인도 여성의 보살핌 : 공·사영역의 교차점

Women's Caring in India: The Intersecting Public and Private Spheres

This paper seeks to examine women in India in the so-called private and public spheres of social life, to assess whether the dichotomy of public and private spheres is relevant for understanding women's caring roles. Another question, posed in this paper, is whether private and public domains inter-penetrate each other or are they quite distinct as far as Indian women's roles are concerned? Women's work of caring brings to focus both their private and public roles, viewed in different contexts. Caring involves human service work, done in different ways by women within private familial contexts, as well as in the public arenas of work and community life, as social workers, teachers, doctors, nurses, volunteers and so on. Roles of caring are understood as dictated by the sexual division of labour that regards it as natural for women to care. The caring and nurturing role of women, historically, has been reinforced in ideologies. According to the ancient Hindu Manusmriti or The Laws of Manu, a woman, in childhood, was to be subject to her father, in youth to her husband, and when her husband dies, to her sons. In other words, she was never to enjoy autonomy. More recently, biological and intellectual differences have provided a rationale for circumscribing women's roles. It is seen that the ideology relating to women's caring is not only influences private or familial spheres but those relating to women's public roles as well. These are examined in the history of the Indian social reform movements and in contemporary contexts of women's learning and work. Subsequently, a means of looking beyond the caring model and the dichotomy of public and private, is sought: by assessing the significance of institutions and organizations that mediate between the arenas of public and private and thus, constitute some channels of empowering women. The engendering of women's caring roles takes place through socialization processes visible in everyday interaction, in media, folklore and practice. Several studies in India have focused, directly or otherwise, on girls learning to be feminine carers. Girls learn to care in concrete ways in day to day living, supported by accompanying norms that justify certain styles of interaction and an ideological framework. Processes of socialization, which produce and sustain feminine roles of caring in India, have been subjects of anthropological inquiry. Girls are rewarded when they perform household chores or look after younger siblings, while boys are rewarded when they fare better at school. In the Indian context, ideals about feminine roles come into conflict with those of education, evident in low literacy and school participation rates of Indian women and girls, respectively. While at the bottom of the class ladder in India, girl children tend to lose out on schooling, among middle class groups girls tend to enter feminized educational streams. More recently, education has been viewed as an arena in which the feminine roles of caring continue to be elaborated but has the potential to combat the image of woman as the familial carer. Women have transferred their caring roles from the family to the work place, evident in the clear correlation between household poverty and women's work, the former being a major motivation for women's participation in the labour force. Women tend to work with a supportive attitude, evident in the widespread notion of women working as "supplementary" or secondary income earners, implying that they do so only if and when it is necessary for their families' well-being or survival. This has been associated with the withdrawal of women from the labour force, a common phenomenon in upwardly mobile groups, whereby the status of the family or community is buttressed. Accordingly, work related to familial standing in the community, is women's "family status production" work. Thus, women's work of caring is performed not only in the private familial spheres, but also i