agency and focus only on their compliance with patriarchal constraints (Gallagher, 2007). They assume that remaining in abusive families indicates passivity. Making a significant contribution to conceptualizing women as agentic, Abraham (2002) describes South Asian immigrant women’s day-to-day strategies for dealing with abuse as forms of resistance in the context of gender arrangements in their families and cultures. Even if they lack resources and are socially isolated, women’s strategies contradict stereotypic images of them as always submissive and passive. Similarly, Chong (2006) argues that women conform to conservative norms not because of submissiveness, but rather because of a conscious decision to improve and negotiate gender relations.
When women try to gain power and security within extended families or to influence husbands to establish separate living arrangements outside of these families, the patriarchal bargains they make sometimes reproduce and perpetuate gender arrangements that disempower them. For instance, Derne (1994) argues that women effectively use sex, docility, and special treatment of their husbands to improve their situations. Even if such tactics help women achieve some goals, they also reproduce a narrow set of allowable gender roles.
Researchers have also recognized that when men in the patriarchal system cannot keep their part of the bargain by providing financial security, women challenge traditional arrangements. For instance, after Bangladeshi mothers employed in a garment factory realized their male relatives fell back on their promise for continual financial support for the women and/or their daughters, the women began to act more autonomously and made independent decisions. Through their actions, the women rejected the traditional expectation that they would first be dependent on their fathers, then husbands, then sons. (Ahmed & Bould, 2004).
Context and Circumstances of South Asian Women in the United States
Although the women’s movement and other social forces have not brought complete gender equality to the United States, immigration to the United States can provide some women means to escape key patriarchal constraints in their native country, and thus get protection through U.S. laws (Parrenas, 2001; Shutte, 2000; Sweetman, 1998). In addition, immigration to the United States prevents some South Asian women from moving into an extended family in their home country, whose members may participate in abuse (Fernandez, 1997).
Though laws and the absence of in-laws in the new country could reduce migrant wives’ vulnerability to abuse, other forces leave them vulnerable. Immigrant families adopt new gender arrangements to varying degrees that could put the women at a disadvantage, and gender roles are least likely to open up to immigrant women with limited language, economic, and educational resources (Parrenas, 2001; Sweetman, 1998; Walton-Roberts & Pratt, 2005). Also, the gendered expectations for immigrant women become stricter as immigrant men often cope with a devalued status in the new country (Dasgupta, 2007; Mazumdar, 1998). Thus, immigrant women may find themselves deeply entrenched in patriarchal relations and roles in their marital families in the new country (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994; Ong, 1993; Shankar & Northcott, 2009). Also problematic are women’s beliefs that disclosing abuse dishonors their families (Krishnan, Hilbert, VanLeeuwen, & Kolia, 1997; Yoshioka, Gilbert, El-Bassel, & Baig-Amin, 2003); this belief may further prevent them from revealing problems of wife abuse. Taken together, these inhibiting factors may severely limit abused women’s access to legal and advocacy assistance in the United States.
Methodology
Study Participants, Research Setting, and Interviewers
The sample for this study was purposively selected to allow for research on South Asian immigrant women with recent (the last 3 years) histories of abuse at the hands of their husbands, and a comparison group of similar women with no abuse history. Two South Asian domestic violence advocacy agencies located in different Northeastern U.S. metropolitan areas assisted in recruiting the sample. One of the authors selected and trained women who worked as volunteers or staff in the advocacy agencies to work as paid interviewers. Interviewers’ affiliations with the agencies and their own South Asian origins gave them access to the community. The interviewers were able to gain the trust and confidence of the participants through their ethnic background and connections with the agencies.
The interviewers recruited study participants from the advocacy agency client pools. To provide a comparison group, they recruited participants of similar age, immigration history, religion, and education to the abused women. Two different sets of interviewers were employed: one group to recruit participants and a second group to conduct interviews. This was done to avoid having a participant interviewed by an individual in her personal networks, and thus power relations and bias were reduced during the interview process. Study participants elected to have interviews conducted in either English or their native language.
The research in the present study falls within the tradition of study of a sensitive topic (R. Lee, 1993) in a difficult to access and vulnerable group of women. Particularly for South Asian women, domestic violence is viewed as a private matter and there is a high social cost associated with individuals who speak about abuse in the family. Researchers’ access to victims for in-depth interviewing is further complicated by the potential for interview questions to create psychological stress or make women vulnerable to further abuse if they are exposed to their abusers. The sampling strategy in this study afforded access to participants and, by virtue of advocacy agency involvement, created a means to provide psychological counseling and protection from abusers, if needed.
