A few days ago, I wrote a surprisingly controversial post about a baby girl who had been buried alive, in Andhra Pradesh. Stupid me, I thought everyone would find such news abhorrent. But, in a shocking and to some, sickening twist, it would seem that condemning infanticide is wrong because it is more important to engage in the worst sort of cultural relativism.
Disagreeing with a man’s choice to bury his newborn granddaughter alive would be Western and especially Feminist stupidity. Are you perplexed? Wondering what I am going on about? Ah, then enjoy the following amuse bouche of comments from a few lurkers and readers, which that post inspired:
Dont get carried away by sensationalism
Everyone has it bad in India. you’re the only one who choose to single out the plight of women and measure it by YOUR western standards. It MUST be measured by Indian standards, i.e. the plight of Indian men, children, grandpas, grandmas, the whole society. Everyone has it bad in India, not just little girls.
just don’t forget, we live in the West, lets not judge everything by Western standards…If they want to kill their girl babies because girls mean one less hand to till the soil (by hand, of course), that is their buisness.
Poor people will do anything to survive. As long as its their family, and not anyone else’s, no one has a right to interfere.
you, possessing such a craving for attention, would rather start a thread focused on a single baby, a TOTALLY isolated incident, just so you can feel better!
Yes, I felt much better after that depressing thread, especially after I naively attempted to offer a counterpoint to it while proving that feminism can be a desi concept, too. As one of you said via email, after wading through comment-sewage, “I can’t believe there is so much misogyny and so little outrage here.”
::
Isolated. I thought of all those apologist quotes when I read the story which MasterVK was alert enough to submit to our news tab earlier today, about another newborn baby girl, who was also found and rescued:
AHMEDABAD: Her feeble cries help almost drowned in the din of the heavy downpour near Kankaria lake on Monday. Until a fireman found the newborn baby shivering in the rain, abandoned mercilessly without a piece of clothing on her body!
The child’s cries had gone unheard for hours and she had turned pale, lying in the incessant rains, near Kankaria lake. The baby was found by a team of firemen led by Rajesh Goswami who heard the faint cries early in the morning when they embarked on duty to check the oxygen levels in the lake.
Instead of the fish, the firemen found the freshly delivered girl who was dumped from the womb straight into the lake to die. “The girl did not have any clothing on her and had turned completely white. We had become sceptical about her survival,” said Goswami.
The firemen first thought of waiting for the police but were alert enough to realise that any wait may compromise the life of the infant. The fire personnel immediately took the girl to L G Hospital where she was admitted in the neonatal intensive care unit. “The girl was hypothermic as her temperature had dropped due to exposure in the rain. She was also covered in sand,” said Dr Abid Vijapura, assistant professor in the paediatrics department.
Dr Vijapura said that the girl was probably delivered at home as her umbilical cord was cut non-surgically and tied with a thread. “Her condition is stable. We have screened her for infections and will treat her accordingly,” he said.
I’ll close with a different quoted comment from one of you, because I hope someone else declares similar fifteen years from now:
Every time someone (sometimes me) reprimands my 15-year old daughter for her highly “spirited” personality, I can’t help but think that she was born on the streets of Kolkata (one can only guess), spared infanticide, and turned over to an orphanage at the tender age of 5 days.
Just look at her now!
I actually find a lot of the commenters’ posts enlightening, balanced and empathetic–despite differences in opinion and perspective, I feel that posts from folks like Camille, Rahul, Aanchal, Chachaji, etc. all get to pieces of a very complex truth in a way that’s respectful yet provocative.
But at the end of the day, no matter how solicitous or cautious we should be about not demonizing anybody or completely misrepresenting a very complex culture, I feel that the underlying reaction should be emotional rather than tempered by statistics and calculations. Of course, knowledge and a broad understanding of the sociocultural and economic underpinnings of female infanticide are crucial, but at the same time, it’s emotion, however shrill or messy, that gets us to stand behind our cause. And the emotion all of us, as South Asians, should rightfully feel is outrage at the fact that a girl baby could be so callously tossed aside, like yesterday’s garbage. Yes, we pick our battles–for some of us, it might be caste; for others, ensuring that poverty be ameliorated by stuff like institutional reform and the creation of jobs; and yeah, they’re all intertwined somehow. But navigating this complex matrix of issues shouldn’t preclude the need to address THIS situation boldly, and frankly, I’m offended by some people’s suggestion that we have bigger fish to fry.
