Ties that bind

When I was growing up in South

India, we often had to fill out forms at school where we were asked about our parents’ occupations. For my mother, I would fill out “housewife”, an ungainly word that made it sound as though she were married to the house. She had been a schoolteacher before marriage, but it was a common choice among women of her generation to give up their career aspirations when they took the long walk around the fire, and she had been no different. The term housewife has fallen out of favour now, and a more politically aware generation has replaced it with “home-maker”. It sounds better, but still carries with it a taint of the traditional, as though it is an easy or automatic choice. I never understood this; being a homemaker is a tough choice of profession — demanding, exhausting, often thankless, yet vital. Surely it deserves more respect!  

Fast forward a few decades, and in a new generation, the tide has almost completely turned. Hardly any of my female peers are homemakers. In the post-feminist world, a woman can choose to be a stay-at-home Mom, but it is a choice that must be vigorously defended. One would expect that with most women, at least in the urban middle-class, free to choose their careers, a sense of quiet fulfilment would rule the day. A feeling of goals accomplished, and a sense of renewed purpose. Sadly, my conversations with women friends do not give me this feeling at all. Most of them seem to feel they’ve been given a bum deal — a classic bait and switch, rather like purchasing a Lamborghini and sliding behind its polished wheel to discover a set of bicycle pedals under the gleaming dash. It seems like the new order simply means women are expected to do even more work. In addition to their traditional roles of primary caregiver, food provider, sympathetic listener, and male-ego massager, now they also have to work at a regular job all day to augment the family income. The gatherer helps with the hunt, and after coming back weary from the kill, is told that the firewood isn’t going to gather itself.  

These are confusing times. The traditional lines of family function have been obliterated, and both women and men are struggling to come to terms with the new order. It seems like the family of my childhood home was a simpler place. My sisters were expected to help with the cooking and cleaning, while I was responsible for grocery shopping, and killing creepy crawly things that made their way into the house. My sister would darn my socks, and I would kill the spider in the corner of the bathroom, the atavistic hunter brandishing his broomstick, dispatching the offending arachnid in a swirl of broken limbs to join his ancestors in a spidery netherworld. I wonder now if my sisters ever resented my patriarchal presumption in not letting them kill their own spiders, if they wished I’d darned my own socks and left the cockroach alone. I doubt it, even if my only evidence is the memory of their relieved expressions when the distasteful deed was done.  

Women’s Day is around the corner. The theme this year, I’m told, is equal rights and equal opportunities for women. It’s hard to argue with that, yet equality is a slippery concept. Is a woman equal to a man? That’s like asking the painter standing in front of a blank canvas with a loaded palette whether red is equal to blue. In my mind, the issue is not so much equality as freedom. Freedom for a woman to live and to love, to work and to worship, to tread her own path, to tend her own garden, unafraid.  

A charismatic and powerful woman once explained the feminine condition to her followers with a parable. When a baby elephant is first caught by humans, she said, it is tethered to a hitching post with a stout chain. The baby elephant struggles and tries to escape, but the chain holds her fast, and she eventually stops trying. When she becomes an adult, she is still tied to the same post, with the same chain. With a single shrug of her mighty shoulders, the gentle giant can now break her bonds and walk free. But memories of past failures keep her from trying, and she remains standing by the post, unaware of her strength, a captive of her own imagination.  

Let us hope that soon we all — women and men alike — can walk away from that hitching post in our collective consciousness. The chain is not as strong as it looks. All it takes is a gentle tug.  

Papi Menon is a technologist based in San Francisco