Seeing red (not pink)

Here’s why International Women’s Day annoys me so much

 

Every year, when International Women’s Day begins to near, my inbox fills up with pink-hued spam, offering me everything from discounts at the neighbourhood spa to a special deal on mammograms at the local medical center. To say that I find this spam annoying would be the understatement of the century. But that is nothing compared to the annoyance I feel when Women’s Day greetings start flooding my Whatsapp and inundating my Twitter timeline.

 

I don’t intend to embarrass anyone in particular by singling out their greeting, because all of them are, frankly, just as irritating. The general theme is how women are such good wives, mothers, sisters, daughters, friends. How women selflessly put themselves out for the people in their life no matter what the cost. How a woman’s work is never done (and honestly, how do they do it?!) How the men in their lives cannot imagine how they would manage without them. And how women must be celebrated for these sacrificing, self-effacing qualities, which allow their men to pass through life without the slightest inconvenience.

 

By the end of the day, I am usually in a towering rage, having read hundreds of such saccharine messages. And with every new one that pops up on my phone, I wonder anew: why is it so impossible for people to see women as individuals, with fully-realized lives and ambitions of their own? Why must a woman still be seen through the prism of a man – to whom she is a daughter, a wife, a sister, a mother, or even a friend or colleague? Why must her achievements be listed in the context of how she makes other people’s lives better? 

 

Then, there is the endless romanticizing of the hard, unrelenting, thankless work that all women do every single day. Getting the kids ready for school, looking after ageing parents and in-laws, cooking dinner after a hard day at the office, keeping the home in order, women are expected to do it all. No matter how ‘enlightened’ the husband, it is the wife who ends up picking up the slack at home. None of this is fun, and none of it is particularly fulfilling. And yet, we are fed the myth that women – those caring creatures – find a deep and abiding pleasure in it all. 

 

I don’t know about you, but I think it is time that we put this particular lie to rest. 

 

So, how would I like to see International Women’s Day celebrated, you ask. 

 

Well, for starters, I would like companies, who invest so much on pink-hued advertising at this time of year, to put their money where their mouth is. Instead of releasing cutesy pictures of their women workforce, I would like them to ensure that every woman on their rolls is paid the same amount of money for the same kind of work as a man does. The gender pay gap in companies is anything from 25 to 30 per cent, which means that women end up making 75 rupees to every 100 rupees that their male counterparts make. As long as that disparity is not addressed, it is meaningless to post pictures of smiling young women lining up for a promotional ad. In fact, it is highly hypocritical, if not downright insulting. 

 

That is a long-term goal, of course, which calls for systemic change. And I am willing to wait a couple of years, even five, for that.

 

But more immediately, it should be possible to change the messaging around International Women’s Day. Instead of hailing women as devoted mothers, great wives, dedicated mothers, or obedient sisters and daughters, let's address women as individuals in their own right. Admire them for their resilience in making their way in a man’s world. Praise them for carving out careers for themselves and for their professional excellence. Celebrate them for living their best lives. And whatever you do, don’t reduce them to their relationships with the men in their life. 

 

It's not asking for a lot. And you have another year to work towards it.

 

Feminist? Who, me?

Whether you answer yes or no, there is no denying the debt every woman owes to those who went before

I am always baffled by young (and not so young) women who proclaim proudly that they have ‘no time for feminism’ or who declare when prodded that they wouldn’t really describe themselves as ‘feminist’. Women like this tend to say things like, “I am not really one for all that bra-burning nonsense’. Or even the risible, “I am not a feminist; I am a humanist.” And then there are those who misunderstand the concept completely and protest that they are not into all this ‘man-hating’ business.

This column is written for the benefit of women like these. Women who live in a world that grants them rights that the feminist movement fought for and won (and which they now take for granted). Women who need reminding what their lives would be like if generations of feminists before them hadn’t fought for their place in society.

So here, in no particular order of importance, are just some of the things that feminism brought us. Just so that these non-feminist ladies know that whether they acknowledge it or not, they owe a huge debt to ‘bra-burning, women-lib types’.

• The right to exercise control over your own body. Hard as this may be to believe, there was a time when women had no say in whom they were married off to. They had no control over their reproductive lives. And while this may still be true of millions of Indian women in rural households, middle-class educated women in our cities today have the right to marry according to their own choice; choose the contraception of their choice; and have an abortion if it fails. The law now recognizes the woman’s right to her own body. And we have feminism to thank for that.

• The right to property: While women had limited property rights the world over (control was effectively exercised by either her father or her husband) in India women who inherited property were effectively barred from disposing of it on their own. This ‘limited interest’ was abolished only in 1956 by the Hindu Succession Act, which made women the ‘absolute owner’ of any property they owned, and gave daughters an equal interest in the estate of their fathers. 

• The right to your name: No longer is it taken as given that a woman has to change her surname when she gets married (or even her first name, as happened with some traditional households). She gets to decide what name she is known as; a symbolic victory but an important one nonetheless when it comes to establishing her own identity. What’s more, thanks to a long legal battle waged by author and editor Githa Hariharan, women also have the right to be named as the ‘natural guardian’ of their children, a prerogative earlier restricted to men.

• The right to vote: We tend to take this right for granted in India, because women have had the vote ever since we gained independence in 1947. But this was only possible because of the suffragettes and suffragists movements – run entirely by feminists – that campaigned for years on end in Western democracies to get women the right to vote. 

• The right to work: Outside the home, that is. No longer do women have to be chained to the kitchen stove – unless that’s where they want to be. They have the freedom to go out into the world and earn their own living, using the skills they have developed in school and college (and there too, it is feminism that has made it possible for women to be educated at the same level as their male peers).

• The right to equal pay for equal work: You know all that brouhaha about Jill Abramson being fired as executive editor of the New York Times because she asked to be paid the same salary as her male predecessor? The story was quickly denied, but the controversy would have been a non-starter if it wasn’t for feminism. Not only would a woman never have been appointed to one of the top jobs in an organization but there would have been no question about paying her as much as a man would earn. You want to know what a pre-feminist workplace would look like? Just watch an episode of Mad Men. Do you really want to live in a world in which Joan Holloway reports to Roger Stirling and Peggy Olson to Don Draper? And all the while, combatting casual sexism – and the odd grope and grab – at the workplace? No, I didn’t think so.

So, all you ladies describing yourselves as non-feminists, unless you actually prefer being bare-foot and pregnant, slaving away all hours in the kitchen, with not a rupee (let alone a salary or a house) to call your own, and with no rights over your bodies or your children, maybe you’d do well to acknowledge the debt to those that went before and fought the good battle so that you didn’t need to.