ABSTRACT
In ethnography, personal narrative, interview, ritual and everyday practice whether among the literate or non-literate, employed or secluded, or urban and rural populations in East and South Asia, two powerful messages emerge which are confirmed by the statistics. The first is that children are gendered; the second is that practically and cognitively daughters are reasoned to be secondary and a supplement, but rarely a substitute for sons. Notions of secondariness and unsubstitutability underlie son preference and are rooted in the culture of gender, so that an understanding of gender identity and the ways in which gender relations are defined and interpreted within everyday beliefs and behaviour is an important contributing factor in understanding daughter discrimination. It is one of the arguments of this book that daughters suffer by reason of gender and that this reasoning has been underplayed in previous analyses of son preference. Although daughters are the most junior and understudied members of the female gender, even the very term ‘gender’ is used universally as if there is an assumed uniform agreement about its meaning to which is ascribed powers of explanation as if gender identity and relations are pre-determined or beyond culture. Within demography, analysts may have given a great deal of attention to intergenerational relations, but they have given rather less to gender relations, although there is evidence that this is changing. Watkins in an important article in Demography in 1993 entitled ‘If all we know about women was what we read in Demography what would we know?’ argued that, with the exception of fertility studies, demographers have not been very sensitive to the importance of gender relationships in understanding demographic behaviour.1 Although the intensity of son preference and daughter discrimination has been linked to gender roles, relations and degrees of inequality, few demographic studies analyse this linkage in any detail, although they often suggest that such studies should be undertaken. It has been left to anthropologist and feminist scholars to interrogate the notion of gender and analyse gender roles and relations in the context of the family, the community and society.