When it all comes down to it, after the past couple days of reading this blog, I’m emotionally exhausted but I’m also anything but apathetic.
Perhaps like others here, I’m tired of rhetoric and discourse (though that doesn’t mean I don’t see the importance of it). I really feel like doing something about this, whether that means educating myself, becoming an advocate, donating a portion of my income…Does anyone have any leads on how to go about doing this? And if there’s anyone out there who perhaps works for a specific organization that addresses female infanticide and more importantly, works to obliterate it altogether, can you please let us know?
Are we talking Godfather now? Don’t forget the advice Corleone gives Michael – I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless. But not men.
Anna, you seem very emotionally hurt so I should point you to my earlier comment. Do not take the rebuttals personally; comments which are defensive reactions do not come from rational considerations. I doubt those commentors believe you’re attacking India per se, its just that certain emotional breakers were triggered; perhaps they were repeatedly exposed to shrill and sanctimonious denouncings of India by many jholawala types who knows.
Female infanticide, for that matter infanticide is a problem no matter where is happens in the world.
Whether people want to accept it or not, India manages to find itself in the news over and over again, because we do this kind of BS.
The fact that the author of this post is Indian-American has nothing to do with the issue. If you do have problems with it, come on over to Uber Desi. We have a post up about a different female infanticide story in India and the blogger over there is 100% Indian. Heck he even has an Indian accent.
Let’s get real and discuss the issue on hand and just that.
Anna, You don’t have to apologize for any of your posts or causes. You don’t have to apologize for being a feminist. You don’t have to apologize for highlighting (not-so-common) female infanticide as opposed to rare (and even rarer press-reporting of) male infanticide. You don’t have to apologize for having a passion for the causes you believe in. You don’t have to spend your time to personally write a few lines of explanation to me–I understand your point; your sense of outrage and urgency. I lived them myself.
But as your reader, my well-meaning advice to you is to build on the constructive response, support, information that you get; otherwise you are caught in a vicious cycle that really goes nowhere and depresses you.
Does anyone know how many/what proportion of the newborn babies found in dumpsters in the US are girls?
I should probably explain that if any of my comments lack a sensitivity or nuance and comes across as abrupt, it is because I am trying to balance work and my need for social/intellectual networking while at work. I really should take more time to make sure my writing is gentle, but I do not…
Dowry is alive and well all across India. Despite being “illegal” parents brazenly ask for it even in the Hindustan Times matrimonial sections, with no sense of shame.
Child marriage is also alive and well in poor rural areas even today. All of the female domestic workers in India that I have had conversations with were married before the age of 15.
I don’t know if “outlawing” either of these two things has been effective in lessening their numbers or not.
Amrita, this is certainly an interesting question. FWIW, (and since Anna also mentioned it) I brought this up only to illustrate that there is a class dimension to these issues – and also to show that it is not the whole story. In making the point, I simply used a US-based example. It is otherwise a complete tangent, with a possible embedded non-sequitur. I wasn’t doing the ‘India may be bad but the US is bad too’ thing.
Class can be a relevant variable – even if not in the wholly reductionist/simplistic sense of “poor = more likely to kill girl-baby”. Class matters in one way, for example, because it still costs money to do the natal sex determination tests. And even if what Amba says @95 is true, that wealthy Delhi neighborhoods have 784:1000 – it only illustrates that class indeed is relevant to the sex-ratio-skew.
Class may not only be relevant, it may also be relevant in ways other than the most simplistic.
My feeling is that gender of dumpster baby in US/Canada is irrelevant because it is a different set of factors that go into the explaining the phenomenon (examples, teens, some dysfucntionality in the larger family, history of abuse, drugs, etc).
