Sacrificed at the Altar of Postmodern Patriarchy!

Gender: Female. Age: 20-21. Education: Graduate in History, sociology, Political Science etc. Ambition: Waiting for the best catch in the marriage market.
Next year enters Post-Graduation in the subject concerned or a professional degree course but the aim remains the same. reason: marriage didn't materialize. This is the story for most of the girls (very true of the middle class). Higher education is not a matter of choice but from compulsion to get the best person available in the marriage market.
Again if someone has been unlucky till this point, she is 'permitted' to work because a working girl is preferred to a non-working one. If she is interested in studies, the next mark is a doctoral degree so that she can take up the teaching profession- generally taken to be a safe one for women and which will not let them neglect their home.
What happens if someone's marriage is arranged while completing the doctoral degree? a supportive husband and family will certainly lead to its completion. But what about those pursuing a doctorol degree in the sciences? They need labs for experiments and for writing papers. In this case, the desirous complete their doctorate but most are made to give it up in the middle and left with a sense being dissatisfied throughout life.
what strikes me is the way education has become a tool in the hands of patriarchy. The female child gets to study till the point her marriage has not been arranged. Once arranged, no one bothers to ask her whether she wants to quit studies or pursue them. It is expected of her to say good bye to studies unless the in-laws wish otherwise.
Again the notion of women working is a patriarchal creation. The men do not want the women to work because she enjoys doing so. The reason given by most is that the husband will not have to take time out for the wife in the evening; she will be too tired to demand an outing and will not have the time to 'disturb' the husband as she will have to do the cooking and other household activities (if the double income does not allow them to keep cooks etc.)!
Women are independent, free to make their own decisions but in most cases it seems to be a mirage! At the end of the day it is patriarchy which decides their fate!


Comments

priyanka said…
very rightly pointed out ma'am! today a working woman is supposed to be a thing of pride by the husband.. if the man gets married to a non working woman(by an arranged marriage of course), he treats his wife with contempt.. her life depends totaly on her in- laws.. if they want her to work.. she has to work even when she wants to be just a housewife.. and if she is unable to get a job.. she is treated badly.. and if the in-laws decide that she should be a traditional housewife.. she is forced to waste all her talents.. even after getting education.. women are not given any freedom of choice.. in fact i think all this talk about feminism and women empowerment is a sham.. i think it is a conspiracy.. to get more and more work done by women..by giving girls all these opportunity of learning and doing jobs they are actually extracting extra labour from them(doing household work as well as their jobs in the offices).. without giving them extra freedom.. you know some families actually force their 'bahus' to go out and work.. to improve their income as well as their prestige (look how intelligent a daughter-in-law i've got!)... and to give the girl the freedom of choosing her life partner is something really unimaginable for some families.. just look at all those daily soaps.. what are they propounding?.. they show that leaving the choice of marraige on parents and doing an arranged marraige is a highly virtuous thing.. where is the post-modern world going?
June 15, 2010 at 3:20 AM
Professor Shanker Dutt said…
It is patriarchy, no doubt, and it takes on protean shapes in different cultures but the homogenising ideology remains the same. What the postmodern does is to deny solidarity,even those that are strategic. What it also does is to deny a human situation its emotional strength. After all isn't this a linguistic construct just the manner in which soaps are constructs, representations of cultural forms? So one wonders if female angst is a human phenomenon or a chain of significations across a matrix of representations.The fundamental problem before one can discuss the issue is sadly how the issue is to be approached. In India it is feudal capitalism, that to my mind, characterises patriarchy.
June 18, 2010 at 1:17 AM
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