Women Across the World Need to Take a (Mental) Load Off
Stories from Indian and American women and their partners
American women of a certain age, myself included, will remember this commercial that played in the late ’70s and early ’80s. The message was that a woman could work until 5, read the kid’s bedtime stories, cook dinner and still satisfy her man because she was a “24-hour woman”.
Of course, we now know that is an impossible ideal, but as a young woman coming of age during that time, I believed it to a certain extent. Advertisements like this one told us that if a woman wanted to enter the workforce, then she still did not relinquish the traditional home duties. She merely had to stay up 24 hours!
In the United States, there was little to no discussion of how the changing of a woman’s role would affect household management. And men who did step up to be helpful were often derided by other men as “soft”. Fortunately, those attitudes have shifted somewhat, but many men still do not take on the mental load of managing a household and leave it to…