Exactly. I don’t know that the “my-future-son-will-work-and-take-care-of-me-in-old-age-while-my-daughter-will-not-work-but-be-married-off-at-an-early-age-into-her-husband’s-family” mentality would even ring a bell with these people.
Most likely, it’s, “shit!-im-15-and-pregnant-with-a-druggie-no-future-boyfriend-and-my-parents-will-kill-him-or-me-or-both-of-us-if-they-find-out-so-while-im-also-buzzing-on-coke-i-might-as-well-get-rid-of-the-baby”.
I also read studies that assert that under normal circumstances (no war, healthy mortality rates at birth, etc), there will always be slightly more females than males in any given demographic.
Very Freudian. Probably you might hear the opposite view from a father’s bias towards daughters. Goes back to opposites attract and the very subtle sexual, or maybe I should say “romantic” fantasies that supposedly parents have towards their kids and vice versa. And I’m not talking incest here, just you know, the whole dance of feminine/masculine, yin/yang and how they feed off of one another.
It’s very appearant in some parental/child relationships, and not so appearant in others. Like trying to compensate for what you didn’t get from your spouse through your child – whether it be praise, adoration, affection, intellectual stimulation, whatever.
True to some extent but I guess what is so frustrating is the lack of balance. The pendulum appears to swing from one extreme to another. Female oppression all the way to female “worship” in the form of “Devi”, the powerful yet self-sacrificing goddess, empowering Divine Strength yet feminine beauty.
It’s so black and white and leaves no room for a woman to just be.
To just be a normal human being with sexual desires that perhaps don’t fit in with the sati/savitri paradigm of ideal wifehood, motherhood.
To just be a person who wants to make mistakes, like people do, and not get guilt-tripped for it.
To just be a person able to live free from “log kya kahenge” attitude and fear of stained reputation.
To just be allowed to live.
To just be.
In #147 above, solutions responds to an earlier quote– “The reason many hate women is they see them as consumers, and not as economic producers” — by saying that dowry from the woman’s family will greatly increase the income of the man’s family. But solutions totally misses what I thought was the point of the earlier quote, and which is something that has not really been discussed so far: the apparent lack of recognition of the woman’s economic contribution throughout her life. To me this is another reason why the economic theory of female infanticide is not adequate. This may seem like a dumb or obvious question, but why is it that women’s economic contributions (wage-earning work, unpaid domestic labor, child care, elder care, etc) remain so devalued in India–whether they are working inside the home or out? What strategies might be used to make people realize that adult women have a lifelong contributive value (in addition to their social and cultural contributions)? Feminists in the west worked for a long time to gain recognition for the unpaid labor contributions of women (still not fully achieved), but I am not aware they were facing the issue of female infanticide in their struggle (please correct me if I’m wrong). It seems a blended economic/cultural approach must be taken to help people realize that to kill their female babies is to shortchange themselves, not only socially/culturally, but also economically. In other words, how to make people realize women are not merely “consumers” of resources, etc.?
espe #164:>>What strategies might be used to make people realize that adult women have a lifelong contributive value (in addition to their social and cultural contributions)
Very good points. This is the key to solving the problem: How does one value feminine qualities? How does one quantify the contribution to society made by women (who are not be a part of the workforce)?
M. Nam
You will get rhetoric on how the wife/mother is Laxmi-Griha, or The Goddess of the Home, and all that. But yet you won’t really see the non-working male members of the household doing their fair share of housework/cooking, or even just assisting Bhabiji with such. Nor will you see the working male members of the household doing much, if any, of that if Bhabihi happens to be employed in an outside job/career.
It’s just seen as “women’s work”, stri-dharma, drudgery that is her responsibility.
So until men are doing the same and in the same quantity, you won’t see much appreciation or value for that. But elequent sanskritized lip service you will get, no doubt.
Bhabiji or Bahuji will work all day in hospital and still come home and serve chai to all the non-working family members while they sit comfortable in front of Doordarshan.
