Abstract
Self-care is an aspect of social reproduction—the basis of a sustainable economy. Social reproduction ensures the primary condition for capitalist accumulation—a healthy and dependable workforce—both, present and future. Typically, social reproduction involves the production (or reproduction) of the household. Producing the household requires care for the self. As women and other caregivers care for themselves, they are revitalised to offer care to those around them—both, in the home and the market economy. However, the market economy understands self-care in individualistic ways, imagining it as a way to brand wellness products. Poet and activist Audre Lorde (1997a) critiques the market economy’s understanding of self-care. Lorde presents a self-affirming idea of self-care—to take the time to understand how one’s body feels versus how it looks. In this paper, we inquire—do married, working Indian women undergo self-care? We analyse data from the Time Use Survey of 2019 and inquire how much time do married working Indian women spend on (i) personal care and the maintenance of their bodies, (ii) leisure and (iii) socialising and private prayer, which we define as self-care. Our study shows that married working Indian women spend 97 min a day on average less than their husbands on self-care. We estimate the effects of demographic variables and paid and unpaid work on time spent in self-care by men and women through a simultaneous equation model. Through this, we trace the relationship between classical Indian patriarchy and the materiality of self-care.
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Availability of Data and Materials
Time Use Survey of India 2019 data is publicly accessible here: https://microdata.gov.in/nada43/index.php/catalog/170. Its technical files include Data Layout, Estimation Procedure and a Readme. The extraction procedure involves reading the file on any Statistical Software like Stata or R. We used Stata. We are happy to share our code on request.
Notes
The Time Use Survey contains a category called ‘self-care and maintenance’, which covers a range of activities. These activities are classified under codes 91 to 99 and include slee**, eating and drinking, personal hygiene, receiving personal and health/medical care, travelling time to self-care and maintenance and other self-care and maintenance activities.
We see self-care as a broader concept, including leisure (Time Use Survey categories 81 to 89), socialising and private prayer (Time Use Survey categories 71 to 79). Leisure includes playing and watching sports, hobbies, consuming mass media, attending cultural events and reading for leisure. Socialising and private prayer include spending time with community members, religious practices, participating in community events and writing or reading letters, emails and other private and social messages etc.
The Time Use Survey of India 2019 is a nationally representative sample survey. The data was collected through stratified, multi-stage, representative sampling and covered the national territory of India, except for the villages in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands. In total, the survey included 138,799 households (82,897 rural and 55,902 urban) and gathered socio-demographic data from 518,744 individuals. Time-use data for 447,250 individuals aged six years and above (273,195 rural and 174,055 urban) was collected through personal interviews for a 24-h period, from 4 AM on the previous day to 4 AM on the day of the interview, in 30-min increments. The dataset has 226,644 men and 218,526 women. Of these, 130,289 men and 134,765 women are currently married. Amongst the married men and women, 116,925 men and 30,563 women are engaged in market work.
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Acknowledgements
Both authors thank Priyanta Ghosh, University of Gour Banga, Malda and the Gender Care Hub at the Oxford School of Global and Area Studies.
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No funding for this research. We have used publicly available data and we have not sought additional compensation for our time.
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Ruchira Sen: conceptualising self-care as social reproduction, identifying the lacuna in social reproduction literature where self-care comes in, writing the structural equations and reduced form equations, interpreting results and producing the first draft of the paper. T.S. Kavita Rajeshwari: writing the code to extract and merge the data, finding the gender gaps in self-care, paid and unpaid work, running the reduced form and structural equations, producing and interpreting the results, and editing the paper to make the required changes.
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Sen, R., Rajeshwari, T.S.K. Self-Care by Indian Women: Materiality and Time Use. J Econ Race Policy (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-024-00142-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41996-024-00142-6