Some dialogues stay with you for long, not because they are loud, but because they try to quiet, and not completely true. A few days back, I was chopping veggies for the dinner sitting on the dining chair, my daughter looked at me over her smart phone, with that half-amused, half-concerned expression that only a twenty-something Genz can master, and said, “Mom, see yourself. You have completely become a housewife these days.” A few weeks before that, she had asked me more innocently, “Don’t you feel bored staying at home 24×7?” She has always teased me by calling me a ‘toxic feminist’. It is a title I always wore with a certain pride. Unfortunately life intervened all my plans. Post my open-heart surgery, my world physically constricted and I had no control over it. It has been long, around seven months that I haven’t stepped out of the home alone, driven my car, taken a train or flight, walked through a bookshop for hours, attended a seminar or many other things. My edge, four-walled boundaries with a balcony became my home.
So when she said it, the word- ‘housewife’, it prickled me. Not because the word is an insult. But because of what we have made it mean in our society and how youth also perceives it in the same way. However, it is not as if I am not working. I am working. I am working day and night. Sometimes I am working for home, other times from home. Since I am always at home so I have become that kind of visible who is invisible. I am working from home and I am earning too. Then next evening, a little hurt, I showed her my bank account. I asked her to calculate what I had received in September month till that date, even though it was just the start of the month. She took my phone, immediately scrolled, and her brows raised in surprise and shock. “Ah,” she smiled empathically. “You felt hurt mom…oh yes…by my other day’s words…so you are kinda work-from-home type of… not fully a housewife… not a dependent one.” That thoughtful pause of her, that “kinda,” stayed with me. A few days before this all encounter, a relative had called on Rakhi to wish me. After the initial civilities, before saying goodbye, he said, ”I have not read any recent article of yours. Have you stopped writing?” And I felt a gentle, sincere elbow; a little enthuse to keep writing. I sat, walked, cooked, slept, did every daily chore thinking about what I should write but nothing was enticing my rebellious soul to pen down. After this encounter with my elder bird I realized that she had unknowingly given me something to write about, a very disturbing, and necessary stuff to ponder and voice over.
What exactly do we mean when we say “just a housewife”? To understand the Indian housewife, we cannot treat her as a modern invention, she is an ancient continuity. In the Stone Age, long before history was carved, she was already there as Eve, companion of Adam – keeper of fire, forager, painter of Bhimbetka, the one who knew which leaf healed and which root could kill. Her survival skills were not peripheral, they were what kept humanity alive. Later she rose as a Rishika, composing Vedic hymns in Indo-Aryan verse – women like Gargi, who dared to question the great sage Yajnavalkya on the soul, and Maitreyi, who chose wisdom over gold. Then the wife was called Sahadharmini – a co-traveller in dharma, not a follower. In Mauryan and Gupta times, she was administrator, Buddhist nun debating metaphysics, mathematician, royal counsellor, and a powerful republican voice like Amrapali. The long medieval eclipse followed invasions, insecurity, child marriage, sati, zenana, purdah – and the doors of the pathshala shut on her. She was told her existence is only in serving her husband at home. Yet she never stopped working, spinning, sowing, carrying water for miles, saving seeds for the next famine, singing the Ramayana and allegorical sagas to children, keeping a culture alive when libraries were burnt. Then came the pre-independence struggle, when Savitribai Phule walked unshaken to open India’s first girls’ school despite stones and cow-dung hurled at her, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain imagined Sultana’s Dream, a feminist Shangri La.
There were women who were more than housewives they were revolutionaries who spun the charkha, hid freedom fighters in their kitchens, and led prabhat pheris with babies on their hips. Post-independence, the Constitution gave women the right to equality, but paper equality and kitchen equality are not the same. The right to education came, but the right to use it came much slower; the right to vote came, but the right to voice freely at the dinner table is still a rabble-rousing in many homes. And so the words – gender equality, right to education, feminist movements – are simply the names women have given to their antediluvian hunger to be seen as whole, what my daughter calls ‘toxic feminism’. Virginia Woolf wrote long back what every Indian woman sitting in her kitchen already knew in her nerves and bones: “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write..” It was not just about writing fiction. It was about writing a life. Money means economic independence, the ability to not tolerate abuse for roti ,kapda, and makan.
