The Determinants of Gender Equity in India: Examining Dyson and Moore's Thesis with New Data

摘要

IN 1983, TIM DYSON AND MICK MOORE proposed that North India's cultural bias favoring exogamous marriage and South India's bias favoring endoga-mous marriage between close kin, which ensured a wife's lifelong access to the kinship network of her birth,went far to explain the greater degree of autonomy enjoyed by women in the South. So persuasive was Dyson and Moore's thesis that it has dominated demographic thought on female autonomy—and, by extension, on fertility and infant mortality—in South Asia.