Gendered access to property
Topic: Society in Early India: Kinship, Varna-Jati, Women · NCERT: Class 12, Ch 3 "Kinship, Caste and Class - Early Societies"
Meaning
Gendered access to property means that men and women had unequal rights to wealth in early India. Under the Manusmriti (c. 200 BCE – 200 CE), the father's estate was divided equally among the sons, with an extra share for the eldest. Women got no share. A woman did own stridhana ("a woman's wealth"), meaning the gifts she received at marriage. Her children could inherit it, and her husband had no claim on it. Even so, land, cattle and money were mostly controlled by men, and this deepened the differences between men and women.
Example
The Manusmriti lists seven ways for men to gain wealth: inheritance, finding, purchase, conquest, investment, work and gifts. It lists six ways for women, and almost all of them are gifts from family or the husband, such as gifts given before the sacred fire at marriage. A few upper-class women did control resources. One was the queen Prabhavati Gupta, who granted land.
Don't confuse with
- Stridhana: this was only a woman's personal gifts, which her husband could not claim. It did not give her any right to the family estate.