The Conservatives

I am no feminist. It is true that I completed an  MPhil course on a lengthy and unwieldly look at feminist theory across the ages and spaces. It is true that I have always been an (loud but behind the doors) advocate for justice for women, a defender of the female faith, with righteous indignation bubbling inside me when I hear of educated women falling prey to patriarchal vices.

But always, always, with a weariness that goes with the well worn shoe.

I am no feminist. My mother whipped me into becoming one.

Despite the metaphor, I kid you not.

She refused to socialize me into gendered identities. She wouldn't give me Barbies and other such excessively femininely anatomized dolls. She encouraged me to play every physical sport on earth. She was tireless in her determination that I should at all costs have a career. I wasn't allowed the luxury of even contemplating the possibility of just being happily married in the future. She was vehement in her tirades against bondages that tie down women ideologically.

All this, of course, right through the ages of 0-18.

There were contradictions. I saw her helpless against some choices she thought she had made. I saw her floundering, many a time, against the compelling rationale and logic of tradition and male reason. She had only her inexplicable reasoning that can't be put into social language to depend upon.

Nevertheless, our generation, this generation of women who ride the waves of Twittering Faces and are surveyed by the masculine eye on the covers of bidding scam cover stories, be it spectrum or sweat equity,  are only The Conservatives.

I am the spokesperson for The Conservatives. I have thrown to the sea the monetary and emotional investment my parents made in my education, years of studious toil, academic excellence, for the sake of marital peace and concord. Unable to argue my case or defend my right or have the courage to take a stand, I am, back to where we started from. A prehistoric anomaly, date me beyond much before the Suffragettes.

Or, take the woman in the predicament cubicle adjacent to me. Lazy about her intellectual abilities, she is much more interested in her husband's career than her own. She has a mother who rose from Lab Assistant to Professor and Head of the Department, who managed home and work,  faced all odds (and ends) to walk a very thin line of frustration and achievement. Yet, my friend, a co conservative, happily gives up a lucrative bank job because she has a high income group husband and was all set to go to the US immediately after marriage.

Yet another co conservative gives up yet another lucrative government bank job on being persuaded by her husband (perhaps) of the lack of challenge in a sarkari naukri, of the inappropriateness of her long working hours for a happy married life. She too is the offspring of the working mother syndrome.

We may head public or private institutions. We are 'allowed' a prominent voice in the administration of public and external affairs. We are 'given' representation on workforces, task teams, educational institutions, scholarship processes, university admissions. But we make choices, willingly, that date back to beyond. Even our grandmothers have been more self righteous.

Complacent in our 'relative' freedom or the lack of war against the male bastion, we luxuriate in the space our fore-mothers made for us. The foray into the outside world our mothers fought for, we shrug aside and relax in air-conditioned cars bought by our husbands. A false sense of economic security lulls us. A good education, an MBA, has ' bought' us a coveted husband with whom we can speak in strange tongues and familiar dictions of interest. For all other purposes, we continue to display our husbands' underwear on the domestic washing lines of marital triumph.