Gendered housing struggles and the construction of single women as risky tenants in urban India

We advance gender inequality scholarship by drawing attention to a growing but understudied group: young, single women professionals (without children). Our thesis is that for women, singlehood is deemed incongruent with role expectations of leadership—both with masculine expectations of men as “ideal leaders”, but also compared to feminine expectations of women leaders as communal, relational. We predict this incongruity to be most penalizing for analytically-talented, single professional women who are seen as gender incongruent for their masculine skills and for prioritizing their careers. Leveraging a multi-method approach, we present evidence in support of our thesis. In Study 1, a set of experiments, we observe participants evaluate single analytically-talented women as least suitable for a leadership promotion compared to identically-described single men, married men and women. Participant explanations for their negative evaluations support incongruity as the mechanism for the penalty toward single women, whom they describe as “too analytical”, lacking the people management skills needed for leadership. Study 2 adds external validity by examining early career promotions of MBA graduates, where single analytically-talented women prove the least likely to advance post-graduation compared to all other gender, marital status, and talent groupings. The combined studies unveil a novel penalty directed at young, single, analytically-talented women professionals in their early careers for their perceived incongruity with gendered expectations of masculine and feminine leadership.

“These Paravan people have a particular Paravan smell,” remarks Baby Kochamma, a character in The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, directed towards Vellya Paapen, an “untouchable” carpenter employed in their household. The Paravan caste, considered untouchable within the social hierarchy, becomes the target of Baby Kochamma’s derogatory comment: one that exposes how olfactory prejudice intersects with caste. Although fictional, Roy’s narrative vividly reflects the sensory and symbolic dimensions of caste discrimination in India. The notion of “smell” here operates both literally and metaphorically, representing the visceral ways in which caste bias is experienced and enforced. This embodiment reflects the stigma and dehumanization that Dalits endure, being perceived by upper-caste individuals as inherently tainted. Baby Kochamma’s remark underscores the normalization of casteist attitudes that persist through everyday sensory encounters. This paper examines how smells in rural and urban India are recognized, regulated, and tied to specific social roles and identities through the lens of sensory politics. It further explores the gendered dimensions of olfactory discrimination by analyzing how subaltern women and men differently negotiate and are affected by sensory environments. Through literary analysis, historical inquiry, and sociological critique, the study identifies smell as a powerful, underexplored sensory dimension that both reflects and reinforces social hierarchies.

This conceptual paper is aimed to highlight the phenomenon of single professional Malay women in Sarawak. Changes in marital trends and family life in Malaysia and other South East Asian countries do not mirror those that have occurred in the west. Much of the research on single women in the west has only looked at singles based on their ‘civil status’ and failed to distinguish between single women who have never married and women who are divorced, widowed, separated or cohabitating. One of the most common explanations for being single is the concept of Jodoh and Qada and Qadar, it brings the same meaning to some of the metaphorical statements such as: “Things happened for reasons”, “Blessing in disguise”, “Wisdom behind it”, “kun faya kun' (what will be will be). The first section of this paper will review literatures on the concept of singlehood among Malays including the western and eastern concept of womanhood. This section will elaborate on some common reasons for not marrying and being single. The second part of this article focuses on the reflections of why singleness matter among Malays. The intent is to comprehend some explanations based on the experience to the question: “why are they not married?” and set out to understand “what went wrong?” This paper thus highlights the phenomenon of not married or singlehood among Sarawak Malay in the shifting, developing and post-colonial Sarawak and Malaysian society.

Reproductive rights represent an intrinsic and pivotal human entitlement, encompassing legal protection for procreation. Essential to this framework is the recognition that single women equally deserve reproductive rights. Although Chinese legislation refrains from overtly disallowing reproductive rights for single women, the interplay of conventional marriage norms and family planning policies has inadvertently tied these rights to marital status, consequently constraining single women's ability to assert them. The establishment of a robust legal structure to ensure reproductive rights for single women would profoundly contribute to advancing a harmonious evolution of China's population dynamics. We employ meticulous textual scrutiny to analyze comprehensively the stipulations concerning women's reproductive liberties within the framework of Chinese jurisprudence. Furthermore, we engage in empirical inquiry to enumerate and elucidate the multifarious constraints placed upon the reproductive freedoms of unmarried women in the Chinese context. This endeavor entails a detailed exposition and incisive examination of China's limitations imposed upon the reproductive rights of single women, encompassing both legal strictures and policy dimensions. The absence of legal endorsement and safeguarding has given rise to substantial impediments to the exercise of reproductive rights among single women in China. Not only do endeavors to assert reproductive rights on behalf of single women encounter intricate challenges in judicial implementation, but they also encounter manifold barriers within national policies. This predicament not only subjects single women to considerable psychological strain but also contradicts the overarching objective of achieving a harmonized population development trajectory in China. China should expedite the development of a legal framework for protecting reproductive rights that includes provisions for supporting single women to have children. This legal apparatus should efficaciously enshrine and shield the reproductive rights of single women, thus playing a pivotal role in advancing a more equitable and well-balanced trajectory of population development.

