ABSTRACT

Women's limited intra-household decision-making power has several dimensions: geographic, cultural, economic, and demographic. The dimension we focus on in this paper relates to women's transition into marriage. Marriages in India are near universal and age at marriage is low implying that nearly all women spend a large part of their lives in a marriage. However, little is known about the bearing events transpiring at the beginning of a woman's marriage have on the path of her decision-making power in the household over her life course. Drawing on the life course theoretical framework, we argue that household authority follows a trajectory, which begins at least with her transition to marriage. Our analysis using panel data of 20,927 mothers from IHDS indicate three marriage types- self-choice marriages (5 per cent), parent-arranged with no choice on the part of young women (39 per cent) and parent-arranged - with some choice (56 per cent). Women who started married life in self-choice marriages later end up with the most decision-making power. But a complex pattern of power relationships emerges among wives, husbands, and in-laws. ‘Some-choice' marriages empower husbands and not the parents-in-law while ‘no-choice’ marriages typically benefit the parents-in-law and not the husbands or the wives.

摘要

妇女有限的家庭内部决策权有几个方面：地理、文化、经济和人口。我们在本文中关注的维度与女性向婚姻的过渡有关。印度的婚姻几乎是普遍的，结婚年龄很低，这意味着几乎所有女性一生的大部分时间都在婚姻中度过。然而，对于女性结婚之初发生的事情对她在家庭中的决策权的影响却知之甚少。借鉴生命历程理论框架，我们认为家庭权威遵循一个轨迹，至少从她向婚姻的过渡开始。我们使用来自 IHDS 的 20,927 位母亲的面板数据进行的分析表明三种婚姻类型——自选婚姻（5%）、年轻女性没有选择的父母安排（39%）和父母安排 - 有一些选择（56%）。在自主选择婚姻中开始婚姻生活的女性后来拥有最多的决策权。但是，妻子、丈夫和姻亲之间出现了一种复杂的权力关系模式。“有选择”的婚姻赋予丈夫权力而不是公婆，而“无选择”的婚姻通常有利于公婆，而不是丈夫或妻子。