Women and Property in Rural Bangladesh

The primary aim of this paper is to situate women vis-a-vis property in rural Bangladesh-more precisely, to show how legal practices and ideological discourses located within conjugal, familial and kinship structures result in unequal capacity for men and for women to act as independent subjects in relation to property. The thrust of the author's argument may be stated as follows: property is a set of social relations. Embedded in these are social behaviour and gender relations. Since the capacity to act is circumscribed to a large extent by the forms of familial, conjugal and kinship relations, the degree of women's independence in rural Bangladesh is problematic. Belonging to a subordinate gender, women are less free to act as subjects with regard to people and to things, hence to property.