It is not just the women’s non-wage earning work that is devalued in India, but apparently, even stay-at-home dads’. My parents are unforgiving (and openly ashamed) of my husband staying at home to take care of our 3 tots. He freelances when I am back in the evening from my work (er, from creating noise on SM), so it is not like he totally lives off of me, the rascal, but I couldn’t get them to see how much they disrespected everything we stood for as a couple and as parents of 3. My mother who has long been seen by my father as the “consumer” not producer, also has the audacity to see my husband as a non-contributing “consumer” polishing off what bacon her daughter agreed to bring home to her husband and children. Of course, mothers like mine have been conditioned by the traditional Cinderella-Prince story all their lives.
I did not answer your question, just added another complicated dimension to it.
Maybe it’s assumed that men like your husband are not doing all or even most of the work at home, Malathi.
I know some men who do all the cooking, cleaning, laundry,etc at home while their wives work outside jobs. Actually, I know only 2 like that. The rest of the stay at home husbands don’t do any of that. They just fix themselves a sandwich when they get hungry and wait till their working wife arrives home tired from a long day to make dinner. Doing the dishes? Laundry? Forget it! Not even in their vocabulary. So I have to admit that that’s the first image that pops up in my mind when I hear about stay at home husbands/dads.
Not my Prince.
They know he is in charge of the laundry, dishes, fixing weekday breakfast and lunch, taking out the garbage and doing all the traditional “manly” jobs such as taking out the garbage, reading electronic-gadget manuals, fixing the leak, maintainig the car, etc. All I do at home is cook dinners and weekend meals and spend time with my kids in the evenigns and weekends. He is a better mom than I am with our kids, I think. And I haven’t even adopted his religion or his last name. And wait, there’s more: he married me at 32, by which time like any good Indian parents, they gave up on any marriage prospects for me
So you would think they would appreciate him better.
Does he know to set the time on the VCR? If he does that, malathi, you know he’s a keeper.
Be here now/Devi/Solution/Solutions/A Solution/PG/Pardesi Gori/Videshi Ghee: How do you come up with your handles? I thought hard for a whole day before I could find one that worked.
well, despite my public use of my parents’ example to make a point, I am aware that individuals are products of the place and period they live in. So it is unfair of me to single out their attitudes in trying to explain a social phenomenon that affects me personally.
Half baked knowledge is dangerous. It is incorrect to say that sex ratios are positively skewed towards the female in every demographic. In fact it is the other way around. In every demographic bar above 64 the demographic skews towards men. A key reason may be that more men than women are likely to die from various diseases and hence nature compensates by over producing. I had posted earlier the sex ratios in various countries. Here it is again.
a) Sweden at birth: 1.06 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.058 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.028 male(s)/female
b) USA at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.046 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 0.996 male(s)/female
c) UK at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.05 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.025 male(s)/female
d) Canada at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.051 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.01 male(s)/female
e) Australia at birth: 1.05 male(s)/female under 15 years: 1.049 male(s)/female 15-64 years: 1.017 male(s)/female
Malathi,
I was raised by a stay-at-home Dad. I consider myself ridiculously lucky for it; he taught me how to change the oil in my car AND how to tie a sari, if you can believe it. My dad got plenty of flak from everyone for doing what he did, but the safety and well-being of my sister and I were more important to him than the opinions of others– no matter how consistently vicious. Add me to your Prince’s fan club. 🙂
Solutions (or whoever you are), please stop ranting about things based on half a dozen people you might have been around. You have an amazing capacity for bigotry even as you sermonise others. Let me repeat a cliche – there are about 500m men in India, do you think they all behave in the same obnoxious manner that you’d like everyone to believe? My mother worked as a teacher and had to look after four kids. My older brother used to drop off my sister (she was about three) at a relative’s on his way to school – he was hardly 12. I learnt to use the rice cooker when I was 10, because my mother was doing 6am-1pm shifts in summer. Heck, why am I even responding to you? You’re mind is made up about certain things and that’s the way the world will look to you. May be one of these days you can start using certain parts of your brain better.
