How “trad wives” Deny Women The Right To Choose

 [This was written for the USAWA Newsletter- Matchbox 06]

At the Presidential Inauguration, it was impossible to ignore the adoration with which Usha Vance stared at her husband while he was being sworn in as the Vice President. With her wide-eyed, unblinking gaze, and the beaming smile, she projected the image of a teenager who had not yet come to terms with the fact that the object of her veneration had chosen to bestow his attention on her. This was a carefully curated aesthetic, and her intention clearly was to make herself the object of countless “find yourself a woman who looks at you like Usha Vance looks at her husband” memes.

In reality, Usha Vance is anything but the vacuous Barbie doll that she projected herself as. The daughter of professionally qualified parents, she is a graduate of Yale Law School with a fairly impressive legal career. Her husband often refers to her as the more privileged, the more sophisticated and the more intelligent person in the relationship. In his memoir he describes how on more than one occasion he sought her guidance on how to behave in social settings that were awkward for him. Despite being his equal in every way, she chose to present herself as a docile and devoted wife and mother who couldn’t believe her good fortune!

If you really think about it, was there any reason for a woman to carry a three year old child in one hand while holding the family Bible in the other? When my child was three, I often made him oversee his younger brother while I was busy- even if the Vance child couldn’t have been left in charge of her older siblings, she could have been made to stand next to her mother and hold her hand. But that would not have made a dramatic picture would it? The adorable “baby” sucking her thumb, the pink dress, the devoted gaze- it was all created to fit into the “trad wife” aesthetic that is so popular in the United States, especially among the alt-right.

Who is a “trad wife”?
A “trad wife” is someone who consciously chooses to adhere to traditional gender roles where the man is the provider and the woman is the homemaker. This phenomenon is driven by social media influencers who typically adhere to a 1950s aesthetic of frilly aprons and tow-headed children, and who have their make-up and high heels firmly in place while they whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies from scratch because their husband asked for it. Without exception, “trad wives” also espouse the conservative Christian ideology and reserve special scorn for feminists, who, they claim, look down upon their “choice” to be “trad wives”.

If feminism is about women having the “choice” to be and do whatever they want, then, is being a “trad wife” incompatible with feminism? Doesn’t the “trad wife” have the right to choose to be one- isn’t being a “stay at home mom” is a perfectly legitimate choice? The incompatibility is because of a subtle difference between a “stay at home mom” and a “trad wife”. A “stay at home mom” believes in gender equity and chooses to prioritise childcare under certain circumstances. A “trad wife”, on the other hand, specifically views homemaking as her duty and chooses to submit to her husband’s authority. In effect, by making marriage the ultimate objective for a woman, by linking their self-worth to the cleanliness of their home and the quality of food they prepare and by telling them that “husbands must come first if you want a happy marriage”, trad wives are romanticising the ideology that the second wave of feminism fought against. Feminism is certainly about giving women the choice to bake banana bread if they want to, but the “trad wife” ideology implies that the self worth of a woman should be linked to the quality of banana bread that she bakes. Interestingly, trad wives are almost without exception white and married to white men who earn enough to support their decision.

By openly endorsing the traditional “Christian” values, “trad wives” willingly or unwillingly reinforce the alt-right philosophy which is based on denying women the fundamental right to make decisions that directly affect her. By choosing to present herself as the adoring wife and doting mother, Usha Vance (like many others) showed her allegiance to an ideology which will deny girls and women a future which she could aspire to, but chose to turn her back on.

Male Voices That Capture the Female Experience

[This was written for the USAWA Newsletter- Matchbox 05]

Log onto X (formerly called Twitter) or Instagram, and you find scores of accounts abusing assertive and articulate women while declaring that “feminism is cancer”. Turn on the TV, and there are prime time debates that without even a proper discussion conclude that all Indian men are victims of women who misuse the legal system for their benefit. There are forwards on WhatsApp and shares on Facebook which misquote statistics to demand that the laws which were created to protect women from social evils be scrapped and replaced by “gender neutral” laws. Clearly, this systemic backlash is because while society has worked towards empowering women, it has failed in enabling men to live harmoniously with empowered women. There are, however, a few male authors who write with great sensitively about a society which is not yet ready to accept gender equity either at home or outside.