This article explores representations of singlehood in two short fiction texts set in Indian urban spaces – namely, Jayant Kaikini’s ‘City without Mirrors’ and Anita Desai’s ‘The Rooftop Dwellers’. The rising number of single people in India has led to renewed contestations of family values and gender norms in middle-class society. Through the selected texts, the article facilitates a complex engagement with the depiction of singlehood in urban India, its gendered dimensions via questions of housing and mobility, and its negotiations with modern and traditional forces through identities such as that of the young urban single working woman. It also argues that the ‘aloneness’ of the ‘unattached’ single woman is constructed either as ‘threatening’ or as ‘lonely’ in reference to young women and older single women respectively, both of which are states that potentially disrupt the status quo and thus need to be eliminated within a discourse of safety. Juxtaposing the disparities and connotations of male and female singlehood in urban spaces, the article critiques heteronormative and patriarchal systems that construct single people as peripheral entities and cause their marginalisation and highlights the notes of subversive agency that appear between the lines of overarching cultural and literary scripts.

BackgroundWith the development of medical technology, many countries around the world have been implementing ethical guidelines and laws regarding Medically Assisted Reproduction (MAR). A physician's reproductive decisions are not solely based on technical criteria but are also influenced by society values. Therefore, the aim of this study was to analyze the factors prioritized by MAR professionals when deciding on whether to accept to perform assisted reproduction and to show any existing cultural differences.MethodsCross-sectional study involving 224 healthcare professionals working with assisted reproduction in Brazil, Italy, Germany and Greece. Instrument used for data collection: a questionnaire, followed by the description of four special MAR cases (a single woman, a lesbian couple, an HIV discordant couple and gender selection) which included case-specific questions regarding the professionals' decision on whether to perform the requested procedure as well as the following factors: socio-demographic variables, moral and legal values as well as the technical aspects which influence decision-making.ResultsOnly the case involving a single woman who wishes to have a child (without the intention of having a partner in the future) demonstrated significant differences. Therefore, the study was driven towards the results of this case specifically. The analyses we performed demonstrated that professionals holding a Master's Degree, those younger in age, female professionals, those having worked for less time in reproduction, those in private clinics and Brazilian health professionals all had a greater tendency to perform the procedure in that case. A multivariate analysis demonstrated that the reasons for the professional's decision to perform the procedure were the woman's right to gestate and the duty of MAR professionals to help her. The professionals who decided not to perform the procedure identified the woman's marital status and the child's right to a father as the reason to withhold treatment.ConclusionThe study indicates differences among countries in the evaluation of the single woman case. It also discloses the undervaluation of bioethics committees and the need for a greater participation of healthcare professionals in debates on assisted reproduction laws.

State promotion of particular kinds of gender relations and household structures in Japan since the post-war period has constructed the reproductive family as an official ‘“absorber” of economic and social risks’ (Takeda 2008: 161). While the last three decades in Japan have seen the introduction of legislation and policy designed to encourage women’s participation in the paid workforce, a gendered labour division operates whereby household work and child-rearing are seen primarily as women’s work. Women who are neither mothers nor wives, and particularly women who are mothers but not wives, occupy a peripheral space in dominant constructions of the family as the basic social unit. Single women, particularly those who live alone, challenge what MacKenzie has called ‘conjugal order’, referring to ‘the broader social norms associated with marriage and the family, including the privileging of heterosexual sex’ (2010: 205). However, as unmarried women may also be workers and/or unpaid carers, their contributions to the household and broader economy are not insignificant. In contemporary Japan, an ageing low-birth rate society where increasing numbers of women (and men) are remaining unmarried, the households and consumption patterns of single women are increasingly significant.

