When she was asked at the Jaipur Literature Festival why she had not married, Oprah Winfrey responded by saying she “wasn’t the marrying kind” and that “marriage called for an element of conformity that she didn’t think she possessed”. (Of course she added a small joke for the benefit of the largely Indian audience when she faux-complained “no one was arranging any marriages” for her, and the crowd — which consisted of that slice of India that does not have marriages arranged for it — laughed politely at the in-joke).
But there it was — she more or less said it for the growing tribe of uber powerful alpha-women across the globe, for whom marriage has become an interesting accessory as expendable as last year’s Birkin. She might as well have said she needed marriage like a fish needed a bicycle.
In India the phenomena of powerful women in whose CV marriage may exist, but mostly as a footnote, is a familiar one. Mayawati, Jayalalithaa and Mamata Banerjee, all have risen to their positions of power without the appendage of a husband, though in the cases of the first two, there had been the companionship of a powerful male mentor.
In Sonia Gandhi’s case, marriage appears to have been the central focus of her life, but she only assumed her personal power and equity in her widowhood. In her mother-in-law Indira Gandhi’s long and turbulent career, marriage appeared as a cipher.
And across the borders in Asia, most of the powerful women leaders like Sheikh Hasina Wajed and Begum Khaleda Zia in Bangladesh, Aung San Suu Kyi in Burma, Megawati Sukarnoputri in Indonesia, Wan Azizah Wan Ismail in Malaysia, Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan, Corazon C Aquino and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo from the Philippines, and Chandrika Kumaratunga in Sri Lanka had marriages which were more or less in the past tense when they assumed power, for reasons of widowhood or enforced separation.
In developed countries we observe the phenomena of powerful women marrying for reasons of expediency and progeny, but in many ways to men who end up by their side as sad jokes like Prince Philip and Denis Thatcher in England, Todd Palin in USA and the community of husbands left behind by women like Elizabeth Taylor, Madonna and Jennifer Lopez.
What is it that makes powerful women transcend the institution of marriage or render it so inconsequential and non-essential?
Of course it is a fact across continents and cultures that women married mostly for reasons of tradition and security, both factors that recede when women adopt roles outside the traditional boundaries. (Oprah Winfrey isn’t going to marry to move into a 1 BHK and acquire a two-wheeler and pressure cooker of her own.)
And the other rules for which women married — love, sex and children — have more or less been re-written before you can say German Greer.
Sex and love, it has been observed, flourish just as well (or often better) outside the confines of marriage; and in this age of single parent adoption, artificial insemination and surrogacy, no one really needs a ring around their finger to be a parent.
But of course it’s not only billionaire TV chat show hostesses and their ilk that can afford to thumb their noses at the institution. For most of the young women in their twenties and thirties earning their own pay cheques and running their own lives, getting married is just not as important an issue as it was for those of us born earlier.
Germane to this is the recent conversation I had with a young and terribly bright media executive on the fast track in her career and happily unmarried. “I don’t know,” she said in that curious diffident-but-confident way they speak these days. “It’s not even on my radar, you know?” she shared over a Lavazza at a funky Mumbai café. “There was a time when I used to hear my older GFs moan about how there were just not enough great guys around they’d want to settle down with. But you know what, there’re a LOT of great guys in my life; just that I’m not ready to ‘settle down’.” She seemed pensive. “I mean the thought’s crazy, man. Maybe I’d change my mind if they called it ‘settling up’!” She had a point.
But for a lot of women these days, ‘up’ is where they’re going, pretty well on their own.
