You can’t because… I can because...
How often do Indian girls hear these words between the ages of five and 15? “I can’t make the tea because I’m a boy.” “You can’t stay late for theatre rehearsals because you are a girl.”
Growing up in a patriarchal society in which tradition is rarely questioned, only equal opportunities education helped women to break out of the medieval notions about their frailty and inherent inferiority.
About half century ago, realisation dawned — slowly, but nevertheless it dawned — that a woman’s brain is as good as a man’s. Thereafter, a miniscule percentage of Indian women who were fortunate enough to secure a university education in the 1940s and 50s laid the field that their confident descendants walk in today. Even the daughters of a gardener or security guard can be certain of higher education if they can clear the entrance tests.
From hesitating to say yes, 40 years ago, to a daughter who wanted to go from Salem to Delhi to study, today’s families do not question whether or not they should support the grand-daughter’s plans to study in Europe.
Even so, stereotypes persist, and with it now, a hardening of male bonding against women at the workplace because an honest and competent woman is now a force to be reckoned with in any line of work.
A point many people might have noticed is that other things being equal, it is nearly always a man who is promoted by another man into a position of higher responsibility.
Indeed, it is quite likely he would be supported by a woman colleague who is actually more competent than he is but who thinks it wiser to play a subservient role in order to keep her job. Women do a lot of shadow work.
Consider the pillars of society: education, law and religion. What role do women play at the very top of any of these institutions? They were all designed by men to keep order in society — a subconscious item on the list being the control of women.
In all the years of India’s Independence, the country has had only one woman Prime Minister, and one woman as chairperson of the University Grants Commission. Has a woman ever been the Chief Justice of India? And despite the much-trumpeted equality before God that all religions preach, can any woman hope to head a church, mosque or math?
The question from the other side is whether society recognises what it does to little boys and men who are trained to suppress their softer sides and encouraged to be unemotional. (“Don’t be a sissy. Only girls like dancing and dressing up.”)
Most fatally for the species, most of them are taught to despise women and view them with either suspicion or derision. It begins very early with statements like, “You can’t join this game… it isn’t for girls,” and goes on to “That is your responsibility, not mine, because…”
One of the theories for misogyny is that a human male’s first experience of both pleasure (food and comfort) and discipline come from his mother, and this pattern of reward and punishment given or withheld sets up a certain deep resentment of womankind as a whole and is, when carried into adulthood, expressed as dislike, mistrust and a strong desire to subdue and control women.
How often have we seen women struggling with heavy bags while a husband or son walks ahead of her unburdened by any of the grocery? We need to remember that women are home-makers, not home-slaves.
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