How Badass Asian Women Thwart Lunatic Rules Of Patriarchy
How the brave feminist revolution silently paved the way
‘I come from India, a young democracy, a breakout nation yet one steeped in patriarchy. The country is famous for it’s exploding population growth, it’s crazy rich, rising middle income group, growing software talent pool & yes, cows on roads.
Most famous is how the culture of patriarchy treats its women.
There is truth attached to the notoriety. Asian cultures are known to hold women back. India & its men to this day dictate to women what they should or should not wear. They are the reason (or not) women have access to education, sanitation, money or property. Women caught in the vice like grip of the culture often forsake friends who can lend them a kind ear.
Women are held back by patriarchy. But they do strike back.
The silent revolution is rewriting the crazy rules of Indian marriages. It took three generations of Indian women to bring about the change.
My mother grew up in the 60s & 70s, when the Women’s Rights Movement was yet to reach India. Women of my mother’s generation were locked up by their conservative homes. But these homes also saw value in educating its women. So my mother got an education. Not a fancy one, but a simple degree. Indian women of her era married & married early, because that was how they were taught to live.
In the 80s the Indian middle-income group was born.
Inflation & rising standards of living in cities meant the women had to work to supplement family income. But they continued as primary caregivers of their homes with little access to help or gadgets. They were raised by patriarchy to overwork & not complain.
If they couldn’t handle the stress, they quit the workforce with the permission of their families. Family meant not only the spouse but also his extended family. The woman’s kin left the picture once she married.
Women of my mother’s generation held onto a dream however, for their daughters to have the kind of life they dared not dream about.
They raised my generation of millennials to achieve not settle. In the millennium, India opened its borders to multinationals. The nouveau rich & the “upper” middle income group was born. Indian millennial women were akin to those elsewhere. For us marriage & mating were an unequal deal. We opted out. We lived to work, travel & have many interests. Those of us who chose marriage chose not to have children.
Not all the choices I made that were in a way dictated by patriarchy were wise.
I made my bucks but could not give the system two fucks. I was unsure about children, so I had them late. My career was for me the biggest deal, but I lost it in the pandemic anyway. In my fight to climb the ladder I burnt bridges, so nobody helped me when I lost my job. I could have chased my love for writing sooner but I was scared of what the culture would do to me if I quit my profession.
My biggest regret is that I considered the rules of a conservative society dangerous rather than just downright silly.
I let personal goalposts sail by. Millennial Indian women got a few things wrong. But we got right how we redefined life for the girls of Gen Next. They don’t let their lives be defined by archaic rules.
The young ones now know what they want.
They own their gender & how it defines who they want to be. If they are cis gendered, they couple for love rather than because “that’s what everyone does”. The women are secure enough to know their lives cannot be compromised by a legal union.
They are tossing the famous Indian ‘arranged marriage’ out the window. They choose work-life harmony. Which means companionship, babies & careers. They embrace tradition not because they have to but because it could be fun & they like to hold onto their roots. This means they chuck what they find degrading.
My kind of feminism got me scared of patriarchy.
Rather than dismissing its rules to live as I wished, I lived by a different set of rules to avoid it’s grip. I did not chase dreams until I had let them pass me by. Gen Next has got it right.
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