2 years, 10 months ago-
When it is about career women either leaves it due to her responsibilities or she easily decides to give up her career as she don’t want to fight for it. Hardly a few women fights for their career.
Society force women to get married and then have a child and also the child’s responsibility is given to her due to which she is pushed to leave her career and be a good wife and mother. In laws shows her that it is the best option for her family to give up her career and focus on building relationships in family. Why women are expected to leave their career after marriage? Why women has to choose between their career and family? Why men don’t have any kind of pressure of leaving their jobs after marriage? No woman should have to give up her job or become a dependant just because it is the most perfect option for everyone involved in family. She has her own choice whether she wants to continue her career or not. Nobody can force her. If at the end of the day women has to leave her career then why she has educated. Just for getting a good husband and raise her child. A woman should learn to resist and not pressurised herself to give up her career due to someone else.
We can have all the policies and strategies for gender enrichment. We can focus on getting girls into schools and getting them jobs but it all fails if a woman gives up on her career after a certain point due to her family. Women should think about it.Okay so we always hear all those neighborhood aunties always saying that even if you become successful in your career still a woman has to handle the sole responsibility of handling a household. We all know how time and time again we are always told that our basic job is to look after our home.
It’s not really ironic to hear these demands like how a woman should change her lifestyle including her first name when she is married but after all if our own biological parents treat us an outsider why won’t the real outsiders won’t have the audacity to speak and treat us like that?
As we all know according to the society women should always prioritise the wellness of the family first be it her maternal or husband’s home.Before marriage she is always expected to to think about her parents and their so called pride while her parents only think about society and relatives that are different. After marriage her half time goes on pleasing her in-laws and husband and remaining half for children and grandchildren. So in a way an ideal woman just lives her life for everyone except for herself. Women who sacrifice everything as they show in TV bahus is always labelled as an ideal match.
As we all know after marriage a woman is always an object who is brought and in fact it’s her privilege that she is married into their family and now that they are gonna provide for her so she has to comply with them. Since she is given by her family to them the first thing they need to do is label her as theirs so her surname and even first name in some cases is changed. So now she is officially theirs .
Even though today women do fight for their rights and almost have stopped these patiarchal norms still there are these things needed to be changed.Women are always expected to sacrifice there own selves for their family, duties and responsibilities. When it comes to maintaing the house, marrying, having kids, it’s always the women who have to sacrifice their career, life for the sake of it. Until the younger age women work hard, practice and learn in order to be independent, strong and capable. Every woman has her dreams, what she wants to become, what she wants to do, but by the time she grows up she’s handed over with a million responsibilities leading her to give upon her dreams or career. When a woman is in her twenties she is expected to get married, no matter how much she’s successful or not, she’s expected to leave everything behind and walk into some other place with her husband. Most women have to leave their jobs when they have to get married because of the burden of the duties and the unsuitable circumstances she didn’t asked for. Most women have to adjust according to their husbands. Why isn’t a man asked to move in order for his wife??
Moreover even if she manages to carry on with the work after marriage, she has to leave her job while having kids, and raising them. Sometimes, women even don’t want to have kids but the family forces her to carry on the bloodline. Women often end up giving upon their careers because of the heavy dose of responsibilities she has on her shoulders.It needs to be understood that relationships and careers should not be weighed against each other. In our Indian culture, we have been forced fed this notion that been led to believe that relationships are more important than anything else in India whereas the western influence on us teaches that one shouldn’t compromise on their career for a relationship. Women should not have to compromise with her career due to the gender roles that have been bestowed on us.
The Indian patriarchal mindset is still stuck in the archaic times where men were the primary breadwinners and women were restricted to household chores. In case the man died, the woman was either burnt along with him or was taken care of by their parents, in-laws, or society. We can’t expect any of these to happen in modern society. On the other hand, western philosophy preaches about developing individual thinking and pursuing individual goals as the way to lead life. Women should be given the freedom to choose between family and career. They should decide whether the relationship is really worth giving up on your career or is your career worth giving up on your relationship? The answer differs from one person to another. A truly supportive relationship wouldn’t let you lose your career and a really good career should support a good relationship. There will be compromises on your end which will be definitive but it should be up to the woman to set limits on these compromises, whether it might be regarding the career(like rejecting a promotion/ transfer to stay with the other person) or the relationship(like convincing your partner to move to a different place to support your career).
Also, they need to be given a wide range of choices when it comes to selecting career choices, it should not be restricted to the mundane gender-driven roles. The patriarchal mindset needs to be demolished.The practice of adopting the husband’s surname began in ninth century England when lawmakers began contemplating the legal aspects of families and marriage. A wife was considered to have integrated into her husband’s family and thus began the custom of taking up his name. In India, the practice has a cultural connotation where marriage is itself an act of giving away a daughter to the groom’s family. Hence, the change of surname. In fact, there are certain Indian communities which give daughters-in law a new name as an act of welcoming them into the family.
When Priyanka Chopra Jonas adopted her husband’s surname, her feminist stance was widely questioned. It seemed a typical expression of patriarchal custom. On the Barstool Sports’ Chicks in the Office podcast, she explained her decision.
“I was never forced into it, it’s just something I wanted to do because that’s how I grew up. Hopefully, in another 50 years, it’ll be guys taking our names too, or just not changing our names, and that’ll be normalized.”
The actor justifies her decision on account of honouring her family’s tradition. It sounds quite discouraging because ‘tradition’ in our country is merely sugar-coated patriarchy. Our tradition is an agent of perpetuating male chauvinism through socialisation and active conditioning.
Internalised patriarchy is so profound that sometimes even a decision seemingly made independent of pressure might have occurred due to subconscious coercion. We convince ourselves of free will when in truth we are unconsciously succumbing to patriarchal principles. So when a woman decides to change her surname or give up her career after marriage for the sake of keeping up tradition, the decision is not truly democratically made. It is an expression of internalised patriarchy. If not, why then do we find only women debating whether or not to take up a surname? Why is there talk of only women giving up their career after marriage? Has it become an inconceivable idea for a man to take a career break instead of his wife?
With reference to an observation made by Coontz, Ravi Desai writes that the foundation of marriage ‘is still rooted in patriarchy, an oppressive ideal that no amount of feminist correction by its participants can fix.’ Women having ‘a choice’ in matters such as changing surnames is progress only on the surface level. It might seem empowering to have a choice. While it does matter, it is not enough. When the very institution of marriage is unfeminist and patriarchal, such choices remain only romanticised distractions.
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