This post is dedicated in gratitude to all of the wonderful women in my life. I feel so lucky to have known so many strong, intelligent, talented and truly beautiful women. Happy women’s day to you all!

I know it’s not Mother’s Day, but I feel the urge to thank my mom who sent me the info on the above film. She has an insatiable thirst for knowledge and I must owe my own to her…

Thanks to my grandmothers, whose hard work and dedication to family were remarkable.  They both went to law school well before it was a common thing for women to do.

Sometimes the contrast between women’s roles and lives in India and the US seems so stark, but then when I really think about it they both pretty much boil down to the same thing: well-being for the family and community. It’s just that in the US, we’ve gotten accustomed to the luxury of being able to think about ourselves, our desires and our independence.

But wherever we are, being a woman is a complicated affair. And being able to go through it gracefully with head held high, and make a contribution to people’s lives, is a commendable deed.

As I see my relatives and peers becoming mothers, I can’t help but wonder at the tremendous amount of patience and courage they have. What a gift they are giving of themselves.

Being a woman is the opposite of delicate; it demands fierceness and fortitude. A steadfast commitment to compassion. Just like the Devi, Linga Bhairavi…

Not only was untidiness both cause and effect of inner chaos, but it was also a surefire argument catalyst. At times of utter despair, I was ready to call in the reserves of more senior domestic goddesses (aka my mother & mother-in-law!). Anything but take on the task by myself.

(image from plokta.com)

That’s not to say that my husband wasn’t willing to help. But sometimes his habits would so exasperate me that I would rather just do the job alone. Apparently this is common amongst couples: women take cleaning so seriously that, if the husband helps, he has a hard time living up to their high standards. Yes, I’ve read this before online at the height of my troubles, but I don’t feel like digging up the links myself right now. If you’re interested, google it! I did find this from my previous post:

A recent article on Alternet by Vanessa Richmond perfectly illustrates the trend, at least among American women, to shun cooking as an “unliberated” act.

My grandmother would tell me how impressed she was that, when I was younger, I was so well-organized and I would try to help her tidy her kitchen when I visited. That was probably my parent’s influence, which has obviously since loosened its grip–or has it? I really wonder if my disdain for orderliness has its roots in adolescent defiance, which then became compounded by feminist theories. Or perhaps I just didn’t feel like devoting my attention and energy in that direction.

For my dissertation at LSE, I wrote about a UNICEF project for girl’s education and questioned its assumption that education was automatically empowering. A contact of mine currently at the LSE, Layla, has posted some very interesting research–conducted by the LSE, no less–that again brings these questions to my mind:  Cleverest women are the heaviest drinkers

Those with degrees are almost twice as likely to drink daily, and they are also more likely to admit to having a drinking problem.

“Reasons for the positive association of education and drinking behaviours may include: a more intensive social life that encourages alcohol intake; a greater engagement into traditionally male spheres of life, a greater social acceptability of alcohol use and abuse; more exposure to alcohol use during formative years; and greater postponement of childbearing and its responsibilities among the better educated,” says the report.

The article doesn’t mention stress–and that alcohol happens to be society’s most acceptable and easiest available antidote. What would be helpful to look at is how women’s involvement in “traditionally male spheres of life” is inherently stressful; even more helpful would be examining methods to eliminate stress so that this kind of abuse need not happen.

Granted, this research is from the UK with notoriously high rates of alcohol consumption. But still, it’s quite tragic to think that the most educated and qualified women are wasting their potential by getting sloshed.

Is it because they cannot handle the pressure of being in such high positions in society and conforming to roles with which they are not comfortable? Is inebriation a more empowering alternative?

Some new research featured in the NYT on the gender gap contends counterintuitively that more traditional societies have smaller gender differences than modern ones.

For evolutionary psychologists, the bad news is that the size of the gender gap in personality varies among cultures. For social-role psychologists, the bad news is that the variation is going in the wrong direction. It looks as if personality differences between men and women are smaller in traditional cultures like India’s or Zimbabwe’s than in the Netherlands or the United States. A husband and a stay-at-home wife in a patriarchal Botswanan clan seem to be more alike than a working couple in Denmark or France. The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge.

These findings are so counterintuitive that some researchers have argued they must be because of cross-cultural problems with the personality tests. But after crunching new data from 40,000 men and women on six continents, David P. Schmitt and his colleagues conclude that the trends are real. Dr. Schmitt, a psychologist at Bradley University in Illinois and the director of the International Sexuality Description Project, suggests that as wealthy modern societies level external barriers between women and men, some ancient internal differences are being revived.