Atharva Pandit’s ‘Hurda’ is based on a real life crime where three sisters disappeared, only to be found dead a few days later in a village well- till today nobody knows if it was an accident, suicide or murder. By constantly referring to the “green top” that one of the girls was dressed in, the author subtly points out to how by asking by “What was she Wearing?”, the blame for sexual assault is often shifted onto the victim who was “Asking for It.” The book also has multiple examples of how men indulge in sexual harassment and even sexual abuse, while either remaining oblivious to it, or by continuing to justify their action.

In Venkat, the narrator of ‘Sakina’s Kiss’, Vivek Shanbhag has created an extremely nuanced character- one who thinks he is “progressive”, but who in fact not only contributes to the unequal distribution of labour at home, but also weaponizes the vulnerability of women to feel good about himself. He constantly talks about how he knows how to brew a cup of tea, but when he sees his wife cooking all the meals, instead of pitching in (or at least appreciating the work she does), he suggests she get a cook. This is the kind of passive aggressive behaviour that is common in many households, but which is largely invisible men. I amazed that male author was able to create a character who is so nuanced in his misogyny. Venkat isn’t the only such character in the book- there is a self-professed “revolutionary” journalist who encourages a female journalist to travel into the hinterlands without an escort, but expects his beautiful wife to stay home to serve him meals at exactly the right temperature.

Nisha, one of the two narrators of Prayaag Akbar’s ‘Mother India’, is one of the most nuanced female characters I have met in recent times. She is a small town girl working in an upmarket retail establishment in a big city, who gets into a relationship with a man who doesn’t reciprocate her feelings. It would have been very convenient to develop her character around stereotypical lines, but the author has taken care to create a woman who intelligent, resilient, and independent, in addition to being very attractive. In a society where women are often accused of filing “fake rape cases” against men to coerce them into marriage, Nisha’s reaction, while entirely believable, was not what one would normally expect. The other female characters, similarly, are well etched and resist being pigeonholed.

When male authors like Shanbhag, Akbar and Pandit successfully capture the female perspective, it provides how, however faint, that eventually we will be able to move towards being a less misogynistic society. 

The Black Hill: A Story from the North East

 

‘The Black Hall’ is based on an historical account of a French missionary who tried to find a route to Tibet by travelling through the Mishmee Hills. He managed to establish some semblance of a mission on his second attempt, but he disappeared soon after. A chieftain of the Mishmee tribe was tried and convicted for the crime, setting in motion a series of events involving rivalries between tribes and brutalities by the colonial powers. Mamang Dai takes the historically documented account and weaves around it a love story which is at the same time as harsh and as enduring as the landscape in which it is set.

The book is set in the early days of the foreigners trying to establish themselves in North East India, and at one level it is a story where history is told not from the perspective of the colonisers, but from the perspective of  original inhabitants of the land, who do not want to see their way of life taken over by someone else. At another level, the book beautifully describes the geography of the North-East. Of a land where modern political boundaries have little meaning. A harsh land, well suited to the resilient people who live there. There are several journeys in the book- journeys which involve fording streams, walking through forests, following the river, climbing hills that shimmer in the sunshine and using river passes to cross the mighty mountains. You can almost visualise the protagonist using a rope to lunge herself over a river in spate! The book describes the customs and beliefs of the various tribes who live in Assam and Arunachal Pradesh (long before the states were even given these names)- the food they eat, the clothes they wear, the spirits they worship, the stories they tell, and the taboos and superstitions that govern their life.