“Laxmi-Griha”, “Stri-dharma”… I’ll hazard a guess that you watched too many Balaji Telefilms soaps on Star Plus 🙂 Thing is, not too many young people actually think on those lines, it’s just that changing status quo is more than just throwing around opinions on a blog. Again, not to sweep anything under the carpet, but don’t assume you know everything about India.
It’s Griha-Lakshmi btw.
The younger generation (under 40) does not call the shots. Centuries of tradition is preceding them.
Kids dropping off sisters and using the rice cooker, while great, does not make for a nation where husbands and wives are sharing the housework equally.
Really and truly, when you visit India how many husbands do you see doing ALOT of housework or cooking?
And it’s my experience that Indian families like to sit down to homecooked dinners, not just macaroni and cheese packets put to boil. So cooking a dinner for a family of only 4 can be quite time consuming, even intricate, with at least 3 different preparations, often times more.
Anyway, ok, I’m willing to concede that amongst the younger generation of newly weds who are living nuclear style, the men probably do more and can start the rice cooking before the wife arrives home. However, in joint family homes where there are in-laws (grandparents), a couple, their kids and possibly a brother or sister in law or two, who do you think the bulk of the housework and cooking falls on? Who feels obligated to serve chai to elders when they return home from work? Who feels obligated to put the rice on and prepare the roti atta?
If you are trying to paint some picture of India being a utopia of shared household responsibilities between men and women, sorry. Even many North American households do not meet that standard.
But anyway, if there is a desi man out there willing to go exactly half and half on all labour in this regard, gimme a holla!
Let me rephrase that – a desi man willing to go more than half and half and take responsibility for the bulk of the household chores, then give me a holla!
Women have been doing twice as much work for too long now, earning money and coming home to cook and clean. Half and half won’t cut it anymore. We want to kick back with some cold ones and watch TV after work too. Or kick back with some Darjeeling chai.
FGM: where FGM is practiced, woman are often seen as more sexual than man, and more likely to stray. FGM is oonsidered a way of keeping your wife a ‘good and proper’ wife, and keep her from sleeping with other guys (AKA. yeah, this kids are so mine.)
Secondly, about plastic surgery in the US being a choice, and FGM being something where toddlers are held down and cut up by village elders isn’t exactly the situation, as I have heard it. From readings, and also some discussions with African women, I have found many young women choose to go through with FGM. Why? Well generally they state it is the good and proper way of doing things, a traditional rite of passage etc.
But why is good to do things? Because it is considered a societal value, most likely. Just like, in the US, a woman with large fake breasts, liposuction, and collagen lips is considered more beautiful than one with small breasts, a bit of a flabby stomach, and plain old, well, normal lips. So how do you decide where individual choice ends, and societal values make the choice for you? A gray line, I think.
Also, I want to add about this whole subject, and the whole subject of whether we should discuss the subject, I applaud Anna for bringing it up, and everyone who is willing to talk about it in constructive manners, especially those who are working with organizations in India and see it everyday. I think when you forget about the actual individuals behind these statistics, its a lot easier to dismiss.
When we are talking about women or human rights in general, I always go back to thinking about the time I spent in rural Bihar. I heard some real horror stories there. One was advice: If you get raped, don’t fight back. Don’t struggle, and don’t say a word about it afterwards. It will only invite more sorrow in yourself.
One story for you: A woman came with her grown up daughter to tell didiji (the woman I stayed with, quite an interesting women (http://www.gyanjyotiashram.org/ She has started informal schools for over 2,000 extremely poor students in bihar, formed women,s groups, helped with planting gradens, fruit trees, distributed cows and chickens, trained teachers (male and female) and run a school for teenage girls, where I taught, as a few of the things she has done) a very upsetting story. Her older daughter was married to a man in another village. She has one young daughter and was pregnant with her second child. Her husband kept beating her, and she ran away to her mom’s house and was staying with her. Someone from her husbands family came to them, asking her to come back. They promised her, her husband said he would never beat her again, if she would just come back. Leaving her daughter at her mom’s, she decided to go back and believe her husband’s promise. About two weeks later, the Mom got told that her daughter had died of jaundice and her body was at the police station. She traveled to the village and found the body of her daughter bruised and abused, with bruises around her neck. She demanded an autopsy to be done by a doctor, and they found she was severely beaten and strangled to death. This doctor though, never officially filed this report. Given a bribe from the husbands family, the cause of death was changed back to “jaundice” and a women perfectly healthy two weeks earlier was officially dead from a medical illness.
