Short Abstract:

China and India have a long history of patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal customs. Centring women’s care work – as daughters and (grand)mothers – we ask how feminised care practices contribute to rewriting the son-centred intergenerational contract, and at what cost.

Long Abstract:

Both China and India have a long history of social and economic life being organised along patriarchal, patrilocal, and patrilineal principles. Under such principles, family relations are marked by a strong intergenerational contract (IGC) centred around sons responsible for old-age support and continuing the family line. Within the son-centred IGC, care flows along the patriline and is largely feminised.

With urbanisation, women entering the labour market, and the transition to smaller families, including daughter-only families, the traditional IGC is undergoing a shift. Today, daughters typically retain close bonds with their parents, offering both practical and emotional care and support. However, although the son-centred IGC is attenuated, feminised care practices are still the norm, and many women juggle multiple care needs and responsibilities while struggling to meet the demands of their own careers and wellbeing. The invisible labour, both emotional and physical, embedded in the work of caring is fuelling a crisis for the modern woman - who is she allowed to be, within and without networks of kin relations built on unacknowledged, unpaid care work?

This panel centres women’s care work – as daughters, mothers and grandmothers. It asks how feminised care practices are contributing to rewriting the IGC, and at what cost. By focusing on middle class families in urban China and India, contrasting their similar histories of son-centred IGC with their cultural-political differences, the panel will generate important insights about how power relations and gender and class (in)equalities are reworked within and through the IGC.

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