The café vegetator says

A friend, from a highly ‘educated’ and upper class family in India once told me “I don’t think my father would have allowed my mother to work as a professor if my mother’s college had any male teachers.” Suddenly, today morning, after 5 years of hearing my friend’s observation I felt sick to my gut recalling this casual statement (who the fuck gave his father the right to allow his mother to work? I guess everyone) and seeing the disconcerting parallels with the book I am reading today.

My latest read is Naila Kabeer’s amazingly unpretentious book “Power to choose” (and Saba Mahmood’s pretty foofah one “Politics of Piety”). Kabeer’s Bangladeshi lower-class homeworkers in London “choose” to work from home and not in factories because of the presence of male workers on the shop-floor. That shouldn’t surprise me, right? After all, these are Muslim women in Purdah from uneducated lower class families we are talking about (although if you read Kabeer’s description of similar women factory workers in Dhaka, you are in for a surprise). But what about the thousands of non muslim, non illiterate, non “backward” women who “choose” to be homemakers and homeschoolers for their children? What are their motivations? Their answers may not be as ‘simple’ as men being present in the outside world, but ultimately similar; the govt doesn’t think they need to work outside so it doesn’t provide for child-care, they need to be good mothers first, not send their kids to bad playschools… Pick up any magazine in this country and there is some kind of warning as to how children in bad child care systems turn out to be psychopaths, drug addicts or pregnant. Teenage pregnancy? School shootout? High rate of divorce? War? Just blame it on the working woman or the evil career-minded mom. (Blame the war on working women! A bit of a stretch but a nice one, no? J)


I would get lynched by some scholars (esp Marxist types) for saying this but at some level doesn’t gender trump everything else? It doesn’t matter where you come from and where you are, some things will be the same for you, just at different degrees of intensity.

PS: Birla or Bing if you are reading this, take it as a stuck-in-a-café-for-too-long-when-the-sun-outside-feels-so-good rant from a woman who “chose” to be a “café-vegetator” and don’t give me a long Mohantian lecture on the simplicity of my argument!

PPS: I know, I know that a Dalit woman getting raped by a group of men who want to put her and her community in place is VERY differently situated on the matrix or whatever of inequality than my friend’s mom in a all-women college. I DO remember my women’s studies text books. GAWD, will you guys let me write my blog in peace!