Marriage, well-being, and agency among women

Abstract

In a slum in Delhi, married women's sense of well-being is based on their everyday experience of sexuality, motherhood, and work. While they may not be deliriously happy or content in their lives as married women, they attain respectablility and status through marriage and childbearing, and exercise agency in speaking out against the oppressive conditions or abuse they may experience in their marriage. Marriage is essential to their sense of self-worth, and having a fully functioning body is essential to their role as wife and mother. Although women take control over their reproductive and related health, often against the advice of their husbands, they are unable to challenge patriarchal control over their sexuality. Woman's embodiment is rarely experienced for pleasure or joy; the body is an instrument for survival. Women's bodies are weapons used to survive a harsh everyday life in a world that is ordered by relations of gender inequality and economic necessity.