Although the sensitivity of the research topic influenced the choice of sampling strategy, the consistency of findings with theory and prior research, which are noted in the findings and concluding sections of this article, may increase credibility of findings from a purposive sample. Indeed, despite much initial criticism from survey methods scholars, network sampling (e.g., through the advocacy agencies and interviewers) has since found much favor in the study of sensitive topics (Becker, 1998; R. Lee, 1993), as it often represents the only way of gathering data. The study was not intended to produce data to generalize to a larger population, but to understand in some detail how the study participants made decisions about marriage within the constraints they perceived. Importantly, consistent with feminist methodologies, findings contain women’s own explanations of their circumstances and choices (Sprague, 2005).
At the time of the interview, 8 of the 40 women had never been abused in the marriage. They provided the comparison group to the group of abused participants. The remaining 32 women described histories of abuse. Of the 32, 23 lived separately from abusive partners—14 in a shelter and 9 independently. Two women lived with men who previously were abusive, but who had discontinued abuse. Seven lived with men who continued to be abusive, though one of these indicated that her husband’s most recent abusive act was to remove her from the lease to force her to leave their home.
Interview Questions
The analysis and findings draw on answers to a subset of structured questions in the full interview schedule. Recognizing that simple counts of abusive incidents fail to reflect the nature of intimate partner violence (Dobash & Dobash, 2004; Loseke, 1989), both qualitative information and quantitative measures were used to determine and cross-check the placement of women into categories to reflect existence and type of abuse. Women described their abuse and resulting injuries and emotions in their narratives. In addition, a quantitative measure similar to the Conflict Tactics Scale (Straus, 2007) assessed women’s self-reports of multiple types of abusive incidents. Another quantitative measure, the Battering Experience Scale, indicated feelings of vulnerability that stem from lost power and control and entrapment that occur when partners use physical, sexual, or emotional force (Coker, Pope, Smith, Sanderson, & Hussey, 2001; Smith, Smith, & Earp, 1999; Smith, Tessaro, & Earp, 1995).
In the interviews, women explained how their marriages came about, circumstances of their migration, what made them happy and unhappy in their marital relationships, abuse of women in husbands’ families, reasons and triggers for abuse and control, and their strategies to prevent discord in their marital families. Women also provided a quantitative rating of the degree to which several possible influences (e.g., love, concerns for children, lack of financial resources) kept them in relationships either currently or, for those living apart from husbands, in the past. Finally, women living apart from abusive husbands described why they separated and how they survived since the break.
Coding the Data
We determined abuse by examining women’s qualitative descriptions, including resulting injuries and emotional state, as well as the two quantitative scale scores (Battering Experience Scale and counts of abusive incidents). We coded cases to reflect either “no abuse” or one of five types of abuse identified by Johnson and Ferraro (2000): common couple violence (unrelated to control), intimate terrorism (multiple tactics to control a partner), violent resistance (for self-protection), mutual violent combat (partners battling to control each other), and dysphoric borderline violence (one partner is violent out of frustration).
We coded key themes in the entire response set case-by-case. Using NVivo8 software, we located passages relevant to patriarchal bargains. Women’s reports of pressures to marry and the circumstances of marriage and migration revealed themes such as parental expectations of marriage by a certain age, beliefs that daughters are financial burdens on parents, and the importance of having children, and thus getting married. Women’s descriptions of what would make them “happy” and “unhappy” in their relationships were coded into themes reflecting their views of a desirable husband–wife relationship. Responses to questions about abuse in in-laws’ families revealed whether husbands were embedded in abusive natal families. Several themes and their subthemes revealed husbands’ and in-laws’ expectations for what wives should be and how they should act. These themes reflecting expectations were found in responses to questions about the nature of discussions and activities that the couple shared, evidence that husbands never intended to interact with their wives (e.g., husbands established separate living arrangements from the start), and limits and controls husbands and in-laws set on women. For limits and controls, numerous variants were combined into the major categories: control every move, isolate, block sending remittances to her family, and prohibit education and work outside the home. Other coded themes were in-laws’ participation in abuse and control, women’s reasons for staying in relationships, women’s effective and ineffective strategies for stemming family discord and abuse, strategies for breaking with marital families, and goals at the time of the interview. Subthemes for women’s strategies for stemming discord and abuse included the following: seeking help from justice and victim assistance systems, making oneself unnoticeable, fighting back or running away, agreeing with husbands and obeying them, and relying on religious faith. Subthemes for goals were as follows: ensuring children’s bright future, keeping the family intact, obtaining material goods (a house or money), and personal progress (having a career or being self-sufficient.)
