Why women hold the key to unlock these family taboos

Shoba Narayan

• Last Updated: October 29. 2009 12:18AM UAE / October 28. 2009 8:18PM GMT

Plans just revealed by the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children for nationwide surveys to gauge the extent of domestic violence and child abuse will bring into focus issues often neglected – and they are not alone.

Last week the Shriver Report, by the American author and journalist Maria Shriver and the Centre for American Progress, celebrated that for the first time women constituted half of America’s workforce. “A woman’s nation changes everything,” the report said, suggesting a ripple effect on issues from the way businesses and governments functioned to how faith-based communities viewed themselves. 

And next month the India Summit of the World Economic Forum in New Delhi will focus on, among other things, empowering women; there will be a plenary session entitled “Investing in Girls, Investing in Development – The Girl Effect”.

Focusing on what the world calls “women’s issues” is a fine thing for any nation, but it can also be misleading. As Dr Afra al Basti of the Dubai Foundation for Women and Children points out, quantifying the scope and size of the problem is a neccessary start when smaller GCC studies indicate that one in three women is a victim of violence.  Harder still will be addressing the attitudes from which these numbers spring.

I grew up in India but was educated in America. As an undergraduate at Mount Holyoke College, one of the “Seven Sisters” of American higher education, I was introduced to feminism and remain a feminist to this day. I am also the mother of two young daughters, and for their sake I want a world in which gender parity is the norm. But underneath it all – underneath the reams of numbers I digest, the gender reports I read and the women I cheer into leadership – I have to ask this rather disquieting question: are we women setting ourselves up for failure? By competing in a male world using male paradigms, are we negating our strengths?

Feminism in the East is – and has to be – different from the way it has played out in the West. It cannot be a straightforward route to women’s liberation in the western sense. In the West, empowering women meant sending them to work, getting women equal pay for equal work, and breaking the glass ceiling. Here, our road, like shifting desert sand, has to be more zig-zag because our cultures contain contradictions (consider: we venerate our mothers but do not want daughters).

In the West, feminism usually meant re-educating the men. In the East, it also involves re-educating the women – the way we view ourselves and, more importantly, each other.  Since the familial web is much stronger here, the way a woman treats her daughter, daughter-in-law and granddaughter is just as important as the way a man treats the women in his life.

In America, my label was merely that of a “professional” and a “spouse”.  Here, I am mother, daughter, daughter-in-law, sister, sister-in-law, cousin, sister, wife and family-friend’s daughter. Each of these relationships involves women who nourish and nurture me, but also chastise and condition me about how to lead my life.

Both in the Arab world and in Asia, we women spend much of our lives with other women and therefore imbibe much of our world view from them. To simply tell us one day to go out there and compete with men is an about-face that many of us are not equipped to execute.

To compete with men, we need to be “trained” by the women in our lives. Mothers need to give permission to their daughters. Mothers-in-law need to relax their vigilance over the daughter-in-law, to learn not to belittle her in ways small and large. Sisters need to give sustenance. The tragic truth is that in the East it is we women who are harder on ourselves than the men. For change to happen, the men need to back off; it is the women who need to coach and encourage.

Cultures contain contradictions. Islamic cultures are traditionally viewed as repressive and chauvinistic. But they also produce super-strong women who have navigated uncharted waters and become global icons of change and influence. The only female architect who is a genuine global superstar, Zaha Hadid, is from the Muslim world. Ditto for the Iranian graphic novelist and film director Marjane Satrapi and the British entertainer Shazia Mirza, who have succeeded in areas where “the boys rule”.  They are exceptions, for sure, but they have also reached heights far above what most of their western sisters have achieved. They have, in other words, changed the game; broken the rules; shown us what is possible.

How to translate such possibilities for a million little girls is the challenge for eastern feminism. When A R Rahman accepted the Oscar for his score for Slumdog Millionaire, he stood in stark contrast to the other winners. They thanked their directors, the crew, their spouses, and partners. Rahman thanked … his mother. In this acknowledgement lies the clue to eastern feminism.

Like it or not, mothers wield an outsize influence on the lives of their children in the East. Unlike the West, we don’t celebrate independence and disengagement from the family. We don’t do rebellion. Our Manichean world view, which divides women into wives or whores with no shades of grey in between, is developed and strengthened in large part by the very same women when they become mothers. And when these boys become Oscar winners they don’t thank the wife lest they appear hen-pecked. They thank the mother.

For feminism to succeed in the East, we need to battle the men to gain some part of their turf. But before that, we need to battle the women. We need to tell our own mothers, who have been conditioned by centuries of tradition, that times have changed and we need to change with them.  We need to tell our daughters that they hold up half the sky and it is up to them to choose which half. We need to tell ourselves to loosen up and stop judging other women.

Charity begins at home; and here in the East, so does feminism. 


Shoba Narayan is the author of Monsoon Diary, a memoir about growing up in South India