How Badass Asian Women Thwart Lunatic Rules Of Patriarchy
How the brave feminist revolution silently paved the way
An Indian wedding
Hello Substack
It’s another hot Tuesday here in India. Summer temperatures have touched 40C & we are waiting for the rains to give us respite.
For those of you who don’t know, India is a young democracy, a breakout nation. Apart from hot summers, the country is famous for it’s exploding population growth, it’s crazy rich, rising middle income group, growing software talent pool & yes, cows on roads.
But most famous is how the culture of patriarchy treats its women.
There is truth attached to the notoriety. Asian cultures are known to hold women back. India & its men to this day dictate to women what they should or should not wear. They are the reason (or not) women have access to education, sanitation, money or property. Women caught in the vice like grip of the culture often forsake friends who can lend them a kind ear.
Women who are held back by patriarchy do strike back.
This silent revolution is rewriting the crazy rules of Indian marriages. It took three generations of Indian women to bring about the change.
My mother grew up in the 60s & 70s, when the Women’s Rights Movement was yet to reach India. Women of my mother’s generation were caged in their conservative homes. But these homes also saw value in educating its girls. So, my mother got an education. Not a fancy one, but a simple degree. Indian women of her era married & married early, because that was how they were taught to live.
In the 80s the Indian middle-income group influenced the way it’s women lived.
Inflation & rising standards of living in cities meant the women had to work to supplement family income yet continue as primary caregivers with little access to help or gadgets. They were raised by patriarchy to overwork & not complain, so they went about their chores with mouths shut.
If they couldn’t handle the stress, they quit the workforce with the permission of their families. Family meant not only the spouse but also his extended family. The woman’s kin vanished from the picture once she married.
But they couldn’t take away her hopes for a better future from her. Women of my mother’s generation held onto a dream, for their daughters to have the kind of life they dared not dream about.
They raised my generation of millennials to achieve not settle. In the millennium, India opened its borders to multinationals which birthed the nouveau rich & the “upper” middle income group. Indian millennial women lived like their sisters in the West for the most part. For us marriage & mating were an unequal deal. We opted out. We lived to work, travel & pursue hobbies. Those of us who chose marriage chose not to have children.
Not all the choices I made that were in a way dictated by patriarchy were wise.
I made my bucks but could not give the system two fucks. I was unsure about children, so I had them late. My career was the most important part of a careful life I had built, but I lost it in the pandemic anyway. In my fight to climb the ladder I burnt bridges, so nobody helped me when I lost my job. I could have chased my love for writing sooner but I was scared of what the culture would do to me if I quit my profession.
My biggest regret is that I considered the rules of a conservative society dangerous rather than just downright silly.
I let personal goalposts sail by. Millennial Indian women got a few things wrong. But we got right how we redefined life for the girls of Gen Next. They don’t let their lives be defined by archaic rules.
The young ones now know what they want.
They own their gender & how it defines who they want to be. If they are cis gendered, they couple for love rather than because “that’s what everyone does”. The women are secure enough to know that a legal union is not a one-sided compromise.
They are tossing the famous Indian ‘arranged marriage’ out the window. They choose work-life harmony. Which means companionship, babies & career. They embrace tradition not because they have to but because it could be fun & they like to hold onto their roots. This means they chuck what they find degrading.
My kind of feminism got me scared of patriarchy.
Rather than dismissing its rules to live as I wished, I lived by a different set of rules to avoid it’s grip. I did not chase dreams until I had let them pass me by. Gen Next has got it right.
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