For every coded theme, we compared four groups of women: no abuse history, prior abuse that stopped several years ago, abuse history and living apart, abuse continues and still together. Through these comparisons, we developed an understanding of unique circumstances differentiating abused women from those who were not abused. We also identified differences in constraints and patriarchal bargains. For abused women, the comparisons revealed the circumstances of women who broke from what we found to be extreme patriarchy enforced through abuse that constituted intimate terrorism in the marital family.
Findings
Description of Women and Abuse
For the abuse and non-abuse groups, most couples originated from India (87.5% or 7 for the non-abuse and 84% or 27 for the abuse group). 1 One non-abused woman and her husband came from Nepal. Among the couples with abuse histories, two couples were from Pakistan, one from Nepal, and another from Bangladesh. There was one mixed nationality couple in the group with abuse history.
All women in the study who married after age 26 had histories of abuse. In the non-abuse group, one couple was Jain and the rest were Hindu. Religious beliefs were more varied for wives and husbands with abuse histories. In the non-abuse group, none of the women or men had a previous marriage. Of the 32 couples with abuse, 5 had husbands who were previously married, 2 women themselves were previously married, and for the remaining 2 couples, both were previously married.
Wives’ and husbands’ age differences, immigration status, and education suggested that women had lower personal resources or lower status than their husbands, and that often women had “married up.” In the non-abuse group, women were similar in age or up to 9 years younger than their husbands. For the abuse group, age disparities were greater and more varied. Four wives were older than their husbands, 17 husbands were 1 to 9 years older than their wives, and 11 husbands were 10 or more years older, with the greatest disparity being 31 years. Most women were sponsored for immigration by their husbands (5 of 8, or 63% of women with no abuse, and 19 of 32, or 59% of those with abuse). The age differential and wives’ related lack of education, work experience, and personal resources as well as immigration prohibitions against women working while in the United States as a dependent, and the fear that husbands would withdraw immigration sponsorship, promoted wives’ dependence on their husbands. Abuse histories were most common for women who married older, after a divorce, and to a man who was divorced. It may be that their own age and prior marriages disadvantaged these women in the “marriage market” (Abraham, 2002) and led them and their relatives to settle for partners considerably older than their brides and with prior failed marriages.
Johnson and Ferraro (2000) identified five types of intimate partner violence. In our sample, all women with abuse histories experienced the same type of violence. This type is intimate terrorism, for which physical abuse is “one tactic in a pattern of control and manipulation, and is often accompanied by emotional abuse” (Morash, 2006, p. 13). One study participant, Sohini, 2 described this type of abuse: “ . . . when we are [home] together, he’s a control freak, always fighting . . . using bad words a lot. He’s abusive, disrespectful. Living at home with him is like living in hell with him.” Consistent with South Asian family structure, some in-laws perpetrated abuse (14 out of 32, or 44%). For instance, Puja’s mother-in-law starved and threatened to burn her daily. In-laws encouraged or supported husbands abusing their wives. Puja’s in-laws encouraged her husband to abuse her to keep her under control, similar to other women participants who said that mothers-in-law turned their husbands against them, often by constantly criticizing the daughters-in-law.
Scores on the Battering Experience Scale provide further support that abuse constituted domestic terrorism. For items such as “I try not to rock the boat because I am afraid of what he might do” and “He can scare me without laying a hand on me,” women with abuse histories felt this way, on average, “most of the time.” Women categorized as abused also reported high counts of particular abusive incidents on the quantitative measure.
The Decision to Marry and Migrate
Women’s explanations of how they came to marry often revealed bargains they made to cope with patriarchal natal families and patriarchal cultural expectations. Women experiencing abuse more often felt pressures to conform to normative expectations that women should marry. Only 1 of the 8 (12.5%) women without abuse described pressure to marry. She said her parents used “emotional blackmail” to force her to accept the marriage proposal. In contrast, several (13 of 32, or 41%) women with abuse histories described pressures to marry and resulting compromises that represented patriarchal bargains within natal families.