The biggest changes recorded by the researchers involve the personalities of men, not women. Men in traditional agricultural societies and poorer countries seem more cautious and anxious, less assertive and less competitive than men in the most progressive and rich countries of Europe and North America.

Utterly fascinating. While I’m loathe to just take the latest study at face value, it certainly is thought-provoking–especially the bit about how the men differ. I can’t help but think of the white man’s burden: how the imperialists portrayed the colonised men as alternatively ‘effeminate’ (in India) or ‘lazy, savage beasts’ in Africa. Yet this research could be interpreted as saying that the imperialists were the brutes (as indeed I think they were)!

Personality is more complicated than height, of course, and Dr. Schmitt suggests it’s affected by not just the physical but also the social stresses in traditional agricultural societies. These villagers have had to adapt their personalities to rules, hierarchies and gender roles more constraining than those in modern Western countries — or in clans of hunter-gatherers.

“Humanity’s jaunt into monotheism, agriculturally based economies and the monopolization of power and resources by a few men was ‘unnatural’ in many ways,” Dr. Schmitt says, alluding to evidence that hunter-gatherers were relatively egalitarian. “In some ways modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots,” he argues. “That means high sociopolitical gender equality over all, but with men and women expressing predisposed interests in different domains. Removing the stresses of traditional agricultural societies could allow men’s, and to a lesser extent women’s, more ‘natural’ personality traits to emerge.”

I can definitely agree that our current state of civilization is unnatural, but I guess I have a hard time seeing how ‘modern progressive cultures are returning us psychologically to our hunter-gatherer roots’. Well, certainly the jury’s out on any hard and fast conclusions, but I like the way the article finishes:

Things could get confusing if the personality gap widens further as the sexes become equal. But then, maybe it was that allure of the mysterious other that kept Mars and Venus together so long on the savanna.

Allure indeed…

For more, see Broadsheet’s take.

“A patriarchal ethos dominates both the societies, American and Indian, but they operate in different ways. In India, despite the patriarchal ethos, powerful women leaders have emerged,” says political scientist Imtiaz Ahmed.

The most famous examples are BSP chief Mayawati and AIADMK head Jayalalitha. Both emerged from the shadow of iconic godfathers, to establish themselves as leaders with grassroots support.

It is not enough to be someone’s wife, sister or mistress in Indian politics. Neerja Gopal Jayal, professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University’s centre of law and governance points out that “Even at the panchayat level, we have had women from the member families being nominated. But the first time, patronage may work but not the second time. And this is true at the national level too.”

I myself have often wondered how, especially in the super-conservative state of Rajasthan, female leaders have established themselves. (See today’s article about Sonia Gandhi criticizing “the corrupt and inefficient [Vasundhara Raje] government.”)

Ranjana Kumari, director of the Centre for Social Research says, “What is unique to India, is the fact that women have the space to grow as leaders. Maybe, it has to do with our cultural ethos, where women are worshipped as goddesses.’’

I’m not so sure about the goddess worship argument, considering the low status of the majority of women; I think it could be more likely the ethos of ‘Mother India’ and the self-sacrificing stereotype of mothers/women.

The Washington Post had an in-depth piece on Indian women’s status. It starts off discussing ‘eve-teasing’, i.e. harrassment, but then delves into the whole range of issues from dowry to sex-selective abortion:

For India’s middle-class urban women, the past decade has brought unprecedented opportunities to advance in a social order long dominated by men. But a powerful male backlash has accompanied the women’s revolution, an upwelling of resentment that has expressed itself in sexual violence and harassment.

At the same time, however, the number of reported instances of domestic violence, rape and dowry killings is spiking in South Asian cities, according to women’s groups, demographers and sociologists.

Violence against women is the fastest-growing crime in India, a recent study concluded. Every 26 minutes a woman is molested, every 34 minutes a rape takes place, and every 43 minutes a woman is kidnapped, according to the Home Ministry’s National Crime Records Bureau.

Novellist and commentator Shobhaa De is quoted as saying:

“The latest statistics are terrifying. And it clearly points to male rage. Underneath our incredible social change, the Indian male is experiencing nothing short of a psychological frenzy.”

The article highlights the Smile Foundation for its attempts to address the issues through “self-respect and self-esteem sessions” and street theater.

It’s worth noting that while India ranks fifth highest in reported rapes, the United States ranks highest in the world. Yet I don’t think an article discussing gender dynamics in the US is likely to be covered by the WashPo in a similar manner.