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We study the intergenerational effect of a woman’s social status on the health of her children. We overcome limits to causal identification in existing literature by exploiting an institutional feature of joint households in rural India: women married to the younger brother are assigned lower social rank than women married to the older brother. Studying differences among cousins within households, we find that children of lower-ranking mothers are shorter than children of higher-ranking mothers. We further argue that this effect is in part due to differences in maternal nutrition: as evidence of this mechanism, we document effects of being a lower-ranking mother on post-partum BMI and birth weight in newly collected data, and on neonatal mortality in national data. Because the relatives who arrange the marriages that we study do not take the groom’s age rank among brothers into consideration, more disadvantaged mothers are not more likely to be married to younger brothers. We show that women whose marriages assign them lower social rank are not disadvantaged in health, height, or human capital before marriage and that the difference in social status that we exploit emerges after marriage. We verify that our results are not due to pre-marriage differences between fathers or mothers; are not caused by endogenous household dissolution; and are only present among children of higher-and lower-ranking mothers living together in a joint household, but not among the children of brothers living in separate households.