Although she doubted that her future husband was an ideal choice, Sohini gained respectability from being married by the socially prescribed appropriate age: “[I felt pressure] from myself because I was getting older. Most women in India get married at 23.” Abraham (2002) also documented that “older” women face the shame of rejection from prospective grooms’ families, and this creates additional pressures to get married. Similarly, Laksmi’s agreement to marry alleviated her parents’ concerns for her future. Her father’s ongoing health problems burdened her family with responsibility for her into the future. Tripti’s sister had divorced, causing her mother to feel that there would be more than the usual barriers in setting up a marriage as the divorce cast doubt on whether the daughters were suitable marriage prospects.
Despite some exceptions, for women with abuse histories, marriage was usually a means of escaping social and family pressures and alleviating parents’ worries and concerns about unmarried daughters. In a few cases, it was a way to achieve personal goals, although Sangita’s personal goal, having a baby, was consistent with traditional expectations for women.
Regardless of abuse history, most women came to the United States due to a recent marriage or to be married (28 of the 40, or 70%). Of the remaining women, 4 were married outside the United States, but migrated after their husbands began working at a U.S. job; and 6 met and married in the United States. One couple came to the United States together, and one husband migrated to join his wife in the United States.
Desired and Actual Relationships With Husbands
With very few exceptions, women participating in the study revealed that they wanted husbands who cared about, communicated with, loved, understood, and spent time with them. Of the abused women, a few noted that some sexual attraction was needed to make a relationship work, and one said that a successful relationship required that the wife control 80% of the household income.
Consistent with Gallagher’s (2007) observation that women in patriarchal settings try to improve their economic and employment chances, several women hoped to work or attend school in the United States. Women like Padma, who expected to “get a job and better life,” were thwarted by husbands who would not allow them to attend school or work. Payal’s husband insisted she “quit her career” as an assistant principal in a nursing school in India when they were engaged. Despite financial exigencies and women’s resistance, abusive men often successfully enforced prohibitions against work and school. In so doing, they established extreme patriarchy. Extreme patriarchy is characterized by the belief that women’s orientation should be totally restricted to the home, and that related prohibitions against employment are their destiny (Stankuniene & Maslauskaite, 2008). In less extreme forms of patriarchy, women’s employment is accepted under some or all circumstances.
Women with abuse histories were expected to adapt to other requirements of extreme patriarchy. Sharply contrasting women’s hopes for relationships with husbands, several abusive men avoided communication with their brides. From the start of their relationship, Meenal stated that her husband “did not even look” at her. Geeta described how her husband was friendly to her only during their honeymoon and after that did not speak to her. Living with her husband and his sister and brother-in-law, she was “never involved in family conversations”; instead, she played with her in-laws’ children and “stayed by myself.” When Geeta’s husband moved out of state to take a new job, she continued living with her sister-in-law, and only visited him once. Similarly, Sonal’s husband immediately moved her from their apartment to live with his parents in another city; their relationship deteriorated further when he began seeing a girlfriend. Dipti’s husband wanted her to live with him together with his girlfriend. Over half (17 of the 32, or 53%) of the women with abuse experiences raised issues of men refusing interaction with them due to long hours of work, living separately, failing to pick them up at the airport, as well as complaints of men’s boredom and a disinterest in private conversations with their wives.
In addition, 17 women in the abused group (53%) said that their husbands and/or in-laws threatened to, or did, get rid of them. Within 2 weeks of her wedding, Shobha’s husband began telling her that she could return to India to get divorced. From the beginning of her marriage, Shazia’s husband told her that she was “not his type” and he wanted her “out of his life.” Women explained their abuse as their husbands’ method for getting “rid” of them. Manisha’s husband wanted to replace her with a virgin, since she was previously married: “[o]nce he got his green card he had the freedom to commute to Nepal and he thought he could marry someone younger and started behaving mean to me.” Threats to expel women seemed more like signals that women had no intrinsic value as individuals, rather than efforts to get them to stay and comply with extreme patriarchy. Wives could be replaced by girlfriends or new wives with more desirable qualities.
Some husbands did “get rid” of their wives. Tripti’s husband removed her name from the lease and, as she put it, “kicked me out.” Puja was abused by her husband and in-laws, who isolated her and blocked her from running out of the house. “[U]nder [threat] from police involvement, my husband and his family sent me back to my family in India.” The in-laws appeared to send Puja back to India because they could not counteract police intervention, and thus could not force her to conform to the family’s expectations.