ABSTRACTThe research explores the complex landscape of singlehood in India; it focuses on the experiences of single women in a society where marriage is a deeply ingrained social institution. Challenging traditional norms, an increasing number of women are choosing to remain single, a decision with significant personal and social implications in a collectivist society that prioritizes familial expectations over individual choice. While societal pressures to conform affect both men and women, this study specifically examines single women's experiences. This study uses an intersectional approach to understand how different factors like gender, class, age, and life circumstances shape these experiences. It analyzes how economic independence, workforce participation, and a stronger emphasis on individual identity have reshaped the social landscape for single women, despite persistent stigmas and challenges. It highlights the agency of single women in navigating social expectations and aims to provide a nuanced understanding of their multifaceted experiences in India.

In ta ing about the professional woman as mother, one could L-al with the effects of the career on her mothering, the effects of motherhood on her career, or the effects of combining these two roles on her personal satisfactions. Most of my focus will be on the first: what kind of a mother is she, and how have her children turned out? But let me discuss the other two briefly, for they provide an important context for my major points. The dysfunctions of motherhood for the pursuit of a career have been pointed out by Bailyn,' Epstein,2 White,3 and others. We are handicapped in our carier advancement by geographical restrictions, family obligations, guilt, and prejudice. The husband's career considerations have been given priorities not only because of his insistence, but also because of our acquiescence. We have been assigned, and we have accepted, the major responsibility for child care and the household operations. As R o d has indicated, some men also have not pursued their careers with single-minded devotion, but have allowed their family concerns to temper their ambitions. But this is far more true for women. Furthermore, women have had that mixed blessing-the chance to drop out without censure. We have all returned from a bad day at work to a chaotic household and wondered why we ever left the kitchen. We are harassed, overworked, and in desperate need of a housekeeper. But for all of this, we may have fared better with respect to personal satisfactions than had we chosen one of the alternative paths that were available. This is not to say that there is no room for improvement, but the life that includes a commitment to the several roles-wife, mother, and professional-may be the richest of all. There are a number of recent empirical studies indicating that despite all of the difficulties, the bright and educated women who have combined all three look back with considerable satisfaction and a minimum of regretsm Birnbaum,* for example, compared a group of mothers who were also faculty members of a large university with unmarried faculty women, and with a group of mothers who had graduated from college with honors but who had pursued neither further education nor a career. The groups were comparable with respect to age-mainly in their early forties. Of the three groups, the nonworking mothers were the ones with the lowest self-esteem and the lowest sense of personal competence, including even sense of competence about child-care skills. These women also felt least attractive, expressed most concern over self-identity issues, and most often indicated feelings of loneliness. The subjects were asked what they felt was missing from their lives and the predominant answer from the two groups of professional women was rime, but for the housewives it was challenge and creative involvement. The single women, in this study as in other^,^ held higher professorial ranks than the married professionals. Both professional groups indicated high self-esteem and a sense of competence, but the single women were lonelier and somewhat less comfortable in their social relationships. The data indicate then that the woman who has combined a career with marriage and children has not pursued her career with the total undeviating involvement that has characterized men and single women. She has, in many cases, withdrawn from full career commitments when her children were young, returning

