The Ideology of Femininity and Women’s Work in a Fishing Community of South India

Abstract

We are haunted by a crude nineteenth-century materialism when it comes to conceptualising the interconnections between culture and economics, particularly as they affect women. Ideologies of femininity, particularly in their more severe and restrictive aspects such as seclusion, segregation and sequestration, are all too frequently conceived as the peculiar burden of women in the propertied upper strata of society. This is sometimes noted as a curious ‘paradox’: women’s freedom from surveillance is supposedly in inverse proportion to their economic power as members of a class or caste. Jeffrey’s book on seclusion among the Pirzada women of the Mizammuddin Sufi shrine in Delhi states the general argument as it has been framed for India:

The Indian situation, then, presents a paradox. It is mainly — but not exclusively — women from the poorest sectors who work outside their homes, and have greatest equality with their menfolk at home. By contrast, the cloistered women who do not work are women whose menfolk wield the greatest influence on the world outside the home, and who, as several writers have commented, experience marked inequalities between spouses in these richer families, often signalled by the women when they cover their heads, lower their eyes, or employ polite and circumlocutory forms of address. (1979: 32)