What struck me most as the women told us this story was the calmness with which she told it. She was obviously shaken, but not crying openly. Not fuming with anger and screaming out her pain. No, she sat quietly, telling her story with a sort of resignation. Her daughter was abused and killed (pregnant) by her own husband, and even though she had the smarts and strength to demand an autopsy, the results were the same- no justice for her daughter’s lost life. I remember sitting there on the step, listening as she told, and didiji translated the parts I did not get the first time around. I remember as a cold chill creep up my back in the heat of garmi, engulfing my heart in a life where you can look your daughter’s killer in the face, assemble the evidence against him, and the next day, a bit of money, and all the evidence disappears.
I remember being told by Didiji how difficult it was for her to convince her young adolescent student’s families to let them travel to her ashram for a year’s worth of intense education (which she now pays them to teach what they learned to other children in their villages). Not because their extremely poor parents were against educating girls (Most gathered firewood, crushed rocks to pave roads, or harvested food off other people’s farms to ‘make a living’) but because they were afraid that their daughters, instead of getting an education, might get sold off to the highest bidder and trafficked.
I remember discovering Sumitra, one of my lively, fun-loving, joke and sport-loving (and she loved to dance, and I taught her how to skank) and the day her friends revealed the secret she had been trying to desperately been keeping from us: She was married. Why was this, silly 12 or 13 year old girl afraid to tell us this? Because she thought we would not let her go to school anymore. When she found out we knew, she came to us with the biggest look of fear on her face and asked “Will I have to go home now?” “of course not” I remember the wide smile that broke out across her face. I asked didiji, if she knew why Sumitra was married already. Didiji said “A few years back, her father got very ill, he thought he would die. He got her married so that if he died, someone would be there to take care of her. She hasn’t gone to live with her husband’s family yet.” She explained.
I remember the day I asked the students “What do you think you will get from this education” and Neelu spoke up, always an eloquent one:
“We will become human beings” she said.
apologies for the typos. I am always afraid I will accidentally ‘disappear’ my post before I can submit it.
That was truly revolutionary for his time. As malathi points out, it is pretty uncommon even today.
Soluable, the point is, even within my limited domain, I have several examples to counter your examples. Does the average man help out with household work? Based on what I have see, well, not a whole lot. But it is hard to generalise attitudes even within a family. So where does that leave us? We can debate endlessly, but if you are not offering insights based on a real understanding of the problem (I’m not saying I can), it doesn’t help anyone. You can feel smug all you like, no problem.
As for younger people not calling the shots, the important thing is, well they eventually could, if there are enough of them.
Btw, in response to your last comment, I’ve no problems being a househousband, provided my wife/partner can bring home enough dough 🙂 Actually, I’d prefer just being filthy rich so I can have others do my work for me, but hey.
That’s exactly what I said.
Soluable – you have now had 3 posts straight with the same handle. This is unacceptable. Plus it is spelt wrong. May I suggest “Solvable” or “Soluble”?
Pardesi Gori, not only are you criticising India (again), but also making your pro-North American biases very clear. Once again I will humbly suggest you embrace your roots and forget about India. By the way, you changed your style a little bit on this thread…nice try… until the stri-dharm and what not I wasn’t even sure if it was you…but eventually the truth came out loud and clear. People here always figure out that it’s you back again. Truly remarkable how a banned person finds herself back on this site (with some imaginative handles I must admit) again and again. How many different computers do you have access to?
The downside to this is that in some cases we may suspect a commenter to be Pardesi Gori when she/he’s really not.