Reviewed by: Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s – 1930 E.J. Errington (bio) Lisa Chilton. Agents of Empire: British Female Migration to Canada and Australia, 1860s – 1930. University of Toronto Press. x, 240. $60.00, $27.95 Studies of gender and empire have been a growth industry in the last two decades. What distinguishes this volume is Lisa Chilton’s addition of migration studies to the mix. Agents of Empire examines how British and colonial women participated in a campaign to ‘domesticate the dominions’ by establishing and managing international networks of migration [End Page 295] for single British women to Australia and Canada in the second half of the nineteenth century. It also offers glimpses into the lives of some of those young women who took advantage of these female emigration societies and became part of a community that spanned the globe. As Chilton carefully explains, one of the first objectives of the small group of middle- and upper-class British women who initially championed female migration in the 1860s was to transform their cause into a ‘respectable sphere of work for social reformers.’ They also had to convince a colonial and imperial audience that not only did the future of the empire rest on the willingness of the right kind of woman to settle in the new dominions, but that female-directed organizations were the most appropriate vehicle to accomplish this goal. Two delightful chapters explore the campaign that enabled these women emigrators (to use Chilton’s term) to become accepted and respected agents of empire. Narratives of travel and resettlement presented in emigration society records, in the press, and in widely distributed pamphlets constantly reminded the British and colonial public that young women migrants needed to be protected. Only ‘the maternal gaze’ of female-directed and -managed emigration could transform potentially dangerous public spaces – aboard ship and in colonial cities – into safe and respectable havens. The irony was that the success of the discourse rested in part on emigrators’ ability to infantilize their charges at the same time that they were trying to convince reluctant colonial hosts that they needed a new class of women – educated, respectable, hardworking, willing, and capable of doing a multitude of tasks, including home help. Chilton explores the experiences of some of those single women who took advantage of the opportunities offered by female emigration societies through a careful reading of the letters they sent home and that subsequently appeared in society publications and records. Among other things, we begin to see how some of these new settlers continued to draw on the imperial family of women for emotional and at times financial support. A number of them also graduated from being dependents to becoming active agents for feminizing the empire. This all began to change with the coming of war in 1914, however. Gradually, the state, both in Canada and in Australia, began to assume greater control over the policies and processes of migration. Chilton uses a case study of the Australian government’s program in the mid-1920s to import British domestic servants to work in the new capital of Canberra to illustrate the impact that this had on single female emigration. Men and state agents managed emigration in ways quite different from those of women directors and managers. Moreover, by the end of the decade, the work of female emigration societies had been almost completely co-opted by the state. The strengths of this study are many. The comparative approach provides the author with the opportunity not only to appreciate the [End Page 296] ‘gendered politics of imperial migration’ but also to explore the complexities of the debates and changing circumstances of single female migration during this period. This study also broadens our appreciation of the variety and complexity of middle-class women’s voluntary work in the second half of the nineteenth century in Great Britain and in the colonies and illustrates how networks of women – of varying circumstances –often had an international reach and influence. As Chilton makes clear, Agents of Empire does not, and it may not be possible to, consider the experiences of those young and not so young single women...

It has long been recognized that consumption behavior represents mainly joint household or family decisions rather than separate decisions of family members. Accordingly, the observational units in consumption surveys are "consumer units," that is, households in which income is largely pooled and consumption largely shared. More recent is the recognition that an individual's use of time, and particularly the allocation of time between market and nonmarket activities, is also best understood within the context of the family as a matter of interdependence with needs, activities, and characteristics of other family members. More generally, the family is viewed as an economic unit which shares consumption and allocates production at home and in the market as well as the investments in physical and human capital of its members. In this view, the behavior of the family unit implies a division of labor within it. Broadly speaking, this division of labor or "differentiation of roles" emerges because the attempts to promote family life are necessarily constrained by complementarity and substitution relations in the household production process and by comparative

Female Hucksters and Produce Markets in the Great Lakes Region, 1830s–1890s Debra A. Reid (bio) Mary Judge had seen a bit of the world by the time she became a vendor at Detroit's City Hall Market. She remained a market fixture until her death. For over thirty years, newspaper reporters linked her, more than any other individual, with one cause célèbre, the city's public market. Judge catered to journalists, no doubt, but her entire cohort of female growers and hucksters found themselves in the news often. The media did not recognize them for bringing food to market, daily, between April and November. Instead, journalists often linked market women to the problems that the city hoped to solve if it closed the market. Vendors' wagons clogged downtown streets and created a public hazard, while their boisterous tactics and perceived unladylike behavior allegedly bordered on abuse. The media went even further by stressing the private challenges that individual women faced as evidence of the familial and social risks that resulted when women operated their businesses outside the bounds of patriarchy. This perpetuated the argument that the only good woman was a dutiful wife or ward working selflessly for a family's economic solvency. Judge's market story fits patterns well-documented in women's history. She became part of a sixty-year-old formal economy when she opened her stand in 1863. Yet, she selectively complied with regulations or outright defied them as need arose. Serena Zabin has documented comparable tactics among "poor white women" in colonial cities, women that she describes as "the linchpins" of informal economies. These women conducted business at a time when few women operated businesses outside the home, and most kept house and tended families under patriarchal authority. These informal economies continued into the early national period. Zabin argues, however, that informal trade and the poor White women who conducted it became [End Page 51] increasingly marginalized as common law perpetuated White male authority over commerce, earnings, real and personal property, and over the welfare of White men's wives, families, and wards.1 In Detroit, males authorized, regulated, administered, and managed the public market from its beginning. The first authorization coincided with Detroit's incorporation as part of the Old Northwest Territory in 1802. Then, city trustees established a market at the Detroit River and authorized appointment of a clerk to manage it. Little detail about this market exists, but in 1816, trustees approved construction of a market house in the center of Woodward Avenue below Jefferson Avenue (on the Detroit River side), financed with tax revenue. The markets in St. Louis, also a French-influenced midwestern city, followed a similar pattern with a market in the center of a wide avenue. Male clerks appointed by an elected common council administered the market.3 Growers, hucksters, and customers alike reflected Detroit's multi-ethnic population, with Indigenous, French, British, and Black and White Americans often crossing the fluid border between Detroit and Windsor, Canada. Antiquarian Silas Farmer romanticized this as he described the "black-eyed, olive-skinned maidens … from the Canada shore" who brought "garden-sauce and greens" to the earliest markets in little carts pulled by French ponies. In contrast, a newspaper account indicated that little demand for garden produce existed. Instead, many residents raised what they needed, and elderly men hauled surplus to the city markets in wheelbarrows. Only a few stands operated regularly, and they sold "celery, beets, lettuce, and similar vegetables, poultry and the like."4 Each ethnic group brought different perceptions of female status and authority to market operations, but the legal status of the women at the market resulted from a transfer of English common-law procedures to the new midwestern context. Elizabeth Brown has concluded that justices in the Wayne County court of Michigan Territory did not improvise, nor did they deviate from precedent. Instead, they followed English common-law procedures, as had justices in the eastern seaboard states. Changing situations prompted additional analyses, however, especially in the case of women, commerce, and property law. Justices cited two books in their decisions addressing the legal status of married women (femme covert) and single women...

