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February 3 - February 9, 2022
At this point, I know that many Indian readers will adopt a defensive pose.
Not this woman, no. She agrees totally
But I’m too angry and heartbroken to offer any moral ambiguity and equivocation.
clear—there is no meaningful dimension of well-being on which men and women are equal in India. None.
All the data on gender in India, despite progress since Independence, confirms that our country is profoundly unequal and that the gap between male and female achievement and access to resources continues to grow.
consistent alliance between patriarchy and hierarchy in maintaining the existing structure of inequalities in our society.
This promotion of invisibility of women’s actual roles, struggles, views and aspirations have provided a major obstacle to the realization of the vision of equality that took shape during the freedom struggle.’
Nearly all women in India still depend on men or family money for their living.
acknowledgement of the gendered politics of violence in our country?
The state and the family—the two critical institutions of Indian life—have delegated all the unacknowledged and laborious burden of care to women.
Sixty per cent of Indian women are not allowed to travel alone outside their villages or neighborhoods, even to the market or a health clinic.
The key worry for us is that women’s access to independence and public life remains curtailed.
Be it access to phones or jobs, our culture and institutions display tremendous resistance in allowing women more freedom to engage with the world outside their homes.’
If any progress has been made at all, it’s been because women have fought for it, they’ve snatched it and then they’ve guarded it.’
The share of women ‘workers’ shrunk from thirty-three per cent in 1911 to a meagre twelve per cent in 1971.
Chattopadhyay saw the need to acknowledge the home as a site of economic production and augment women’s labours through government investments in childcare, crafts and home-based industries.
women workers needed ‘attention’ instead of ‘protection’.
There are also growing concerns that the 2017 amendment will lead to the private sector hiring even fewer women.
single women who must care for elderly parents with one income (which is invariably less than what a man would earn for doing the same job) are provided no support.
‘hard to overestimate how much damage this history of objectification and oppression has done to the self-esteem of women.
‘There is less love and much more tension everywhere,’
To think that social inequalities aren’t driving even privileged women up the wall, to presume discrimination doesn’t surface in one’s everyday relationship with oneself, to believe that a sense of unworthiness and shame doesn’t creep into the way we navigate our romantic lives, to pretend that our interpersonal relationships with partners, fathers, brothers and mothers are immune to structural inequalities and are somehow havens of perfect equality is plain idiocy or, worse, a sinister silence.
Thirty-seven per cent of all women who died by suicide in the world are Indian;
‘I was silly to go to that protest, what’s the point? These boys at home here will never change. He spoke to you so badly, and I could do nothing. He has no respect for educated women like us. In fact, the more we speak and do well, the more he hates us.
The world did not incentivize young Varun to investigate his biases. The women in his everyday intimate life would bear the brunt of his authentic feelings.
The good news: nearly ninety per cent of both boys and girls felt that men and women should receive equal treatment and opportunities. The bad news: eighty per cent of boys also felt that men should receive preferred treatment in accessing education opportunities.
Eighty per cent of the boys surveyed felt that the woman’s ‘most important role was of a homemaker’ and sixty-seven per cent of the girls concurred.
It is always someone else who is to blame for social malpractice and gender trouble.
all the data on gender-based violence or economic discrimination will show that the home and intimate relationships are where female autonomy is quashed,
the family as it exists, is based on clearly established hierarchies of gender and age, with gender trumping age:
Because the feminism I’ve seen knows you must chip away at social structures every day.
Perhaps it is a sign of how unequal a society we have become that the feminism of my class of Indian elites who live in Twitter Pradesh does not resonate with those who do the hard work of engaging in quiet renegotiations within homes, marriages and friendships.
Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.
Within families, women believe they must labour for love.
Because love is capital, a way to ensure feminine success and survival.
Love is supposed to defy logic, not be entrapped by it.
Indian feminism struggles to explain why so many modern women, those who defy their traditional roles in the economy and fight silent battles at home, have been possessed by the idea of traditional matrimony and romance.
At a time when we are so wary of who speaks for whom, so worried about who appropriates whose experience that we risk losing fruitful conversations while stranded on our identitarian islands,
‘The mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep.’
