Why women hold the key to unlock these family taboos - The National Newspaper

Miten Etelä-Intiassa kasvanut nainen tulkitsee naisten aseman edistymistä; mielenkiintoinen idän ja lännen kulttuuria vertaileva artikkeli siitä, miten (vanhemman polven) naisten asenteiden muuttaminen on avain naisten aseman edistämiseen.

Feminism in the East is – and has to be – different from the way it has played out in the West. It cannot be a straightforward route to women’s liberation in the western sense. In the West, empowering women meant sending them to work, getting women equal pay for equal work, and breaking the glass ceiling. Here, our road, like shifting desert sand, has to be more zig-zag because our cultures contain contradictions (consider: we venerate our mothers but do not want daughters).

In the West, feminism usually meant re-educating the men. In the East, it also involves re-educating the women – the way we view ourselves and, more importantly, each other. Since the familial web is much stronger here, the way a woman treats her daughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter is just as important as the way a man treats the women in his life.


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For feminism to succeed in the East, we need to battle the men to gain some part of their turf. But before that, we need to battle the women. We need to tell our own mothers, who have been conditioned by centuries of tradition, that times have changed and we need to change with them. We need to tell our daughters that they hold up half the sky and it is up to them to choose which half. We need to tell ourselves to loosen up and stop judging other women.


Why women hold the key to unlock these family taboos - The National Newspaper