Everyday Battles against Patriarchy, Culture and other irritants.

Everyday Battles against Patriarchy, Culture and other irritants.

Today I held back on going to the gym because I had to make coffee for my husband. And that got me thinking. If asked, we would automatically define household as modern, our relationship as one of equals etc. Yet much our roles are played out in the conventional mould. The reason, I concluded is the result of our upbringing. My husband, like all men of his generations, has been provided, by rearing and / by education with a skill set that is marketable, employable and can be exchanged for money. Me? My story is similar to that of many women born in the late sixties/early seventies in India. We believe we are generation caught in the cusp.  Our mother had Dreams for us. We were sent to college. We were introduced to role models- I A S officers, pilots, professors, doctors, the successfully employed younger aunts. We were allowed to dream, to talk about them, to go after them- within limits.  Then marriage happened and most of us discovered that our male compatriots were not raised to make room for our dreams. They were not tyrants or autocrats. Not at all; far from it, we admit. Yet what remained unsaid was; go ahead chase your dreams but around Life. But my dreams? They are Our dreams aren't they? Let’s rearrange our lives to fit them. And we did. Uprooting ourselves every time we moved. Taking years off from work when we had children. Struggling to fulfill our own needs and aspirations around these demands. In the end we all did find jobs and keep them. But that is what they remained for many of us. Jobs, while our men build careers. We never questioned it; we never knew how to. We never knew we could. We had no sense of entitlement, we were raised not to have any. And our milieu did the rest. Why do you want to work? Why struggle? Why don’t you just enjoy life? Why did nobody see that real joy would come from applying our skills, our knowledge in a space where we could be just individuals valued for our unique abilities. Just like the men.

Some women did go after their dreams. And ended up struggling to straddle both worlds. Over worked, guilty about the family on the days they worked late, guilty about work on the days they came home early. Working twice as hard in both arenas to earn the right to fulfillment that men obtained by simply being born.

Please don’t misunderstand me. This is not a feminist rant. This is a Feminist Story. All of us acknowledge our advantages; we admit we are privileged. Worse things could have happened to us; it has happened to other women. We were taught to think, we were allowed to think, we can form opinions. We know. It’s a pity that a man does it automatically; he is expected to do it. When we do it, it is pointed out as a privilege. I used to pride myself on being a post-feminist. Then I grew up and looked around me and realized that even Feminism has not reached many of us. I now wear my feminism badge with pride.

The point of this story is patriarchy is sly, ubiquitous and devious. It slips in and takes control in so many ways. Many of us vociferous strident equal- rights champions have fallen prey to it. And woken too late. Or sometimes have found ourselves ill- equipped to fight it. It is hard to shake of generations of conditioning. It is easy to fall into patterns of behaviour modelled my mothers, aunts and grandmothers. It is almost impossible to break the mould with no role models.

But there has been change. We have gone after our dreams, modified dreams; a compromise but dreams none the less. Something our mothers could not say. We are raising our daughters differently, passing on what we learned from our hard –fought battles. And some of us at least, are raising our sons differently too- teaching them the importance of treating all dreams equally.

We are changing. I suggest that society had change quickly too and catch up. Or the battle could get unpleasant. How I wish I could believe this happy ending.