At the heart of the book is a tender love story of Gimur, a young girl who falls in love with an apparition, who gives herself up to him, then gives up everything she has ever known to follow him to his village. She returns home when she feels she can no longer live with the secrets and silence between them. She is a woman in love, who will do anything for that love. She is also a woman who despite the limited options available to her asserts her agency at all times. She is a woman who many men use as their load star. It is the story of the men who love her in different ways- her childhood friend who never stopped watching over her, her husband who was willing to brave societal displeasure to be with her, and the French missionary who’s path crosses hers many times. The historical account doesn’t include any women, yet they must have been there. By placing Gimur at the centre of the story, the author reminds us of how history traditionally treats women. While Gimur does not find happiness of the kind she expected to find, by the end of her life, she realises that she lived the life she was meant to lead.

The author often comes back to words and narratives. Is the written word more important than oral traditions? Are words needed to capture your thoughts, or do thoughts transcend words? What is more important- words, or the silence that speaks without words?

The book uses the historical narrative to raise questions about civilisation, development and colonization, and these questions remain relevant even 150 years after the period in which the story is set. Who owns the land? Is land even meant to be owned, or is it something that is held in trust and passed on? Who determines which faith is superior? One is struck by the passion of the missionary who crossed over from Assam to Tibet not once but twice. But isn’t the faith of the people who trust the spirits to cure their sick just as strong?

The book is harsh. The book is lyrical. The book is unforgettable, just like the land in which it is set.

Shadow City: A Story of the Many Kabuls that Were

 I picked up Shadow City: A Woman Walks Kabul soon after the Taliban returned to power in 2021 after waging insurgency against the US backed government for two decades. Fresh from reading reports of the many restrictions which the Taliban had placed on women, and seeing archival photographs of a westernised and cosmopolitan city, one was, of course, immensely curious to know more about how the two realities could have been simultaneously true about the country.

Taran Khan is an Indian who lived and worked in Kabul for extended periods of time as an expat after the ouster of the Taliban in 2001. Unlike most expatriates, she chose to step outside the sanitised spaces to explore the city and interact with the residents. This book is the culmination of her effort to understand the many layers of Kabul.

Having grown up in India, the author, like most Indian women, viewed walking for leisure as a luxury. We have all been conditioned into staying away from public spaces, and pretending that our walks are purposeful because that is the only way a woman can justify being out on the street alone. In Kabul, she was subject to similar restriction- she was told it was dangerous to venture out on her own, yet she walked, and as she walked, new layers of the city revealed itself to her.

The book is divided into seven sections, the first and last of which are called “Returns”. In the first “Return”, she talks about how her family was originally from Afghanistan and of how she viewed going to Kabul as a way of returning home. While she can read the Persian script, she didn’t know the language, so most of the written word was inaccessible to her. But her grandfather, who like many educated Indians of his generation was fluent in Persian, helped contextualise most of her experiences by relating them what he had read about Kabul. The “Returns” with which she concludes the book is her return to India after her last tour in Afghanistan. Over the years, she has seen the city change, till it is almost unrecognisable to her. The optimism she encountered in her first trip has been replaced by apprehension, and there is the fear of what might happen when the US troops withdraw and international aid dries up. People were worried about the growing power of the Taliban and making plans to escape. Would the country return to what it was before the boom that she witnessed?

The each of the other five chapters, she picks up a different aspect of life in Kabul, and shows how in Afghanistan layers always peel away to reveal the same story being told over and over again. The history of Afghanistan is of cycles where there is a complete erasure of history, only for the same story to be told again and again. She talks about books and writing, about mental illness, about weddings, about movies and even about Buddhism. In each of the topics, she brings her own viewpoint which is simultaneously that of a curious but empathetic outsider and an insider. Her own childhood in Aligarh finds resonance in what she sees in Kabul, and reading her account, you are struck by how deeply intertwined society in Afghanistan and India is.

It is, however, impossible to read the book without remembering and being reminded of what is happening in Afghanistan today. The same women who danced at their weddings dressed in the latest designs from European catwalks have been rendered completely invisible today. The people who carved out joyful lives for themselves within the constraints placed by society are today reduced to baby making machines. There is despair while reading the book, but there is also hope because the cyclical nature of history in Afghanistan shows that one should never give up hope. The book is also a clarion call to not take a freedom for granted because freedom is precious.