A recent advertisement by a telecom major stirred a debate about stereotypes attached with working women. The advert shows a female boss stressing the significance of targets and deadlines on two junior male colleagues. Later, she gets home and converts into a cordon bleu cook to make a full course dinner for her husband, who, as it turns out, is one of those two junior male colleagues.
A husband working under a wife in office? As much as we would love to believe that times are a changing, this arrangement will never work in reality. Even if the man is blindly in love initially to see it, he’ll recover his sight soon enough, or the busy world around him will take out time to make him realize what a half male he is to ‘take orders from a woman…his wife!!’
Stop feeling guilty
Then the household bit. The rule is simple: it’s obviously the wife who cooks or does the house! Pepsico president Indra Nooyi said in a recent interview that the day she was appointed the president, she left office early to share the news of her promotion with her family. But her mother asked her to go get milk. Her husband, who was back early that evening, couldn’t do it ‘because he was tired,’ her mother said. After getting milk, when she told her mother about her big promotion, her mother responded with ‘you maybe whatever in office, but at home you’re a wife, mother, daughter etc.
Nooyi says that her daughters would never say that she has been a good mother as she failed to turn up for their special days at school. Her husband often ‘jokingly’ says that her life is Pepsico, Pepsico, Pepsico, and the rest and that ‘I am right at the end of the list’.
Nooyi says she has stopped feeling guilty about it after all these years.
Balance yourself first
Professional women, just like men, very rarely get to spend time with their families. Many women give up their jobs at the time of marriage or during pregnancy or pick up jobs like teaching which will give them enough time with their families. They sacrifice their professional lives in order to strike a work-life balance.
Rather, why can’t women sacrifice personal lives to strike the balance? Men do it all the time and are lauded for it!
When we, the-been-there-done-that-stuck-arounds, talk about work-life balance on a public forum, we have to be politically correct. We can’t openly say ‘chuck family, it’s the career that matters all the way’. I’ll be blunt here. How many housewives have we seen being truly respected? Hardly one in a hundred, or maybe more. If the husband won’t pick faults in the diligently cooked food, the son or a teenage daughter will. The house will never be clean and arranged according to their logic. She will constantly get yelled at. But she won’t leave. Why? No money! Even a working wife in such a situation won’t leave. Why? Society.
A movie named Waitress reflects this perfectly though all women may not be married to a controlling wife-bashing bully that the protagonist’s husband is. She, an inventive pie maker, takes violence and won’t move out of the unhappy marriage because she has no money. Whatever she earns as a waitress at a local diner, is extorted by her husband. He blocks all her efforts to save or make money. It’s only after she has a baby and holds her in her hands, that she gets the courage to abandon her husband and end the marriage. Then she realizes that the owner of the diner has left her a small fortune, his diner, before he died. She then owns and runs the diner.
A childhood friend, whom I met after 15 years recently, was confused when I told her to choose what she liked from the menu at a coffee shop. She said, ‘I have forgotten what I like. But I know what my children or my husband would pick up from this menu..’ She is married into a rich family that owns farm houses and Skodas. You will say, ‘how does it matter then? She has the money. She has a family. She has the comforts. What more would you need to be happy?’
Consider this. A woman, who has dedicated her life to her children and husband and forgets what she likes, goes out with family and family friends. When the friends ask her about her choice of coffee, her child or her husband pitches in, ‘We choose for her usually. She has just not taken to the mod culture yet.’ Some go to the extent of calling their mothers or wives ‘dumb’. Remember the movie English Vinglish where the husband tells their new family friends that his wife is born to make laddus when she actually made laddus to make her husband happy?
Get out of the dependent mould
So what do we do in a changing scenario where women are moving out but not yet? First, women have to know now and forever that their careers are foremost. If the husbands or children can’t accept her professional responsibilities, it’s their problem not her.
Love and devotion are highly overrated when it comes to human relations. Those, not only women, who completely give themselves away for others, end up being taken for granted and are not respected. Unfortunate but true.
It may sound selfish but actually, this world seems to respect only those who have the guts to stand up for themselves. Women have been raised as dependents since time immemorial and that is exactly why their self respect stands eroded in every generation, since time immemorial. The handful of women, however, who have gone against the norms set by society, have been respected by all… err this ‘all’ will not include the numerous pusillanimous men who think independent women are ‘available’ to satisfy their libidos just before they fall for their wives whom they are being, or were, ‘forcefully’ married to.
Image Courtesy.
