WATERING THE NEIGHBOUR'S GARDEN: THE GROWING - CICRED

IS SON PREFERENCE EMERGING AMONG THE NAYARS OF KERALA …?
women may be seen as auxiliary contributors in families, research
shows how women’s economic participation in South Asia, even at low
wages, radically transforms women’s value in the household, reduces
familial gender inequality, and challenges patriarchy(Ahmed and Bould,
2004).
Third, our research supports the “gender and development”
perspective, further demonstrating that while development may
improve a region’s overall socioeconomic profile, unless gender
inequities are addressed, they will emerge at the family or household
level. Our analyses included examining the roles of kinship change and
of socioeconomic change that showed the limited paid work roles of
women but not of men. Our findings support Bloomberg’s (2004)
contention on the importance of women’s productive role
contextualized within a female-centred kinship system, for
modernizing agrarian societies. From a historical perspective, the
abolition of matriliny was part of a community strategy spearheaded
by Nayar men to advance within a modernizing wider society,–“the pity
was that it hinged on a rejection of the woman centred ‘otherness’ of
their matrilineal past” (Arunima, 2003: 195). The historical division of
male and female spheres continued during modernization and
combined with the shift to patriliny so that males (fathers and sons)
acquired the roles of provider and status enhancers of family status,
and women (mothers and daughters) the role of homemaker and
auxiliaries. Though contributions of adult women may be valued,
daughters are devalued as expensive outsiders whether or not dowry is
paid (Das Gupta et al., 2003).
No single component of this process can be singled out as the
root of son preference, e.g., it is not the shift to dowry alone that
makes daughters expensive for parents. The entire set of
transformations in kinship, economy and gender roles interlink to
create the perception that daughters are expensive and are no longer
core members of the natal family. Modernization in India has not
stemmed reliance on kinship networks for economic survival and
status attainment. In fact, use of kinship networks has remained a very
effective strategy to advance in modernizing India. Male-focused
kinship networks, operating in a patriarchal setting, make male
dominance of the occupational sphere and female specialization in the
domestic arena almost inevitable, making daughters expensive for
parents and auxiliaries for in-laws. “In the Indian patriarchal ideology,
women are regarded more as a highly flexible resource of the
household rather than fully-fledged members of it” (Banerjee, 1998:
261). Dowry is a symptom of this situation rather than a cause. Similar
analyses have been advanced for the extreme levels of son preference
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