In our Indian culture, maximum of girls grow up knowing that whether she’ll become successful in her career or not, she has to be a perfect wife, a perfect daughter-in-law. Thus studying and growing on the path of success is a secondary choice, cooking and doing household works are essential not as a living necessity but as for being a perfect wife. And yes, of course it’s a patriarchal norm which is being preserved among us through generation to generation.
Yes, some can claim that nobody ever told women to do so, just like here nobody told them to give up on her dreams, nobody told her to change her surname, nobody told her to be someone else. And that’s where contradiction lies. Yes, most of the women choose it for themselves but have anybody ever asked her what if she didn’t choose that option? Actually have we ever given her some another choice?
No… When it comes about leave a dream and make time for children or household activities or for any other member of home, we never expect the male to do so. It’s duty of a female. Here we worship our mother, making a perfect portrait of female who serves eternal patriarchy. And so it’s always expected from a mother to sacrifice.
Everyone of us approximately knows how much it bothers after changing the surname. It’s sometime about identifying problem, sometimes with banks, pan card, voter card, or can be for other registration procedure. And in a huge democracy like India it’s obviously not so easy to rewrite all of them.
But still only a few female nowadays are able to keep her surname even after marriage. And if she does, our so-called literate society makes question about it continuously.
The thing is, yes, female themselves make the choice, but we have never given any other way for them to do so. If a woman ignores a little bit of her duty from being mother, or being a wife, to make herself happy, we never have a second thought and labelled the words like ‘selfish’, ‘ultra modern’, ‘not a good mother’ and many insulting remarks, forgetting how much worshipped she was and deserve to be. A not so perfect female, according to the judgement of our society which strongly upholds patriarchal norms, should never be worshipped -this is what we make our children learn. Then how can she evenly judge the options or choices for herself, knowing that one step other than social recognition and she is doomed.
So, basically it’s none other than an expression of internalised patriarchy, which must be shaken up to give female at least the choice, she deserves.