My mother has been a housewife all her life. She has never had a job, has a very basic education and so automatically she has never had huge demands from life. But, does that mean she doesn’t or cannot have an identity of her own? Is being a housewife any less than having a full-time job?
These questions got me thinking about “identity”. What does it mean? What is the actual definition of identity? Does identification only come for those who fit into a socially structured definition of a 9-5 job? What is identity/ identification?
According to the search engine, “The definition of identity is who you are, the way you think about yourself, the way you are viewed by the world and the characteristics that define you. An example of identity is a person’s name.” Now, if we take a keen look at the definition, we will see that the word used most in the definition is “you”. Then, how come people like our mothers or our grandmothers have spent almost their entire life living under the identity of being someone’s mother or someone’s daughter or someone’s wife? How come they are just someone’s “missus”? Is it just because they do not have a 9-5 time bound job that pays them at the end of every month? Our very patriarchal society has somehow hegemonized us to believe that a woman’s identity still remains under the garb of a man’s. So, even when appealing for women’s rights or women’s safety, some particular phrases are very frequently heard; “Stop rape! Because she is someone’s mother or someone’s sister.” Or “ Would you do it if it was your mother, sister or wife?’’ Shouldn’t it have been, “She is someone.’’?
India, as a nation might be taking baby steps towards a more undogmatic mindset, more liberal thinking, more acceptance, but honestly, are we there yet? How many of us can genuinely say, even only to ourselves, that we do not take our mothers, especially those who are homemakers for granted?
From the time when I’ve learnt to differentiate between right and wrong, I have often been heartbroken by how the society has treated our mothers. And the bigger problem is, the victims often themselves do not comprehend the set back in this. For instance, my own mother who has never really cared if people call her by her own name as long as they know that she is particularly someone’s wife, whose only point of concern has been if we have eaten or not, whose only goal in life has been how to make my father content. For her, identification of herself has never mattered as long as she is appreciated by her family for the new recipe that she tried for dinner. She has never really started to care why identification is so important!
This self-identification problem is not only limited to the ladies of our previous generation, but is also very much acute in the on-going millennial cohort.
‘Perhaps Eckhart Tolle said it best: “When you lose touch with yourself, you lose yourself in the world.” And when it comes to losing touch with themselves, women seem to do that best, especially when it comes to relationships.’
No matter how strong or how independent , how individualistic or unconventional a woman is, most crumble down under the coercion of the relationship where a man is involved, sometimes even unintentionally. This happens mostly because the common population still believes in the wrong definition of “feminism” and the men even worse, they think “letting” a woman do all that they does on a regular basis is feminism. More sadly, this misconception is not only ingested in the mind of men but also in the minds of 70% of women, belonging both from the prior as well as the current generation. Maybe, that’s why a bitter relationship is always expected and normalized between a mother-in-law and her daughter-in-law. Neither the mother-in-law nor the daughter-in-law wants to acquire their own identities but they want to be the female version of their husbands’ surnames. The women find themselves in this dilemma because most women are brought up to see an amorous partnership as the main event of their entire lives.
This situation is likely to evolve along with the course of the next few decades. So, not only men but women should also be taught about the fact that how significant self identification of a person is. Till then, let us try to shamble the stereotype where women struggle everyday to discover their own identity which is often dominated and stumbled upon by the paternal society.
“She is a person!”
Source: Line in Italics taken from: How do women lose themselves in marriage?- Huff Post
The Amateur's Scratchpad 