Why Should Women and Not Men Live With And Serve Their in-laws?

KAKALI DAS

In India, we are often told that a daughter’s rightful place is with her in-laws.

Census data reveals that 97% of all Indians who migrate after marriage are women, and while 85% of men still live where they were born after age 25, only 24% of women do the same.

And contrary to popular belief, this practice is just as common in Indian cities as in villages.

In Indian pop culture, a woman who doesn’t want to live with her in-laws is depicted as a cold-hearted careerist, or a scheming vamp, trying to separate a man from his ageing parents.

Legal judgement reflect this presumption with the Supreme Court recently granting a man the right to divorce his wife because she tried to steer him away from the “pious obligation” of living with his parents.

But how does this affect women?

Research has found that in rural India, mothers-in-law often end up restricting a woman’s mobility and ability to form social networks outside her marital home, by controlling her decision-making and preventing her from visiting places alone. And across the board, Indian women living with their in-laws have a lower labour force participation.

Daughters-in-law often considered ‘outsiders,’ spend more time in domestic and religious activities than daughters, and spend less time in paid employment, learning, socialising, or leisure. The value of a male child remains stubbornly skewed because of the persistence of patrilocality. Having a boy mean having two caregivers in your old age, while having a girl means having none.

Why Should Women and Not Men Live With And Serve Their in-laws? — Photo by pramod kumarva on Pexels.com

But where does this notion come from?

Scholars trace the origin of the practice of patrilocality to intensive agricultural practices. In societies with intensive agriculture, land is sown with valuable crops multiple times a year. Sons were required to live on their family’s farms to do the intensive agricultural work and physically defend the land throughout the year.

And even though our economic conditions have changed in the present, we continue to organise households in a way that most of the economic power and expectations rest with male children, all because we think that they are more capable of taking care of ageing parents. But present research shows that it is financially independent daughters, married or unmarried, who are more likely to support their elderly parents emotionally and financially.

And here’s the thing, there is a great value in the idea of extended families living together and caring for each other, and in the young looking after the elderly, especially when there’s such a huge elder care crisis throughout the world.

The problem arises when your ability to care for the elderly is determined by your gender, where you are bound by duty to take care of your husband’s parents, but ironically need your husband’s permission to even check in on your own parents.

In order to build a society that truly values elder care while also valuing healthy relationships, we need to ensure that the extended families people live with and care for are a product of their individual choices, and not predetermined by gender norms.

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