Linzi, I checked out your “Didi’s” website and I’m impressed. Her whole set-up appears to be simple yet effective. I’m of the mind to travel to Bihar and check out her ashram the next time I’m in India. I, like other posters here, am getting a little bit tired of talking the talk without walking the walk. I feel the need to do some physical help stirring within my soul.
Thanks for the inspiration!
And I love that murti of Yogi Jesus!
Soul-utions- Didiji would love to have you come and welcome any help you bring with you.
I am also very impressed by her. She has been living alone in Bihar for 25 years, doing this work (Originally from Kerala).
You should send her an email. Her Jesus Murti in his orange robes sitting on his lotus blossom is pretty rad, I must agree.
That’s exactly what I said.
You can believe whatever you want to believe. Good luck.
Actually, not so revolutionary among Keralite immigrants to the U.S. in the 70’s. The primary breadwinners were the wives who were mostly nurses by profession. I know many stay-at-home dads among this group.
im either going to pull half the weight around the house, or hire a maid to do the whole thing. i dont need a cook, maid. i can hire those. i need a wife/friend/companion…
Rahul, other reasons I wrote those comments was to show: 1. How, to a certain extent, my husband and I are trapped in the sexist role/image/expectations society has for us. 2 After all that we have done (professional, personal journeys) to get where we are, I/we have still managed to let down my parents; they are not able to bring themselves to be proud of us or happy for us. (And they are not traditional; my mom fights aspects of sexism in her own (limited) way).
Wait a minute, I let this pass yesterday, without commenting?
I said we are parents of 3–and they are 3 under the age of 6. Do you know what a household with 3 kids under the age of 6 looks like? It is a zoo; a whirlwind; noisier than SM. I come to work to escape from all my brats, lovable as they are.
Seiously, it would be wrong of me to give the picture of a husband lounging with a drink in his hand…Just being Mr.Mom/Dad when I am not around is more than enough. He doesn’t have to do anything else, not even set the time on the VCR, as far as I am concerned 🙂
So, all you husbands out there with stay-at-home-mom wives, take notes too, please
malathi#191, agreed, isn’t (2) depressing? Conformity is valued just a little too highly sometimes.
But don’t compromise on the VCR, that’s a slippery slope.
m. nam, i’m not sure that there are any feminine qualities that are distinct enough to make such a delineation. besides the most obvious diferrence between the genders – child-bearing for women, and some might argue a general greater physical strength for men – if we are discussing feminine qualities vis-a-vis workforce and economic contributions from household chores, i would have to say that, inherently, there are none. rather, it is only social conditioning (and the traditional partitioning of work) that has made most societies think of these issues from a gender-based perspective. on the other hand, if we are speaking pragmatically – i.e. the reality is that women are stay-at-home partners in the majority/plurality of relationships – then you have to assign quantifiable values to these various household tasks. my fuzzy recollection of employment law is that such studies have been used to quantify these values, but to what end, i am not sure.
sorry, i only read through the last 20 or so posts, so if somebody has already addressed this, my apologies…
This is true, especially if the husband was in a profession which was less in demand/lucrative than nursing. In many of the situations you’re possibly referencing, the wife came first and sponsored the husband. My dad had two engineering degrees and came here years before my mother did, which to me, makes his choice revolutionary. I didn’t know any other stay-at-home dads, but we also moved away when I was young (closest Mallu family = >100 miles). If it was so common, I can’t understand why my Father had to put up with so much vitriol about how he was “less” of a man for choosing children over career. 🙁
Thank you. Housework is funglible. Companionship is not.
Anna, Ada dear, that’s good because as a writer himself he has a softspot for writers who stick out their vulnerable necks, as do I.
Yesterday, when I said Person or personal emotions become larger than the cause, several people misunderstood, including you. I was not complaining that your friends, supporters here are discussing your hair. I was saying you should not allow your ‘person’ to be drawn into an issue to such an extent; you should not invest so much emotions that it affects your calm. You owe that to yourself because otherwise you will burnout. Do you want longevity and effectiveness in writing? Do you want readers or do you want browsers who leave thinkign you are just hammering incessantly?
