VALUED DAUGHTERS
First Generation Career Women
Alice W Clark
Sage Publications; 199 pages; Rs 595
BABIES AND BYLINES
Parenting on the Move
Pallavi Aiyar
Harper Collins; 222 pages; Rs 350
As more Indian women enter the workforce, two recent books examine the tenuous balance that women struggle to achieve between professionalism and their gender-based roles. One is written by an award-winning journalist/author Pallavi Aiyar, who calls herself an elite-in-a-developing-country kind of brat; the other studies inter-generational changes in attitudes towards women's work through case studies of respondents who have been the first women in their family to seek jobs.
Author Alice W Clark has observed the strategies that have enabled modern Indian women to work in spite of the limitations placed upon them and concludes that familial support is one of the most important facilitators of women's careers. Whether in large cities or small towns, the extent of a girl's education (which determines her employability and her attitude towards work) is most often determined by her family, especially by the father, and post-marriage, by her husband's attitudes. Ms Clark writes about Lilawati Munshi, who was born in 1899. Married, a mother and then widowed while she was still a child, Munshi remarried a widower and played an active role in India's struggle for independence. She fearlessly espoused women's causes too, but the author points out that ultimately, it was her husband's liberalism that helped her gain public legitimacy.
Ms Aiyar isn't very different - she too comes from a privileged, upper class family and is married to a free-thinking Spaniard. This is what has partially enabled her to remain true to her feminist values - and also to write a memoir about motherhood that doesn't gush about how wonderful it all is, career compromises notwithstanding. Her memoir is not scholarly, but makes for compelling reading. Ms Aiyar writes that the book has grown out of the isolation and shock she experienced when she had her first child. It was not simply the physical effort of sleepless nights and breastfeeding (of which she writes rather entertainingly). For Ms Aiyar, motherhood dispelled any notions she had held about her marriage being balanced. In her case, the culprit was not misogynistic patriarchal norms but simple biology that had given her a womb and breasts, making her husband's role in the early months negligible compared to her own.
Significantly, neither book glorifies motherhood - instead both seek to initiate a discourse on how motherhood and other gender constructs challenge notions of professionalism and career-mindedness. Ms Aiyar, who thought she had a perfectly equitable marriage, writes about the injustice of having to compromise on career choices as she stayed up nights with a colicky infant or found herself solely responsible for the children's lunchboxes - while her husband stayed true to his career and helped out whenever he could.
The lives of the women Ms Clark has interviewed are starkly different. Yet, both battle all sorts of odds to sustain long-term careers. Through her case studies of women aged 17 to 25 across three Indian cities, Ms Clark describes many of these quests for economic liberation - some small, others almost heroic. For instance, she writes about a girl in Vadodara whose mother would have aborted her when she got to know she was going to have a second daughter, but was saved by her father's intervention. Today, she plays basketball and aspires towards a career in fashion design. Another respondent in Allahabad insists to Clark that she would only marry a man who respected her and her need for professional growth. She said that she would like to marry into an understanding joint family which would undertake the care of her future children, allowing her the opportunity to work. One cannot help but compare this to Ms Aiyar's rants about finding nannies whilst on assignment in exotic foreign locales. However real they might be to her, they are, at the end of the day, concerns of a woman in a minuscule minority in the Indian context.
However, Ms Aiyar's reiterations that, contrary to popular belief, all women are not born to be great mothers or housekeepers are significant. Her book is an attempt to initiate a dialogue on this subject, so that others may not be as unprepared as she was. Ms Clark's study clearly shows that Indian women also increasingly aspire towards fulfilling professional lives. She calls for changes in societal expectations and the social constructs of marriage, motherhood and childrearing to make this possible. Perhaps the need of the hour is for the government to step in (Aiyar points out that this has already been done in progressive countries like Sweden) to reduce the burden on working mothers, who often have to struggle unfairly to balance their jobs with the demands of motherhood.
Perhaps the most interesting aspect of both the books is their outlook. Ms Aiyar would like to see women talking about the physical and mental burdens of motherhood. Ms Clark theorises that the continued shrinkage in the gender gap in education and jobs could weaken the present mandate for all women to marry and bear children. At the very least, they are a part of an important dialogue that would enable society to view the problems of working women through the
lens of gender equality, rather than as individual issues they must somehow resolve alone.
