Why does she create a monster? Why does she become an instrument of oppression?

As a gender researcher, the question that always daunts me is – why does patriarchy as popular culture not weaken in Northern India?  Why does the dismal scenario of violence and abuse against women by men and older women not change? In this article I offer a potpourri of experiences from my thirty-five years of life as a woman that have led me to believe that patriarchy will not weaken as long as women are complicit in the oppression of other women and act as agents of patriarchy. This article is entirely a personal opinion and I do not wish to offer or impose any generalisations on anyone here.

Three types of women

From my familiarity, I have known three kinds of women in the Indian context. The first, ‘the subservient’ type are those whose sole aim in life is to please the men in their lives, be it their fathers, husbands or sons. They seldom resist men’s inappropriate, domineering or abusive behaviour. This prototype is common in North India and I have known such women in my neighbourhood, family and work place. These women often let go of their independent thinking abilities and rely upon the men to do the decision-making. Often, they do not even check their sons for their improper behaviour towards girls. They feel that if men did not support them, their worlds would become dysfunctional and eventually collapse. In this process they hurt the welfare of other women in their families, workplaces and society in general.

 The second are the ‘reasonable type’ – women who think independently and are able to discern and detest the inapt actions of the men in their family. This is a not the dominant prototype, but also not so uncommon among the women that I have known. It is these women who have made their mark in creating robust families and confident children due to their ability to teach their families’ “right” and “wrong”. In the case of an argument or a dispute in a family, workplace or community, these women support who they perceive are on the “right” side, regardless of whether it is a man or a woman. These “reasonable” types of women I feel are a boon to their families and society due to their ability to strike a balance between conflicting people and viewpoints; they take their families and friends ahead in life.  

The third is the ‘ruthless type’ who dominates everyone, both the men and women in her family, work-place and community. Such women harm their families due to their overbearing demeanours and general unkindness. These women contribute to the creation of unhappy and depressed families and are disliked by people at large.

In this article my angst is against women of Type I and Type III. These women, I feel, contribute in a big way to patriarchal oppression in our society. I will provide some examples of the Type I whose indiscriminate focus on pleasing the men around them became a source of discomfort for other women.

An unhealthy office space: Mr S, Mrs A and Mrs B

Eight years ago when I was working in a government office in Delhi, I had the opportunity of interacting with several women in their middle ages with teenage children. It was here that I started seeing the striking contrasts in women’s attitudes towards male colleagues and bosses. It was here that I met  Mrs A and Mrs B. Mrs A was the personal assistant to Mr S who was a Punjabi man, enjoyed being in a position of power and liked bossing around other men and women subordinate to him. The grapevine was that Mr S was a henpecked husband at home, but liked to dominate women in the office. He would often pass personal comments on women’s dresses, hairdos and body-weight issues. Mrs A being his secretary participated in these idiocies by laughing at his lewd comments which irked Mrs B a lot. Often Mrs B would fume about the fact that Mrs A joined her boss in passing orders at other women and demeaning them in subtle ways to please Mr S. Finally, both Mrs B and I distanced ourselves from Mrs A and could not tolerate her beyond official work. She lost her respectability in the eyes of other women who felt that her behaviour towards them was inappropriate. I wished that Mrs A would see the light one day and stop participating in the harassment of other women. Instead she could have dealt with her cynical boss by adopting an apathetic attitude towards him and focusing only on completing the work assigned to her by him.

A slip-on wife: Mrs C

One day I met Mrs C who was far from my idealised notion of a woman and a mother. She was an extreme Type I woman who could not comprehend that the world existed beyond her husband. For her, the day started and ended with her husband, and her children were just add-ons who were being borne to satiate the ego of her husband. Along with her, her children too were expected to live, breathe and work just to make their dad happy.  At first, I did not see much problem with this model of a family, but slowly I realised that revolving around the ego of the patriarch had hampered the personal development of his wife and children. For instance, I understood that Mrs C hardly had any friends in the city and led an extremely solitary life locked up in her room most of the times. Her husband had instructed her that being his wife gave her a “superior stature” in the city and she should be discerning about befriending other women. She even forbade her daughter-in-law from interacting with other people in the neighbourhood and encouraged her to stay indoors and focus on cooking delicious meals for the family. One evening I saw her husband giving her instructions, waving his index finger and telling her how she should deal with other people, while she stood there, nodding her head like a cow. I felt nauseated seeing such a scene. It dawned upon me that she was regularly poisoned by the monster she had herself nurtured over so many years of her marriage. He had slowly broken her away all her kin and friends and stripped her of these relationships (including her relationship with her daughter-in-law) that are important in every woman’s life. She was living in a spiral of negativity with a man who had convinced her that she was not good-looking enough for him and he had done her a huge favour by marrying her and hence she ought to worship him and take every word of his as gospel truth.

The way ahead for women

The reason that I have illustrated examples of Mrs A and Mrs C here is because I feel that in the quest of pleasing men, these women have disrespected or humiliated other women either at their workplace or at home and have thus contributed to the perpetuation of patriarchy in these spaces. Personally I feel that these women need help to break out from their submissive mentality and evaluate situations more critically like Type II women so that they can contribute to the creation of healthy private and public social spaces. Men generally try and pull women down in every sphere of life, since this is the dominant culture in South Asian countries. Only those women who put their families first and think about themselves later are considered ideal and respectable. I am not proposing here that we disregard our families and focus only on ourselves, rather what I am emphasising is the need to resist manipulation by our male counterparts and break their monopoly through our everyday practices of resistance to misuse of power by them. Instead of strengthening men’s patriarchal tools and becoming agents of oppression along with them, women should focus on balancing gendered struggles so that a more gender-just society can be achieved.