Gender and the Household Economy

Research record

A household is an economic institution before it is a statistical unit. It combines income, food, land, housing, care, credit, consumption, schooling, health expenditure, social obligations and protection against risk. Gender enters each of these domains through unequal claims on time, mobility, property, cash and authority. The relevant history is therefore not a story in which a self-contained ‘family’ slowly gives way to markets. In Mithila, Vajji and Anga, households became progressively more entangled with wage migration, banks, ration systems, schools, health services, self-help groups, digital transfers and consumer markets while kinship continued to organise residence, obligation and legitimacy. This chapter analyses the household as a field of provisioning and bargaining. It does not duplicate Chapter 92, which measures women’s paid and unpaid labour in detail, or Chapter 93, which treats marriage, dowry, inheritance and family structure directly. Instead it asks who holds resources, who converts them into daily welfare, how shocks are distributed, how male migration changes managerial responsibility, and how public programmes alter the boundary between household and state. Survey indicators such as ‘female headship,’ joint ownership or participation in decisions are useful but incomplete: they record particular dimensions of authority and cannot by themselves tell us who controls assets, whose consumption is postponed, or who performs the work that keeps the household functioning.

Section index

1. 91.1 The household must be treated as an economic institution rather than a private residual
2. 91.2 Household membership is not the same as equal membership in household resources
3. 91.3 Agrarian households historically joined productive and reproductive work in the same social unit
4. 91.4 Food management converted uncertain income into everyday security
5. 91.5 Livestock, kitchen gardens and small assets often formed a gendered buffer economy
6. 91.6 Public policy progressively entered tasks once treated as exclusively household responsibilities
7. 91.7 Water and fuel linked gendered household labour to ecology and infrastructure
8. 91.8 Clean-cooking transitions changed technology faster than the social ownership of cooking
9. 91.9 Care is infrastructure produced inside households as well as by public institutions
10. 91.10 Household decision-making is multidimensional rather than a single index of empowerment
11. 91.11 Household headship measures administrative representation more readily than substantive power
12. 91.12 Life-cycle position redistributes authority within the same gender
13. 91.13 Male migration separated earning from day-to-day household management
14. 91.14 Remittances converted distant labour into local household budgets and new forms of uncertainty
15. 91.15 Floods and displacement expose the household as the first institution of disaster response
16. 91.16 Food insecurity is often managed by changing quality, quantity and timing before it appears as total shortage
17. 91.17 Self-help groups transformed private saving and borrowing into a collective household interface
18. 91.18 Group finance can change bargaining by changing the timing and source of liquidity
19. 91.19 Bank accounts and mobile phones create access channels whose control must still be investigated
20. 91.20 Direct transfers and entitlement databases changed the household–state relationship
21. 91.21 Public provisioning partially externalized care while often relying on women as the interface
22. 91.22 Housing quality and domestic technology reshape the cost of maintaining everyday life
23. 91.23 Ownership indicators show legal and documentary change without settling questions of control
24. 91.24 Caste and class determine how much household work can be shifted onto markets or other workers
25. 91.25 Religious community does not produce one household economy
26. 91.26 Mithila households are strongly shaped by flood risk, migration and mixed subsistence portfolios
27. 91.27 Vajji’s household economy increasingly reflects peri-urban markets and institutional finance
28. 91.28 Anga combines craft, urban and agrarian household economies
29. 91.29 Nepal-side Madhesh shares kinship corridors but operates under a distinct household and welfare regime
30. 91.30 The modern household economy is a hybrid of kinship, market, migration and the state

Cite this record

Gajendra Thakur. “Gender and the Household Economy.” Videha Digital Research Archive: Mithila–Vajji–Anga. Videha — https://www.videha.co.in/ · ISSN 2229-547X · GitHub mirror: https://videha-ejournal.github.io/videha/ · Digital Research Archives on GitHub: https://github.com/videha-ejournal. https://videha-ejournal.github.io/mithila-vajji-anga/records/history/social-91/