Shobha Sengupta | The rise and rise of the female human: Assertive, confident, fulfilling potential…

Let’s plunge into the heart of the matter: the husband/partner. The husbands of such women are often pitied. “Surely this is the reason why divorce rates are going up?” The successful, assertive woman is often seen as “aggressive”, her ability to negotiate seen as her “quarrelsome nature”.

The husbands of these “forward” women are often pitied by both men and other women: “Imagine being married to this powerful, go-getter of a woman! She must be fighting with him, making his life miserable.”

Now, I ask you, gentle reader: why aren’t the wives of aggressive men pitied? “Poor lady, being married to this ambitious, smart, powerful, articulate man! He must be beating her up all the time!” That’s what they both are in equal parts: smart and ambitious.

Vert clearly, there are double standards. The man is “powerful” if he can make himself heard and gets his way, the woman is just “intolerantly aggressive”. The man is “articulate” but the woman “talks too much”. Who will listen to her babbling after a point? He is smart enough to provide for his family all his life, but she is “too smart for her own good”. She doesn’t need money: why is she so selfish, grasping, crass and self-serving? If anything, she should work to uplift the underprivileged, but to work for herself is unbecoming for a lady! She should not understand finances, for that makes her “shrewd”. For finances, she should depend on the man in her life, who can pull her strings, or pull the rug from under her… Being a “business-minded” woman is the worst, her sharp astuteness is sneered at -- as opposed to the respect a businessman earns because, simply put, he “runs a successful business”. No questions asked, no judgments are laid at his doorstep.

In the past decades, more and more women have been stepping across the “lakshman rekha” drawn by men to keep them in their place, telling them to be meek, submissive, always smiling, pleasant to the eye, and ready to please.

Now, the “second sex” is stepping out in hordes and getting together, experiencing an epiphany of sorts. Their issues and problems have never been individual, but indeed universal. Their much-loved “protectors” have actually been the enemies they’ve either been sleeping with, or raising with so much pride.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote about the issues facing women in her book The Second Sex, we had Rebecca Solnit coining the infamous word “mansplaining”, wherein men explain to the (“bird-brained”) women the experiences or the work the latter are themselves living or doing. A dent was made by these writers, but it was only the rare intellectual who internalised what they said. Margaret Atwood has been another positive influence. In recent times, Mary Ann Sieghart and Carole Criado-Perez have written two remarkable and award-winning books in The Authority Gap and Invisible Women, presenting hard-core evidence to back what we always knew instinctively that women are the disenfranchised gender. In India, author Shrayana Bhattacharya gives us similar data in her book Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh, the Bollywood actor standing in as a symbol for that rare breed, the sensitive male. These books have been bought and distributed by corporates to display their inclusiveness and “gender diversity”.

While laudable, it is almost as though reservations have to be made in the workplace for the upliftment of the second-class citizen, the female -- her skills and abilities notwithstanding. In an instance I personally encountered, a woman was asked to leave a video work call by her husband to make tea for him, which she meekly did, thereby marring her professional image. Our female domestic staff expect the lady, and not the man of the house, to give instructions, further binding women into inextricable knots.

There is an indoctrinated conditioning belittling the working woman as “the busy little girl”. Indian working women don’t find their work taken seriously enough… they are patted on their backs with: “It’s good you keep yourself busy, because an idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” The female herself struggles with the impostor syndrome, and rarely believes she is as good as, or has really in her possession, the necessary tools of knowledge and skill as much as the next man, or having the innate ability to look after herself. She has been told often enough that she needs a man to protect her, and now believes it wholly. The runaway movie hit Laapataa Ladies reveals how no one is as surprised as the woman herself when she finds she can steer her own destiny.

Mythology placed the woman in impossibly “idealistic” archetypal roles. An obedient Draupadi sought to please five husbands and her demanding mother-in-law, Sati self-immolated because her husband, Shiva, had been humiliated, Savitri travelled to bring back her husband from the dead, Mary was a virgin who gave birth.

But the “weaker gender” is awakening: women now know for a fact that assertiveness and being able to negotiate for her rights are not “shameful”. Confidence, and thereby one’s spirit, may be broken, but self-confidence is a whole different kettle of fish. A self-assured woman carries on without caring a hang even if she has made a mistake. She learns and simply moves on without beating herself up or allow any guilt-tripping to permeate her soul or break her spirit.

She is on a relentless journey of self-discovery, answerable to no one but herself, living only for herself, and fulfilling her potential to the utmost.