Women’s accounts of abuse, usually starting early in relationships, reveal very limiting and restrictive rules and scripts that husbands and in-laws wanted women to follow. Consistent with extreme patriarchy, wives were primarily to bring resources into the family and meet the needs of husbands and in-laws. Puja’s husband and his family planned for her to work as an unpaid employee in the family business. After picking her up from the airport, her husband and in-laws kept her up late while they went through the goods she brought from India. After she slept just 1 hr, Puja’s husband woke her to travel to the market to buy produce for the family’s fast-food franchise restaurant, where she then worked all day. During their marriage, Puja’s husband threatened her family that he would harm her if they did not provide more dowry: “My parents gave money during the wedding, furnished their house in India, [and gave] gold jewelry and clothing. My parents told me the in-laws threatened to kill me if they didn’t continue to give them money.” Koel’s new family expected her to assume responsibility for all housework, and her husband expected her to submit to unwanted sex:
I was happy and busy for about a month but gradually I found out that my husband was not keeping his promises made to me and I was forced to live in a huge extended family. I had to do all the cleaning, washing, cooking. I was like a slave to them. I was isolated and not allowed to go out alone even to doctor’s visit. At night my husband sexually abused me.
Consistent with women’s allowed role of bringing money to their new families, husbands typically prohibited women from sending money to their parents (18 of 32, or 56%).
Compared with the abused group, the eight women without abuse experience described none of the interactions or circumstances that we coded as controls and limitations. In contrast, the interview responses reflected controls and limitations for the majority (26 or 80%) of abused women.
Husbands expected women to obey them completely in all facets of daily life, including leaving the home and interacting with other people (10 or 31% of abused women). Payal explained,
. . . I believe that he enjoyed being in control over a woman . . . After one month, he physically beat me for bringing a few phone numbers of my sister’s relatives who lived in the States. He became angry that I could have any connections outside of him. I was not permitted to go anywhere by myself. He kept me isolated. I was not allowed to phone, write letters, or go to school or work. I did not have any money and he would not give me a key to the apartment.
Prohibitions on women’s education further indicated husbands’ views that wives would solely serve them and other family members through a restricted set of home-based activities. Rachna summed up the expectations of husbands that the women described: “[men in our culture want women to] be like their slaves . . . whatever they want, we have to say yes. Otherwise it causes difficulties.” Reflecting on her experiences, Payal explained that some South Asians felt it was acceptable for men to return to South Asia to marry women so that they could come to the United States and work as a “servant” for them.
Supported by cultural expectations that women sacrifice individual identity to the needs of marital families and community (Abraham, 2002), husbands and in-laws expected wives to suppress their own needs and desires. Sohini clarified the connection between servitude and selflessness in her answer to a question about the couple’s discussions: “[He talks about] work, his projects at work, never about feelings or needs. He discussed what I could do for him, how I could cook for him, iron for him.”
Research on wife abuse in other groups has found patterns of control and isolation similar to those we found (Johnson & Ferraro, 2000). However, for the women taking part in our research, these control tactics also reflect and reinforce cultural expectations of women’s submission to extreme patriarchal control by husbands and in-laws. The cultural expectation of an obedient, dependent, subservient wife, along with the image of the husband as dominant and in control, supports these tactics. Several abusive husbands were embedded in natal families that evidenced extreme patriarchal arrangements and related violence against wives. Meenal explained the patriarchal and abusive nature of her husband’s family: “He [father-in-law] beat her [mother-in-law] in front of me. He was drunk. Male dominated family . . . . They [men] support you [financially] so you have to take it.” Other women mentioned one or more of the following: that men’s other family members had abused their wives; wives were expected to be totally obedient to their in-laws; husbands formed close bonds with their mothers and acted against their wives with their mothers’ support; and friends and in-laws would not assist abused, controlled, and isolated women. These findings are consistent with Dasgupta’s (2008) conclusion that abuse does not take place in a vacuum that is solely occupied by the victim and the abuser. On the contrary, for the women we interviewed, the abuse was supported by social institutions and culture.
Patriarchal Bargains of Women Without Abuse
Interview responses from women without abuse proved helpful in making obvious the extreme nature of patriarchal expectations and restrictions for abused women. In describing their personal goals and their strategies for handling disagreements with their husbands, women in non-abusive relationships revealed accommodations to some facets of patriarchal family arrangements. To address minor arguments, they acted in an agreeable manner, cooked good food, made love, kept quiet, and listened to their husbands, or in other ways conformed to traditional gender role expectations. All of the non-abused women felt these techniques were effective. The women also accommodated to the preferences of their in-laws. For instance, Shahana’s husband supported his parents in India, even though Shahana felt that to raise their children they sorely needed the money after she stopped working outside of the home.
