Grandmother, Mother and Daughter: Changing agency of Indian, middle-class women, 1908–2008

Covering one hundred years, this paper recounts the life stories of threegenerations of middle-class women of the New Delhi-based Kapoor family. Bytaking the methodological view that individuals born approximately at the sametime, within the same class segment, and at the same cultural place will beshaped by the same historical structures so that their lives to some extent aresynchronized into a gendered, generational experience, these three life storiesare viewed as voices that reflect their respective generational class segments. Inview of this, the paper uses the three life stories to discuss changes in women’sagency within the urban, educated, uppermiddle-class. Agency is here understoodas control over resources, and it is argued that in order to understand changes inwomen’s agency, one should take into account the impact of both social, economicstructures and cultural ideologies. When analysing the three life stories, theoverall finding is that the granddaughter has had more control over her ownlife than her mother and grandmother. However, by acknowledging that culturalideologies and social economic structures are not always synchronized, a nuancedand many-dimensional picture of twists and turns in these middle-class women’sdegree and type of agency over time emerges