# **_c) The Effects of Urbanization and Industrialization on Households and Families_**

Urbanization and industrialization alter the capacity of the lineage to regulate the lives of its members. As described above, in pre-industrial China, Korea, and Northwest India, a person’s access to power, social status, and economic opportunities depended heavily on their gender, lineage, and even their position within their lineage. Industrialization offers people the opportunity to earn a living independent of these factors ─ through jobs acquired on the basis of their own education and skills. And modern education exposes people to new ways of thinking.

The organization of urban life also helps reduce pressures to conform to traditional expectations of filial duty. The reach of the lineage is weak in urban areas, where people live and work amongst non-kin in apartments and offices. This contrasts sharply with rural areas, where people live and work surrounded by lineage members. Access to social support networks also changes: in rural areas women are isolated while men are surrounded by kin, but this does not hold in urban areas.

The greater physical mobility of urban industrialized life means that whether people live near their parents is determined by their jobs and personal circumstances, not by their gender. Sons may live elsewhere, and married daughters may live nearby their parents. Daughters’ ability to visit their parents is enhanced by improved transportation and women’s greater role in deciding which social ties to maintain (see below). Whether parents derive support from a child often depends more on the nature of their relationship, than on the sex of the child. This reduces the gap between the value of daughters and sons to their parents.

These changes have been documented most extensively in the literature on South Korea. Women have increasingly entered the laborforce, and gained autonomy thereby. But there are also dramatic changes in the position of women in families where men continue to be the primary breadwinner and the woman manages the home. Urban women’s roles in household management has expanded greatly, to cover not only managing the home and the children’s education ─ but also non-traditional roles such as managing the family income and investments, and negotiating with administrative offices (Kwang-gyu 2003: 107-109; Sorensen and Kim 2004:170-171; Janelli and Yim 2004:141).

Women have also become freer to maintain connections with their own families. Janelli and Yim (2004:133,143) find that by the 1990s, even in rural Korea, daughters “...came to visit parents or siblings and to help with weekend or fulltime farmwork.” And they cite a 1998 survey, that elderly women who live apart from their children have more frequent contact with their eldest daughter than with their eldest son.

“Because married women’s new responsibilities included maintaining the social relations of the family ... many of these women have chosen to maintain relationships not only with their husband’s natal kin, but also with their own. With the massive migration of younger men and women to major cities, moreover, a young couple may live closer to the wife’s than the husband’s kin, resulting in the family’s choosing to spend all or a portion of their holidays with the former.” (Janelli and Yim (2004:133) With the advent of the modern state and other changes described in this section, the power of the clans and lineages has been eroded, diminishing the incentives for preferring sons over daughters. The impact of this on child sex ratios was temporarily offset by the advent of new 19