Women, Education, and Family Structure in India. Carol Chapnick Mukhopadhyay and Susan Seymour, eds

BOOK REVIEWS Where Did All the Men Go? Female-Headed/Female-Sup- ported HousehoWs in Cross-Cultural Perspective. Joan Mencher and Anne Okongwu, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1993. 282 pp. VIRGINIA KERNS College of William and Mary This wide-ranging and excellent volume grew out of symposia held at the American Anthropological Associa- tion annual meeting in 1986 and at the 12th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Zagreb. The 12 contributors are anthropologists and sociologists; about half of them are academics, and the other contributors work in a variety of settings in which they deal directly with social research and policy issues relating to female-headed households. The 14 chapters (including a very thorough and help- ful introduction by the editors, Joan Mencher and Anne Okongwu, and a short summary at the end of the volume) vary in approach. Two chapters draw on both secondary data. and original research to construct models explaining mother-child families (Rae Lesser Blumberg) and ma- trifocal families in low-income groups (Anna Lou De- havenon). Another two address policy planning issues that pertain to female-headed households in South Asia (Andrea Menefee Singh) and in the United States (Anna Lou Dehavenon and Anne Okongwu). The remaining chapters are case studies. Five focus on regions in the Americas and in southern Africa where female-headed households are well known, if often poorly understood: specifically, the United States (Anne Okongwu), Jamaica (Deborah D'Amico), Curai;ao (Eva Abraham), Brazil and Colombia (Mary Garcia Castro), and Mozambique and Malawi (Nana Apeadu). The remaining chapters deal with the Middle East and South Asia: specifically, Egypt (Lucie Wood Saunders and Sohair Mehanna), India (Joan Mencher), and Bangladesh (Mahmuda Islam). Little has been written about female-headed and female-supported households in these last areas, in part because of their lower frequency; they represent 15 percent of all house- holds in Bangladesh (p. 235) as compared with over 40 percent in some areas of the Caribbean (p. 138). In terms of sheer numbers, however, South Asia may well surpass other regions: Joan Mencher estimates that there are about 20 million female-headed households in India (p. 215), with 60 million people living in them (p. 204). The contributors challenge many of the assumptions about female-headed and female-supported households that abound in the scholarly literature as well as in the public mind. They show that women become household heads not only by default but sometimes by choice; that some children may be better off in female-headed house- holds (because a larger proportion of household income is spent on providing for children's basic needs); that the definition of head.ship is often problematic, and the term female-headed households, as commonly used, masks enormous variation in composition, functioning, and eco- nomic and social circumstances. While it is well known that a disproportionate number of female-headed/female- supported households are poor, many chapters document the myriad social (as well as economic) constraints with which women must contend. Even those who are not poor often encounter daunting problems as, for example, they try to represent their households in domains that are culturally defined as male. The book's dedication is quite apt: To all the women struggling to maintain female- headed households. • Women, Education, and Family Structure in India. Carol Chapnick Mukhopad.hyay and Susan Seymour, eds. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994. 246 pp. KAREN LEONARD University of California, Irvine This worthy book makes two points: that education for women in South Asia is undertaken only with the support of the patrifocal family system and ideology, and that such education can challenge that same system and ideology. The editors hope for the latter, and some of the findings reported in this volume do point in that direction. The editors emphasize the importance of microeth- nographic, comparative, and historical work to under- stand the linkages between women's participation in the public domain of education and the private world of kin- ship and family. Contending that little research has been done on these linkages, they open with an extended dis- cussion of their thesis and an overview of the subsequent chapters. The statistical data. used are from the 1981 cen- sus, with a few figures from 1986 and 1987; it would have been useful, and it probably was possible, to update with 1991 census figures before publication. Two revised chap- ters from books published in 1988 follow to provide back- ground: the first, by Karuna Chanana, covers social reform and women's education in pre-independence India, while the second, by Malavika Karlekar, covers women's nature and education in Bengal. Anthropological research re- ports by Steve Deme and Carol Mukhopad.hyay come next. Deme interviewed 49 urban upper-caste Hindu mer- chants of Benares in 1986-87 and shows how fathers' concerns about arranging their daughters' marriages limit women's educational levels. Here, education for women is making some gains, but men still determine its level, and the patrifocal system is not really being challenged. Muk- hopad.hyay's 1988-89 research on women's underrepre- sentation in engineering and science in India shows why these specialties present special problems for the mar- riageability of women. Yet her figures show dramatic recent rises in female enrollment in these and related