The work-from-home practices initiated during the COVID-19 pandemic have caused a paradigmatic shift in how we work. Work from home (WFH) led to an intermingling of the domestic and professional spaces, and the WFH phenomenon has asymmetrically impacted women’s work. In such a scenario, women professionals experience a greater work–life conflict, and the significance of family support comes to the fore. Studying this phenomenon in the Indian context is interesting because the primary responsibility for Indian women lies in the domestic arena. Female Indian professionals are expected to seamlessly fulfil their domestic duties no matter how demanding their job is. The multiplicity of challenges that affect women professionals’ productivity at work only gets compounded when women are expected to work from the domestic sphere where the demand of domestic duties constantly confronts them. Several global scholars have indicated that the burden of domestic duties was greater for women during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the burden of child-care, elderly care and cooking activities increased as outsourcing such activities was not an easily available option during the lockdowns which led to reduced work productivity amongst women. However, this study revealed that Indian female professionals reported better work productivity than female professionals working from their workspace. Indian women are used to fulfilling domestic and professional duties even prior to the pandemic, and Indians perceive greater satisfaction in interpersonal relational experiences rather than individualistic career goals. The study also revealed that family support did not increase when women were working from home, but the increase in family support increased women’s work productivity. Findings also indicate that female professionals with children showed significantly lower work productivity than female professionals (married and unmarried) without children.

Black single professional women form a growing and little researched market. This study hypothesized that there are significant social class differences in prepurchase store screening and in actual store choice process. Findings indicated that there were significant differences among groups in preplanning the number of garments, using catalogues, and seeking information from sales clerks. There were no significant differences in types of stores patronized, and store loyalty appeared low overall. It was concluded, both in prepurchase screening and during purchases, that social class played almost no significant role in store selection. However it appeared that single black professional women, unlike other nonblack samples studied, tended to rely on store characteristics and features more than on informational search and process or an all-out store search. If additional comparative studies substantiate this finding, there are strong implications for retailing strategies.

This article discusses the levels of autonomy and self-definition of the ‘new Indian woman’ in the contemporary literature written in English by Indian women writers. The article will analyse the role, position and influence of the natal family in this delicate and highly experimental identity negotiation by contemporary middle class, single, urban Indian women. The focus of this article is on young, single women who have careers or waged employment, and who thus function in both private and public spheres. Caplan (1985) contended that for Indian women, the family alone represented their economic and psychological source of security. The article explores how the contemporary literature portrays changes in this setup and how aspiring new Indian women at the turn of the century perform cultural balancing acts to defend ever greater levels of personal autonomy, while maintaining (even, in some instances, consolidating) their place within their families. The article finds that despite the burgeoning of the middle class in urban India, which sees a radical economic shift towards increasing numbers of single women working outside their homes, as yet there has not been any equally radical shift in the social, cultural or familial situation subsequently; neither has there been a radical change in women’s roles nor societal expectations of them. However, emerging narratives of the last decade show that some small but significant shifts are occurring at this most fundamental level of identity negotiation, and that the identities of women may be more fluid than they had previously been permitted to be.