The non-abused women seemed to most value their roles as mothers. Every woman named either the education of their children or having children as a critical goal. Relatively few of them (one third or less) said that their important goals included their own education, growth, or job and career. Their conformity to traditional expectations of wives and use of this conformity to maintain a peaceful family life helped them meet their goals. The women’s patriarchal bargain accommodated and reproduced the patriarchal arrangements in these families (Derne, 1994). However, these arrangements were not extreme and did not involve abuse.
Patriarchal Bargains of Women With Abuse
Women confronting abuse and extreme patriarchy most often used three strategies in their initial, and often repeated, efforts to manage it. They became unnoticeable, obeyed their husbands, and prayed and relied on their faith.
Twenty-one of the 32 women with abuse histories (66%) described efforts to be unnoticeable to their husbands, even in the same house or room, so as not to irritate them. During conflicts or disagreements, Sohini, Rukshana, and Shazia tried “not to talk back,” “stopped doing chores in front of him,” “stopped moving,” and “left the room to avoid him.” Women repeatedly used the words “quiet,” “avoid,” and “not talk back” to describe this strategy. Several women removed themselves physically, for example, by leaving the house or leaving the room. Shubha would “lock herself up,” and Gauri would “go to the bathroom and stay quiet.” Most often, the women said that the strategy worked sometimes or to some extent.
About a third of the abused women (10 or 31% of them) tried to be agreeable and not start arguments, did what their husbands told them to do, or used both of these strategies. Most women using such strategies felt they were effective all (6 of the 10) or some (2 of the 10) of the time. Agreeableness and obedience are variants on the theme of women’s repressing their “selfhood.” They hid their own opinions and desires, just as they stayed silent or out of sight, to avoid conflict and abuse. In taking these preventative steps, women hoped to exchange not being abused and being financially supported for conformity to extreme patriarchy. Quiet, out of sight, and fulfilling traditional wifely duties, women followed a script in which they were essentially subservient to their husbands and not entitled to express or act on their own opinions. This was the exact script that men appeared to be trying to impose on women.
Writing about domestic violence among South Asians, Abraham (2002, p. 120) described how religion shaped women’s acceptance that they should be the perfect “self-sacrificing wife, daughter-in-law and mother.” Derne (1994) similarly concluded that Hindu beliefs promote women’s restriction to the home and limit their interactions with their husbands at home. Shaping attitudes to domestic violence, Hindu and Muslim religions place primary responsibility for making a marriage work on wives. Our data show that at least one third of the women turned to religion to deal with abuse. Although she no longer accepted that belief in God would make things “fine,” Tripti revealed, “My religion [Hinduism] helped me be patient and tolerant in the past.” Although Preeti’s husband physically abused her in the past, and stopped only out of fear of legal intervention, she felt her religion kept her faithful to her husband. Religion gave Manju “courage and patience” when she was trying to reconcile with her abusive husband.
A few women defied their husbands to fulfill responsibilities for family members still in South Asia. Despite her husband’s protest, Manisha insisted on sending money to children from a prior marriage. Sohini sent money to relatives secretly, but when her husband found out, “there’s hell to pay” because he would berate and terrify her by “ . . . screaming, shouting, breaking things.” Except for Manisha, men reacted to women’s resistance by limiting the remittances or being abusive.
Only four women, who all lived separately from husbands by the time of the interview, had tried to contain abuse by “running away” from abusive husbands and in-laws. While this offered escape from sexual attacks or beatings for two women, the positive effect was temporary for both of them.
In rating their agreement with statements about what kept them with partners in past or current periods of abuse, women still in abusive relationships were comparatively high in agreeing they remained married because of responsibilities for keeping their parents happy, hopes they would be financially better off, fear of losing custody, and because it is important to be married. They often saw no alternatives to marriage. Tripti described herself as “very confused right now.” She was studying to get ready for a job and career, and seemed to recognize the futility of her hopes of “patching things up” with her husband, but worries about finances and hope that things would improve kept her with him.
Breaking With Patriarchy
Women broke out of patriarchal arrangements by leaving the relationship, or when they were thrown out by husbands and in-laws. In our sample, which by design included many women in touch with advocacy agencies, women used the strategy of seeking these services and help from the justice system (police, restraining orders, and courts) to make or survive the break. Often women used multiple strategies, since police usually referred women to advocacy services, and advocacy services recommended and supported women in seeking police assistance, restraining orders, and favorable court rulings. The proportions of women in touch with justice system and/or advocacy services were 73% (18 of 23) for those who were apart from their partners and 56% (5 of 9, including 2 who had stopped their abuse) for those with partners. Several (13 of 32) women with abuse experiences found assistance from a South Asian-oriented advocacy agency helpful, often because staff recognized the influence of the cultural context on women and their marital family members.
