Valued Daughters: First-Generation Career Women

This book studies the transition of agency and self-identity in young women aspiring for a career. Valued Daughters traces the spread of ambition for lifetime careers among young women in urban India, who are effecting many changes by stepping out of their traditional roles to pursue higher education and jobs. It analyses intersecting transitions—demographic, educational, economic, social, and cultural, with their individual histories and trajectories—that form the context of this study. Using first-hand narratives of women and their families, this book illustrates a new and changing sense of self among these daughters, whose mothers never had careers of their own. Focusing on the way these young career-oriented women engage with immediate society and the world at large, this book explores how they view traditional roles and how they are, in turn, viewed by the society.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements Intersecting Transitions A History of Women among Men Gender and Demography: Paradoxical Effects Professional Aspirations and Education in Cities Status-raising as a Father–Daughter Project Educated Elites in a New Gender Era Embedded Agency: Gains, Losses, and Unborn Hopes Social Reproduction and the Professional Imaginary Toward Gender Transformation Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Alice W. Clark is a historian and scholar of gender and society in India, who has taught history and women’s studies at several universities in the San Francisco Bay Area, including Santa Clara University.  She most recently was the instructor on The Culture of India for the University of California-Berkeley Extension Online.  After completing her Ph.D. in Comparative World History from the University of Wisconsin, she pursued Indian women’s issues under postdoctoral fellowships in demography.   She has consulted on women’s and diversity issues in several countries, given numerous invited lectures, and lived in India for lengthy periods.  With valued professional daughters and grandchildren of her own, she is also involved, along with her husband, in social reproduction from a personal perspective.  In her spare time she enjoys being by the ocean, nature walks, conversation, folk music, reading, and visiting art museums and galleries.

Review :
It is a delight to chance upon a book that deals with valued daughters by Alice Clark…the author should be congratulated for placing her analysis in a layered and textured frame, not overlooking the ambiguities and contrary subtleties that prevail in the societal milieu in India. Apart from the academics from gender studies, sociology, demography and education, the book offers useful reference for members of the civil society and NGOs. Valued Daughters traces the spread of ambition for lifetime careers among young women in urban India, who are changing and effecting change by stepping out of their traditional roles to pursue higher education and jobs… The book is useful to researchers and students of women’s studies, social anthropology and demography, gender studies and development studies.