ABSTRACT
An extensive perusal of ethnographic field studies and personal narratives suggests that in the two largest societies of East and South Asia, China and India, there is a pervasive theme which punctuates everyday conversation, interview and life-cycle event or ritual and that is-that children are gendered. In both societies, among urban and rural, secluded and employed, literate and illiterate or rich and poor populations, differential characteristics and values attached to boys and girls are assumed, articulated and unquestioned, so that in daily practice girls and boys are categorised, welcomed and represented quite differently. In China, I had only to enter a household to observe the visible differences in the introduction of sons and daughters and the smiling response to the presence of sons by friends, neighbours and officials. In India, ethnographers Patricia and Roger Jeffery also found that sons were listed and introduced before daughters and that, whatever the topic of conversation, discussion spilled over into crucial differences between the characteristics and values of sons and daughters. In both countries the gendering of children is quite explicit in men and women’s statements about conception, pregnancy, birth, infancy and childhood, and in their discussions of support in old age and at marriage and funeral ceremonies. In these discussions the significance attributed to sons contrasts with that accorded to daughters, who are frequently greeted with disappointment and almost always relegated to a secondary position. What the ethnographies cited in this chapter show is that in both China and India couples go to enormous lengths to have sons and, in the absence of sons, they may have many more children than they want. Alternatively they may defy government stricture or nature by taking radical measures against daughters during pregnancy, at birth or in infancy and childhood. Ethnographic observation and record confirm that conception is as much a cognitive as physical act and that, despite economic development, technological advance and women’s movements for equality, the most important question before and during pregnancy and at birth is still the gender of the child. For the majority of girls born, their welcome into families and communities in China and India will be quite different from that accorded to their brothers.
