Social Reproduction and the Professional Imaginary

Some young women are now seeking self-identities that they did not or could not seek before. A newly created kind of female self seems to be appearing out of backgrounds where the same could not flourish earlier. In this chapter, I plan to establish how this newness (rare and special though its occurrence may still be) stems from aspirational families encouraging their daughters to take up careers, and how at the same time it is about deeper underlying socioeconomic forces.

First, we look back at the young women whose stories have been considered, in light of a growing professional imaginary which has caught hold of them. This phenomenon characterises women located in both the old and new middle classes, and therefore we briefly examine various approaches to the development of middle ­class identities. The chapter then turns to a consideration of social reproduction as it begins to undergo systemic change. Finally, it undertakes to draw a picture of the emerging form of self-identity that is being shaped and moulded by young urban women, and to imagine some of the implications of this development for the future for women.

A study of India’s young, educated women who are aspiring to build successful careers

The Genealogy of Women’s Ambition

Living in India in the late 1960s and 1970s, I experienced the palpable gap that existed in the genealogy of ambition and career aspiration among educated women. I was acquainted with well-educated women who are members of the mother and grandmother generations of today’s college women; and being college-educated back then meant, almost inevitably, that they were of elite and upper-caste background. If they worked outside the home, it was often due to family reverses and a resolve to maintain a middle class level of support. Of course, those who sought PhDs and other highly advanced professional degree qualifications were quite different. But many women in the urban middle class families I knew, though well educated, became solely housewives after marriage and never seriously entertained other plans. Such families could unquestioningly educate daughters up to the Master’s level, and still have them settle down to immediate marriage and housewifery. In this new era, one can bridge that genealogical gap by looking at women whose mothers, even if well educated, have not worked; daughters who themselves are now articulately seeking lifetime professional careers. Today’s aspirers, in addition, encompass new people, members of a newly rising part of the middle class. These include young women not coming from upper caste or upper class backgrounds, whose mothers have very little education.

The students in this project speak English and are studying for careers in the medium of the English language. One of their favourite words is “exposure,” by which they mean global awareness. The women of this new generation are connected with a wider world via saturated media and communications technology. It is important not to overstate the global transparency of these connections, because for many, the globalised mirror they look into does not have a very clear or accurate view of other countries and regions of the world. Its images are refracted through certain hopes and various prejudices. But this mirror does reflect back to them the upward climb of women. Which of the women of the world and of India are not enjoying any such rise is a question that must be kept always in mind. But with global exposure, increased by the internet, a highly visible swathe of women globally can be seen as growing more powerful.

Studying the lives and hopes of middle class and would-be middle class women is richly worthwhile for perspectives both including but also broader than feminism. The growing embourgeoisement of ordinary folk in India today has a long tale of history. Reaching back into the 19th and early 20th centuries, the thrust of common rural life was powerfully to gather the people into villages and castes and communities. The forward tendencies of urban life were to organise working people, consolidate business interests, and develop strong institutions under a colonial and later a national umbrella. These were patriarchal projects, which in fact greatly increased male dominance while centralising communities further under that dominance. In a historical context, the growth and expansion of the urban middle class in India today is rather different. More encompassing and far-reaching than was ever before imagined, part of its newness is in holding more possibilities for women to have more complex lives and identities.

The historical overview sketched above is selective in saying little of nationalism, anti-imperialism, or religious sectarianism. There is an impetus toward forming and shaping oneself as a person — toward becoming a “bourgeoise” of one’s own, so to speak — that is driven by demographic and economic change more than, yet leading the way for, cultural and political change. Until the 1980s, due in part to high mortality and fertility combined with slow economic growth, India was unable to diversify its economy sufficiently to produce a slate of new opportunities for a great many more people. It then began to do so alongside much news about nationalism and religious sectarianism, trends which continue to gather ominous strength. In fact, there has been no phase of Indian history since 1800 and well before, without some trace, large or small — sometimes hidden — of such tendencies and the fearsome conflicts they can engender. What has been very new, however, has been rapid economic development, which kept up a pace outstripping that of many other nations from about 1993 to 2008, and then slowed down. Fifteen years of high-speed development, followed by a global slowdown, has been the result of the greater global integration of this period.

This recent slowdown and halting recovery places many young educated middle class and newly middle class women in a critical position. They want professional jobs, just like their male peers, and they want both supportive and well-employed husbands. The men they are introduced to mainly want employed wives. Either of the couple needs to be well employed, preferably both; it will usually not be only the wife, unless a state of affairs considered most undesirable comes to pass within a particular marriage. Women’s jobs are more expendable than men’s, and men’s employment has remained a reliable mainstay under unquestioned patriarchal conditions. It may remain so; or it may begin to be undermined.

Professionalism

Professionalism is an elastic, renewable, and multipliable category, very useful to assess at this global juncture. It is also an important factor to be considered in the making of self-identity. The discussion of professions in this research has been limited to those roles that require a college education or better. These roles have broadened and multiplied in recent times. Since the late 1980s, India began to produce newer and more varied career opportunities for more of its educated people of both sexes and diverse backgrounds. The broad unemployment situation referenced in earlier chapters is a serious challenge, but within employment, there are more choices and more roles to play, given the talent, the skill, and the training for the particular job opportunity and being in the right place to find it. Urban centers are by far the best hope for educated careers, though expanded roles also exist in rural management in private firms, government jobs, and non-governmental organisations.

Professionalism ought to be considered as something more than the holding of a certificate and winning of a job by that means. Aiming to provide a glimpse into career-minded women’s growing sense of self-identity, it is clear that professionalisation is a rich part of that process. How a fully professional self-identity is formed and arrived at, and then tenaciously held throughout a life, will be a major challenge facing my research subjects. It involves a lifelong task of commitment to increasing one’s skill development, set of accomplishments, and professional advancement. This task has been carried out by all of my colleagues — professors, writers, activists — who almost all started out with certain advantages. Today’s young career aspirants may or may not start out with social advantages. They may or may not seek careers that are very lucrative. But they are looking for meaningful lives, wanting careers that provide service, employ knowledge, attain respect and dignity, and hold a kernel of moral force, as well.

In expanding on how new roles offer chances for women to create new kinds of self-identities, I offer the case of an aspiring archaeologist, Amrita, at the Maharaja Sayajirao University in Vadodara. (Kusum, in the same department, appeared in Chapter Four.) Amrita’s story is one that shows a particularly huge leap in self-identity, assertiveness, freedom, and agency between mother and daughter. She is 21 and in her first year for the M.A. in fine arts — museology. She has her B.A. in archaeology and wants to become a curator in an archaeological museum. The nearby Baroda Museum has an archaeological section, and the Maharaja Sayajirao University’s Department of Museology has its own museum with valuable ancient pieces in it, so the stimuli here are very rich.

Amrita says, “I selected archaeology out of interest. On a school field trip, I saw signboards at sites we visited, and looked up the word on the internet. My parents said, ‘Select your field as you like. But you must make a career in that field.”’

The above excerpt is taken from the chapter ‘Social Reproduction and the Professional Imaginary’.

Excerpted with permission from
Valued Daughters: First-Generation Career Women
By Alice W. Clark
Sage Publications India
ISBN: 978-9351508885
199pp.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, August 28th, 2016