Misogyny: A Continuous Battle Women Have to Fight
For centuries, Desi culture in India and Pakistan have always remained the same, even after Indian men had moved to Great Britain to earn an education and began to integrate themselves and their family from an Eastern society into a completely different Western society.
Growing up as a Desi girl, I have definitely had to overcome many obstacles when it came to the limitations that were placed on me by the elders in my community. My parents immigrated from Southeast Asia to America after they got married, hoping that the lives of their children would be a lot better than theirs were, filled with opportunity. But when you are a girl in a misogynistic community, those opportunities can be hard to take full advantage of.
Desi females have always been, and continue to be, expected to be a housewife who always respects their husbands and the decisions, whether they are questionable or not, they make. If you aren’t going to be a housewife, you are expected to become either a doctor, lawyer or an engineer so that you can make good money to help support your family after you get married, while caring for your children at the same time. Jobs that reflect your passions are not taken well to in Desi culture. You are either X, Y, Z or you aren’t anything.
Sexism is not just apparent in Desi culture, it is apparent in almost all societies and cultures. In “Catfish and Mandala” by Andrew Pham, for example, Pham had just arrived in Vietnam after years of living in America. Once he arrived, he stayed at his extended family’s house where the women would “..devote half of their days to cooking, cleaning, and caring for the entire clan, sharing labor and responsibilities”.
It has been so ingrained in a woman’s mind that being an obedient housewife is all you can be. It’s so hard to fight back these centuries old expectations of you because as Rameeza Ahmad of The Tempest mentions, “..young Desi men and women are always told that opposing or arguing with an adult is a cardinal sin. It is disrespectful to ever tell an adult that they are wrong or that their opinions are problematic”.
So how can you as a female in such a society rise up from these expectations?
Once India was colonized by Great Britain over 400 years ago, it was ingrained in Indian culture that they were inferior to their colonizers and had to obey them and play by their rules. In the 20th century, women, especially, are expected to obey the expectations of men, who are deemed superior to women when it comes to intelligence and strength. Women have always been expected to bow down to others and couldn’t speak for themselves.
Being born in America, I do have an advantage when it comes to this because I am able to speak out against sexism in my community a lot more than females that are still living in India and Pakistan and can’t speak out without being judged and/or ridiculed against.
Females have continued to fight for their rights over hundreds of years, whether it was radical or not. Eventually, oppressed females came to realize the oppression they had to deal with and decided that enough was enough. As Martin Luther King Jr. states in his Letter from Birmingham Jail, “oppressed people cannot remain oppressed forever. The yearning for freedom eventually manifests itself…”
I, as a Desi girl, have to grow up to not just be a pretty doll that is tossed around, having to always be respectful to others before respecting themselves. I have to be an inspiration to myself and other girls around the world who don’t have the same opportunities I do. I have to go to college, continue my education, go into a career field I am passionate about, and change the world. By simply putting my right foot forward with the intention of changing the world, I already have.
Works Cited:
Ahmad, Rameeza. “Gender & Identity, Life.” 19 Sept. 2019.
King , Martin Luther. “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Received by 8 Alabama clergymen, The Language of Composition, Second ed., Bedford St. Martin’s, 2008, pp. 1–1180.
Pham, Andrew X. Catfish and Mandala: a Two-Wheeled Voyage through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam. Flamingo, 2001.