A room meant a psychological space than a physical one, a corner where no one says, “meri socks kaha hai?” “mom meri laundry laga dena” “mummy khane me aaj kya banaya hai” for at least some jiffies. That room of own gives woman strength, a ‘self’ beyond ‘thankless service’. Our own Hindu philosophy, if one can read beyond patriarchy’s selective translations, uttered the same, more powerfully. Ardhanarishvara, our God is halfwoman and is incomplete without her. How then did we decide that she is incomplete without a salary slip? Women have broken the shackles at various levels entering in Siachen, in ISRO, in the Supreme Court, in startups, in cricket stadiums, in comedy clubs. The list is endless. And still there is a painful lacuna of respect for the woman who prefers to remain a ‘housewife’. We applaud the woman who leaves home at 7 or 8 a.m. We pity the woman who stays back. But why? I see around me many such women who are earning well staying at home, working from home and taking care of kids. It is their CHOICE. It is a woman’s choice what she wants to be. Being a housewife, working from home or for home, or both, is a 24×7, thankless, unpaid and tiring job. And the reality is messier. Who on earth are these who say housewives do nothing? They should take up the job for a month. Even if they don’t earn, they do a hell lot. A housewife’s work is an invisible territory. She wakes up before the house does.
She is a logistics manager – managing ration, school fees, doctor appointments, electricity bills, festivals, fasts, relatives etc. She is such kind of chef who knows who does not like capsicum, and who does not like peas, who needs low salt food, who wants more spicy and she still cooks the meal that feels like home to all. She is a nurse, a counselor and a teacher. She is the one who stays when everyone else gets to leave. Whatever her professional works are, she has to do after her husband and kids leave for their offices and schoolcolleges. She has to finish her professional assignments before they come back to appear as an attending, good wife and mother. The job of a housewife and if she is working from home, is the most vital one. If we attempt to evaluate her salary for whatever she does for everyone, it becomes impossible. Add a chef’s salary, a nanny’s, a housekeeper’s, a nurse’s, a chauffeur’s, an accountant’s, a therapist’s, a 24-hour security guard’s, a hospitality manager’s, a counselor’s, a teacher’s, a cleaner’s, a cook’s, a driver’s- all rolled into one woman who never takes a leave, who never gets a bonus, who is often not even thanked. No household can afford her if she were to send a bill. Moreover her ‘work from home’ is never taken seriously as important work by the family.
It is time to respect her choices, value work, and offer support. The world is racing towards modernization. New technologies, new vocabularies, new ways, new ambitions! The narrative has also changed. And this is what my daughter could not immediately categorize when she said you have become a ‘housewife’. I am not a “dependent one.” I am a symbiotic one, like every human being. I earn my own bread. My daughter called me a ‘toxic feminist’. Feminism has never been about hating home. My feminism allowed me to be a dedicated professional for years, and it now allows me to be a housewife without shame. Virginia Woolf wanted a room with a lock. My generation of women has finally found it. Sometimes it is a kitchen that doubles as a studio for reels, sometimes it is a bedroom that becomes a boardroom at 10 a.m. when the Zoom or Google meet call starts. The door may not have a lock, but the mind does. And inside that mind, we are earning, thinking, writing and doing a lot. We need to break this stereotype and understand that not every modern, educated woman wants to step out of home to prove her worth, and she does not need to. From the same kitchen where dal’s cooker whistles, a thousand economies now buzz.
One of my friend from Philippines write articles, edit manuscripts, teach online, consult, design, counsel, sell, blog, all doing from her small corner table in her house. There is a woman in my society who manages a flotilla of rental cars from her dining table, handling drivers, bookings, and payments on her phone. There are mothers and wives who have turned their kitchens into a cloud kitchen, taking orders for pickles, laddoos, cakes, biryani or pav-bhaji on WhatsApp and Instagram. There are tailors and designers who stitch dresses and sell fabrics on Meesho and Etsy. There are jewellery designers who string beads in their balconies and sell them across the world. There are the artists who make mandala art, crochet toys, resin trays, return gifts, and their craft rooms are now their showrooms. And from this room of my own, I am still writing. Moreover, there is the new, quiet revolution of the laptop- the data analyst who analyses market trends while her baby naps, the coder who debugs from a corner table, the graphic designer, the online tutor, the stock trader, the Chartered Accountant filing GST returns from home. So to my daughter and to the world, I want to tell that the New Housewives are the Lakshmis of the Laptop. Dr. Shalini Yadav is a Professor, Writer and Columnist from Jaipur, Rajasthan.