Writing about a social problem like (female) infanticide can be easy and difficult at the same time. It all depends on how we approach it. Every law-abiding, regular (as in “normal”) citizen knows it is a repugnant act. Period. So for starters, you have all people on your side on this issue. The next step is to make people wonder why it happens. This is the tricky part and this is where different viewpoints and opinions arise. Your goal, I assume, is to make people aware that it happens still and why it happens and if at all possible, is there anything that can be done about it. So here is where some gentleness would help.
It is just like trying to get an acquaintance/co-worker with body odor to see that there is a problem. A safe way to do this is to use the free-for-all public discussion space; this way you don’t personally offend the person in question. But even in a public space you approach the issue of body odor with tact not with a hammer. You don’t want to lose the relationship but you want the offensive odor to be under control. There may be several factors: genetics, garlic in diet, culture (lack of baths, wearing soiled clothes, lack of knowledge about a product called deodorant), whatever. Your ultimate goal is to point out the the availability of inexpensive deodorants. You will never get there if you are stuck at the ‘what’s with the X culture of not using deodorants’ although that is defintiely an important factor, if not the only one. You see where i am going with this?
But be assured that even if you make mistakes and lose the acquaintance of the one with the body odor, you have impacted his/her life in some way (just as the encounter has impacted your life in some way; the growth is on both sides). Six months down the road, after the humiliation wears off, he is going to check out the deodorant aisle.
So let him go, when you come across a rare naysayer or a justifier of female infanticide in India. He may react defensively but his daughter will be allowed a privilege that his wife, by virtue of being his woman, didn’t get. Small increments. His naysaying or justification is not contagious; smart people will make up their own minds; you let his or her comment speak for itself.
A long post and perhaps more than what you asked for, but it comes with genuine feelings from one who is 6.5 years older than you and who has done her share of online screaming for a few years and who learnt something from every arguement.
Now I have to go bury myself in my work that is suffering.
In rural India you also get stay at home dads, but they are not doing the primary child-rearing or house chores, because their wives are usually at home too. As they live in the ancestral home, there is no need to worry about rent or mortgage, and often times, if they are landowners, they rent out their land to be cultivated by farmers, or the rent out some rooms in their home as guest rooms, or someone in the family has money and is covering everyone else’s expenses. I’ve seen this quite alot in India and when I first saw it I thought, “wow, what do they do for money that they can stay home all day”. After being around for some time I figured out how their system works.
Now in the cases of the Keralites who came to USA and wives were working as nurses, I do realize that is totally different because obviously they have rent/mortgage and other expenses that the people I’m writing about above do not. And the dynamic would have been different because the wife was going out to work while in India the above wives did not.
But I’m still wondering if when the Keralite wives came home from work if they found dinner on the table, all of the breakfast and lunch dishes done, laundry done, floor vacumed, toilets clean etc.
The reason I ask this is because if indeed they did – now THAT would be revolutionary in North America at the time (1970s), and I would be really impressed with them and it would give me hope for the male species in general.
I have a dear friend who leaves for work in the morning but before going she makes breakfast and lunch for the family. Then when she returns in the evening she makes dinner. On top of that she has a bottle feeding baby so she has to take care of him before going to work as well. The husband is stay at home and does nothing. Rather they have called her mother from her hometown to live with them so that the grandmother can take care of the baby during the day while her daughter is at work. Her mother is not happy with this situation. She say’s his (her son in laws) parents should be living with them and doing that, she already raised 8 children and wants to retire in her old age and rest. My question is, he is not doing anything at home, why can’t he take care of his own child???
So while this may be an extreme case (maybe not, I don’t know), it is not too far off from many of the other situations I found, as in the above where neither husband nor wife work outside but the wife is doing the child-rearing and house-chores, cooking.
An interesting article regarding stay at home husbands…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=467390&in_page_id=1879
glasshouses, the Daily Mail? What does the NY Post have to say on the issue? Something thoughtful, I’m sure 🙂