Abstract:
Literacy, together with non-domestic employment, which gave
women access to independent sources of income, have been regarded as
important indicators of women’s ‘status’, which affected fertility and
mortality outcomes. Since women in Kerala have on average, been the
most literate when compared with women in other states of India (though
the same could not be said of female work-participation rates), much has
been written about their ‘high status’ and their central role, historically,
in social development. However, there is a growing uneasiness with
Kerala’s social development outcomes linked to non conventional
indicators as in the rising visibility of gender based violence, mental illhealth among women, and the rapid growth and spread of dowry and
related crimes. We suggest that engagement with socio-cultural
institutions such as families, which mediate micro level decisions
regarding education, health or employment, could reveal the continuities
rather than disjunctures between conventional social development
outcomes and non conventional indicators of ill health and violence.
Changes in the structure and practices of families in Kerala in the past
century have had wide-ranging implications for gender relations.
Alterations in marriage, inheritance and succession practices have
changed dramatically the practices of erstwhile matrilineal groups as
well as weakened women’s access to and control over inherited resources.
Alongside, women’s education and employment have not played the
transformative role so generally expected of them. Changing levels of
female employment and the persistence of a gendered work structure
have limited women’s claims to “self-acquired” or independent sources
of wealth. Underlying these changes are conceptions of masculinity
and femininity, which privilege the male working subject and female
domesticity.
