Ladies, don't fall for these gender traps
gender traps? By earmarking March 8 as day to celebrate women and being woman, could we — women included — be entrenching biases so ingrained in our patriocratic societies that we fail to see how, say, in marriages, men bragging about their wives being the ones ‘solely to be credited’ for their beautiful homes is a backhanded compliment that’s a mere room away from the grating adage of the woman’s place being in the kitchen?
Ascribing the married woman as the lord and master (sic) of the household is proscribing her role, whether in business, ownership of wealth, decision-making, interests….
Most (arranged) marriages come retrofitted with a ‘Napoleon strategy’, referring to a short man seeking out shorter men to appear relatively tall. In the case of choosing a son’s wife, a careful selection is made from the ‘bridal catalogue’ in which the woman is less qualified, comes from a less wealthy household (the ‘ghar jamai’ holding a special fear in the patriocratic universe), is less voluble, is less tall….
Instead, being a ‘great householder’, a ‘good mother’, a ‘caring daughter-in-law’, a ‘loving wife’ become parameters by which women, even outside standard ‘saas bhi kabhi bahu thi’ tropes, end up measuring themselves.
What is excluded is far more than what’s included in such gendered Lakshman rekhas. The acquisition of jewellery, for instance, seen as an alpha female activity, the purpose of which is purportedly to acquire (self-)worth, is little but a privy purse of loose change that serves two functions: one,
