How Women Got Tied with Household, Got Stuck With it and Finally Came up With Feminism

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This topic is sensitive, spoken so many times in different manner, in different pitches and yet no one understands or rather choose to ignore.

For centuries women have been trying to make a point, that we are equal whether we choose to go out of the house and earn our living or whether we choose to stay at home and do the households ourselves or whether we do the both. Whatever their choice be, it doesn't make them any superior or inferior to anyone else - be it men or any other women.

Well the above lines are perhaps a dream for every women, barring few lucky ones. Every women is expected to excel in the households - working or non working. Even if she earns equal to or more than men, she will still be prejudiced and expected to carry all the responsibilities on her soft shoulders. And trust me this isn't the case with the Indian society only. This is a worldwide behavior. Ever since I got blessed with my son, I got the opportunity of interacting with a lot of women of multiple nationalities and surprisingly they all had their own stories to narrate. Across all the cultures, a dirty house is always associated with the ill-mannered, lazy and irresponsible women. It's the truth !

But did you ever wonder, how exactly women got tied up to the households? Here's how...

How Women Got Tied-up with Households

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Did you know, that homo sapiens weren't the only species of the humans that ever existed on earth. Excavations have demonstrated that there were many species of humans. Like you have different kinds of fishes or tigers or monkeys, you had different kinds of humans.

But there's a reason why only Homo sapiens survived, while rest of them died their natural death. And the reason is that we could Socialize. Humans are social animals, remember? Due to the ability of homo sapiens to socialize, they could live in larger groups, which lacked in all others.

With larger groups, came a lot of tasks which needed even distribution, like: hunting, making tools for hunting, food preparation, shelter preparation, animal management, cleanliness etc. Those groups worked like corporates of today. You needed a skill or you needed to take a responsibility to survive in the group, otherwise you were left to survive on your own. So, I am sure you guessed it by now, the tasks like food preparation, cleanliness were taken cared by women and the skill was passed on to the generations next. It wasn't a gender bias. I mean C'mon at least I wouldn't go out for hunting or making houses or making tools, at the times when it was done without any modern tools, may be with a sharp stone.

Moreover, women naturally excelled in feeding, cleaning, house management etc, because they were anyways doing it all for their babies, it was then just a matter of extending it to meet the requirements of larger groups.

But let me also tell you, they had the Right to Choose, whether they would hunt, or whether they would do the tasks that other women were doing. Because ultimately, on the skills and contributions of each individual, depended the survival of the whole group.

How Women Got Stuck with Home Making

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Has it ever happened with you that you did something for someone as a charity and just because you were so good at it, you are expected to do it every time and for everyone and for FREE. Over thousands of years, women have demonstrated that they are extremely amazing Homemakers, so the society permanently assigned this job to them and designed the laws around it in the name of Sanskriti or Sanskar.

So as per these sanskars, women were now expected to wake up early in the morning, before everyone and cook or bake breakfast for house members, perform the cleaning activities for the whole house (that includes your toilets and bathrooms as well), keep the house 'guests ready' at all the times, perform complete clothes management from cleaning to ironing to organizing in the wardrobe, then lunch, snacks, dinner, complete kitchen management from cooking to cleaning utensils to organizing the shelves, then food management from grocery to home storage space management, then shopping for not only self but for the whole house, and then if they had babies, oh my god, whole lot of baby or kids management on top of everything. Tired of reading? Imagine all these tasks and many many more are done by the Home Makers!

Well nothing wrong in it at all. Women had or developed the skills in house management, so they were contributing to the society through these activities while their husbands chose to earn for the living.

And if you notice, I am using the term Management here, which means they could either do it themselves or outsource it to a maid, but the ownership of the tasks lies with them.

And by homemaker, I don't mean a house wife, as you will read in the next section

How Women Finally came up with Feminism

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What went wrong with the society was when they started binding the women with these activities forever. They concluded that all the women must be homemakers. They didn't offer any choice for women to take any other route. And in the meantime, with time, women as well started to realize that they could do various other jobs as well and they were also very good at it. Women wanted to grab more opportunities, but the society was adamant to push them to be home makers.

However they fought their battle, and finally entered into a new world and so came a new terminology - Working Women. So now the women started making their contribution in the society by working and started earning as well. But the challenge was that they were also expected to be Homemakers also. Even after the long working hours, they were still responsible for the complete house management.

Women wanted the right to choose. They wanted to decide whether they will be Only a working women or Only Homemaker Or Both. But since the society had become so adamant in seeing women as homemaker, whether you are working or non working, that women had to start yet another battle and they call it Feminism now. They don't want to be pushed into things. They want to choose. Choosing to be a working women is Feminism, Choosing to be a Homemaker is Feminism, Choosing to be both a working women and a homemaker is not only Feminism but also superwomen. 

And Choosing to be neither a working woman and nor a homemaker is sheer Laziness and waste of life, because society never had place for non value adders in the past and will definitely not have it in the present and future. These are the ones I call house wives and not homemakers. I believe they are the ones because of whom even the non working home makers are looked down at, because people often consider house wives and homemakers to be same, while in reality they are not.

And now the funny thing about the present society is that all the men want to marry a super woman i.e. a woman who is working as well as a home maker. And I wonder when will they understand that it's high time that they also become super men now and enter into the space of homemaking as well, to balance the overall men women equation.

Because when riding a bicycle, you can't put the pressure on a single tire, both tires must take equal weights - Applies to both men and women!