Some women living apart from partners felt they traded their safety for a lasting marriage they valued. For example, Rajni said that the positive result of going to court was support from the legal system and the negative result was she separated from her husband. Sweta similarly gained safety and security, but saw her divorce as negative.
Many women with abuse histories turned to the justice system and advocacy agencies after realizing that their personal strategies did not help. Sohini compared the results of being unnoticeable and obedient to the outcome when she called the police:
Keeping the house as clean as possible does not work. [He’ll] always find something. Trying not to talk back does not work because he wouldn’t let up. Leaving the room during a fight does not work because he’d follow. Calling 911 does work.
Analysis of women’s responses to questions about their goals at the time of the interview revealed that women who used the strategies of becoming unnoticeable, obedience, and reliance on religious faith had personal goals that contradicted images of themselves as passive and submissive. Goals of those living apart from abusive husbands included advancing their own careers, getting job training so they were self-sufficient, and moving out of state to “find a better place to live with a decent job and a new life.” Women also wanted to resolve any immigration issues they had. It could be argued that women develop a drive for independence and self-sufficiency after they are abused and leave or are thrown out by their husbands. However, most (78%, 7 of 9) abused women remaining with their abusers identified such goals. In this group, Shobha wanted to resolve her immigration problems, get a job, and “get ahead with our lives [hers and her son’s] free from fear.” Shruti wanted “to be on my own and forget the past.”
Different from women with abuse histories, those in consistently non-abusive relationships did not aim for changes in visa status or employment. Rather, their goals were more consistent with the goals of their marital families. None of the women with abuse histories talked about going back to their home countries. Once they were able to break free from the abuse and thus dependency on their husbands with help from advocacy agencies and by developing job skills, the women did not feel bound to the gendered expectations of wives. Instead, the women talked about goals of their own and their children’s lives in the United States. The feelings of the abused women apart from their partners about goals are best summarized by Gauri:
I feel that my situation is within my control. I know that only I can change it in a positive way. I have a restraining order to protect me and my children. I can gradually aspire towards my goal of self-sufficiency. I feel no ties and obligations towards my spouse. I feel free and happy.
Discussion and Conclusion
Women who ended up in abusive relationships had pressures on them to marry, and several of them had characteristics that probably limited their and their families’ selection of husbands. Being older than the perceived ideal age for marriage or being divorced placed them at a disadvantage in the marriage market. In South Asia, divorce is considered a failure of the wife to keep the marriage from breaking (Ayyub, 2000; Dasgupta, 2007), and divorced women are socially ostracized and are viewed as selfish, loose, unlucky, and a burden to their parents. Just as older age and divorce contribute to pressures to marry, they could also account for pressures to try to maintain marriages.
Marriage migration was an attractive option for several of the study participants. This is the case in other studies showing that it improves women’s prospects of getting a husband who has better education and career than what are available for grooms from the countries of origin (Palriwala & Uberoi, 2008). Women’s natal families may envision their daughters attending school or working, or eventually sponsoring other family members as immigrants. Due to the sampling strategy, we cannot assess how often marriage migration leads to women realizing such positive goals or, alternatively, joining abusive, extremely patriarchal families. In other words, our sample did not focus on women from South Asia who took part in marriage migration, and the effect of marriage migration on their lives. Instead, to answer our research questions, we studied a group of women and their strategies for coping with domestic abuse, and a small comparison group of non-abused women in the same locales. Our data, however, do support the conclusion that some women who migrate to marry are vulnerable to joining highly patriarchal or abusive husbands. Fan and Li (2002) found that men who seem positioned for prosperity in foreign lands may be chosen as husbands because of expected benefits to daughters and their families, despite the men’s undesirable characteristics. Based on a detailed analysis of Japanese men seeking brides from outside Japan, Kojima (2001) concludes that the men hoped to find reproduction and housework “labor” that is no longer readily available from Japanese women, who increasingly reject restrictions and limited roles that extreme forms of patriarchy place on women. Tendencies to arrange marriages to men with undesirable qualities that included their expectations of the extremes of patriarchal marriage arrangements were evident in the abusive families that we studied.
