TELEVISION: CREATING THE "MODERN" WOMAN 63 many women in terms of the power to control when the television set would be switched on and what would be watched. Sometimes this was couched in terms that referred to the generation of children in the family: how their grandparents would keep the television blaring on even when the children had their examinations, or how the children watched inappropriate programmes with their grandparents and their mothers were powerless to stop them. One woman, aged 22, grumbled about how she had to disconnect the cable connection because her motheMn-law was watching too much television and it was affecting her health (however, the story did not seem to hold up to too much scrutiny in medical terms). Many of the women who were the barir bou (the wives of the family) felt that television had increased the intra-family conflicts and thus had had a disturbing effect in their lives. Other comments revealed that the sense of powerlessness was also felt by the women when it came to gender-relations. In most homes, adult women were the heaviest viewers of television; however when it came to decision making, women - whatever their age and status in the family - had to follow the decisions of the males of the family, even if he was a younger brother-in-law (devar) or teenage son. In fact many women related how they would congregate in someone's house in order to watch their favourite serials or soaps if they knew that the men in that particular household would be away. The sports programming, especially the one-day cricket matches were usually the males' choice, while the women wanted to watch the daily episode of the Bengali and Hindi serials. Women could not determine the programmes to be watched in any single home in this sample; whereas in other places, especially in Calcutta, women did often choose the programmes to be watched even in the evening and in times of conflict. In fact in many cases the women in Ranaghat specifically mentioned that they were forced to "compromise" or "sacrifice" in order to maintain peace at home. They put this in the larger context of how the women's role within the family has to be one of submission and compromise in order to keep harmony and peace with the home. Many of these women pointed out that they were actually glad that their menfolk, wliether husbands or sons, were watching so much television because it kept them out of the street corner addas or out of the local club culture which is so much part of urban and suburban life in West Bengal. The social psychologist Michael Argyle has written about the transition from "informal" forms of leisure which includes