Gendered Childhoods and Everyday Inequality: A Qualitative Study in Rajshahi, Bangladesh

1. IntroductionChildhood is a socially constructed phase of life that is greatly shaped by cultural and societal expectations. In Bangladesh, a rapidly growing, culture-observant country, patriarchal setups still predominantly determine children’s real lives based on their gender. National policy has augmented overall educational access most overtly for young women (Asadullah & Chaudhury, 2016), but embedded inequalities still persist on the household level, such that gendered roles first begin to get imposed and internalized (Kabeer, 2015). Micro-level processes carry the key to understanding how bigger societal inequalities get reinscribed across generations.Scholars have adequately charted macro-level gender differentials in such areas as secondary school attendance and child marriage rates (UNICEF, 2019). Relatively far fewer scholars have qualitatively explored day-to-day household and community-level mechanisms functioning in regional environments like Rajshahi that sustain those differentials. This writing aspires to fill that gap by asking about how gender norms play out in children’s everyday lives to craft their responsibilities, freedoms, and access to future options. It explores received traditions’ interplay with modern forces such as media and acknowledges children’s oft-overlooked agency in navigating through that complex world.In this article, we argue that childhood in Rajshahi is a heavily gendered, dynamic, and contested space. Based on qualitative field research, we demonstrate how boys are socialized for economic and public life and girls for domestic roles and charged with safeguarding family izzat (honor), especially in times of economic crises.