The uses of education: young women negotiating migration, employment, and romance in Gujarat, India

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper draws on a three-year ethnography anchored at a premier pharmacy college in Gujarat to explore the uses of education for academically high-achieving young women, specifically, those who had migrated to attend college. Since migration for education had been reluctantly permitted by families, the completion of education interrupted women’s mobility. Exploitative labor markets and familial control over marriage further attenuated mobility. Differentiated movements followed. Indigenous and rural women continued migration for work. Urban women returned home to work. Very rich women in college romance not sanctioned by the family pursued international migration. But across the differences, there were two similarities. First, women relied on education to transform experiences of stuckedness. Those who pursued employment sought jobs they could frame as a “learning opportunity.” Those pursuing love strategized family resources for international migration by cloaking it under education. For academically high-achieving women, reframing employment and romance as educational pursuits legitimized aspiration. Second, the idealized direction of aspiration was entrepreneurial conjugality, not just for romantically committed women. In keeping with the trading histories of the region, Gujarati women hoped to start a family-owned pharmacy after marriage. Community histories both directed women’s aspirations and were used by them as strategic resources, but subjectivities attached to education and conjugality gave meaning to im/mobility. I suggest that situating im/mobility in regional histories and personal meaning making can move migration research beyond its transnational mobility bias and feminizing imperatives.