Democracy in the Family: Insights from India

This book is a compilation of research findings on the sociological perspectives of gender power relations within the household and their changing social patterns in India. It shows how gender inequality bias and discrimination are usually sustained and justified in the Indian context. It also provides some evidence of women’s empowerment. It is useful for academics, policy makers, and program managers who are particularly interested in gender violence, practical and strategic gender needs, gender socialization, and other dimensions of domestic democracy.

— Gender, Technology and Development

This illuminating volume which discusses on gender, society and democracy, will immensely help social science teachers and researchers working on gender, family and human rights within the context of households in India.

— South Asian Anthropologist

The book contributes by bringing to surface the complexity and variety of gender relations in the family, while highlighting the customary and the formal redressal and breather institutions that went unnoticed in the neat binary gender categories of male and female in family studies. In its research journey the family often got viewed as a functional institution and eventually as an oppressing one; this book goes beyond to provide a refreshing weave of the everyday justice-violence complexity in the family.

— eSocial Science

This volume is interesting because…given the theme of the volume and that not much work has been done on it especially in the Indian context, it should be interesting for readers.

— Social Change

Joy Deshmukh-Ranadive is Director, Indian School of Microfinance for Women, Ahmedabad. She has 20 years of experience in the field of Gender and Development and has worked with premier research organisations like Research Centre for Women’s Studies, Mumbai, Centre for Women’s Development Studies, New Delhi and International Center for Research on Women, New Delhi. She has several publications to her credit in the areas of structural adjustment; microfinance; women’s empowerment; violence against women; women and ageing; and economic, social and cultural human rights. She has particularly focused on conceptualising power and empowerment, linking together the micro, meso and macro into an analytical framework. She has also taught Economics at the postgraduate level at the Department of Economics, University of Mumbai and holds an M.A. and Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Mumbai (formerly Bombay). Prior to joining the Indian School of Microfinance for Women, Joy Deshmukh-Ranadive was Country Director of the India office of the International Center for Research on Women, New Delhi.