Our analysis revealed that marital families characterized by extreme patriarchy used abuse to impose very restrictive scripts and rules on wives. The result was the rarity of anything short of breaking or being thrown out of the marital family as a means to achieving lasting financial and physical security. Men’s abusive acts, including the steps they and in-laws took to rid themselves of discarded wives, were not tactics peculiar to individuals. Rather, these tactics were intertwined with and supported by a cohesive ideology that views women’s destiny as being in the family to meet material, sexual, and labor needs of husbands and in-laws. Changing men and their families is not an issue of altering individual-level behaviors, but of affecting shared cultural beliefs in extreme patriarchy.
Abraham (2002, p. 133) established that South Asian women use varying strategies to address abuse: “silence, avoidance, confrontation, hiding, talking back, hitting back, challenging the abuser’s fiscal control, contemplating and resisting suicide, and seeking informal and institutional help.” We conceptualized such strategies as efforts to bargain within patriarchal arrangements. Strategies identified by Abraham—silence, avoidance, and hiding—are similar to the most common strategies that the study participants described as efforts to be unnoticeable and obedient. Women who used these strategies conformed (Shankar & Northcott, 2009) or submitted (Gerami & Lehnerer, 2001) to extreme patriarchy as a means to avoid damaging abuse but stay married. Women living apart from abusive husbands looked back at their experiences and concluded that such methods, as well as reliance on faith, were largely ineffective.
A few women who remained with abusive husbands seemed to have negotiated a new patriarchal order. For example, Ayesha was able to stop her husband from abusing her some years back by obtaining a restraining order. Despite the abuse history, she decided against divorce and saw benefits in staying with her husband. Her bargain was that she accepted living with a husband who was aloof from the family and irresponsible, but no longer abusive, in exchange for financial benefits and the children having a father in the home.
Positive results of other women’s negotiations in the study were more tentative. Gunjan saw positive changes in her husband, who became communicative and spent time with her; however, she worried about in-law intervention when they visited India, where more oppressive patriarchal arrangements would be imposed on her. Similarly, Laksmi thought a recent stay in a shelter shifted her husband’s abuse from “physical torture” to emotional, but she anticipated his mother’s intervention would worsen the situation.
Living in U.S. socio-legal contexts with long-standing shelter and advocacy services for South Asian women influenced several women to enlist the help of the justice system and an advocacy agency, to leave their husbands, and to remain apart from them. Community and institutional gender arrangements in the U.S. context and the South Asian-oriented advocacy community empowered them to make the break. It is important to recognize, however, that culturally appropriate services are not uniformly available throughout the United States (Y. Lee & Hadeed, 2009; Shiu-Thornton, Senturia, & Sullivan, 2005), and that the communities we studied were unique in this aspect.
The theory of patriarchal bargaining helped us to understand women’s entrance into marriage, especially when combined with migration, and how they manage in and break with marital families characterized by extreme patriarchy enforced through abuse. Hunnicutt (2009) and Ogle and Batton (2009) criticize the violence against women and the criminological literature for ignoring or under-theorizing patriarchy. We agree with this criticism. Under-theorized patriarchy assumes a universal patriarchal arrangement in all family and socio-legal contexts. Comparing women with and without abuse histories revealed different forms of patriarchal arrangements. The availability of South Asian-tailored advocacy services in women’s U.S. communities affected several women’s strategies both to change their families and to end their marriages. Recognition of different forms of patriarchy in the family enabled us to better understand women’s actions and the results of those actions. It was also important to recognize that the women we studied were in a unique context in terms of culturally appropriate service availability.
In natal families, patriarchal arrangements, buttressed by cultural beliefs, resulted in several women’s migration to the United States and, in some cases, their entry into unions with husbands and in-laws who constituted families characterized by extreme patriarchy enforced through abuse. The women in non-abusive marriages accepted traditional roles. With abuse out of the equation, though, the cost of accommodating was less, especially since the women’s primary goals were to be mothers and to keep their marriages intact. Faced with extreme patriarchy and abuse, the abused women lacked effective strategies for negotiating their financial security and physical safety within marital unions. However, due to the U.S. violence against women movement, including activism in the U.S. Asian community, the socio-legal institutions punished men for abuse and afforded women resources. Legal and advocacy agencies increased women’s resources for supporting themselves and getting immigration help, and therefore the strategies they could use (Fernandez, 1997). As a result, women were able to see a better life than what they would have experienced in their home country as divorced women (Dasgupta, 2007), and they saw means to support themselves apart from abusive husbands.
Footnotes
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.