Women's Day: How clued in are men to what women want?

Irecently read a romance novel called Bringing Down the Duke by Evie Dunmore. Although it contained the usual mush of most period romances, it was surprisingly insightful. It was about an impoverished woman suffragist, Annabelle, studying at Oxford University, who falls in love with the Duke of Montgomery. Annabelle and her fellow suffragists are fighting to get the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 amended in parliament. The stations in life of the duke and Annabelle could not, of course, be more different. But the age-old trope of rags-meets-riches will never go out of fashion in romance.

After a few clashes of will and wit, it is clear that Annabelle and the duke, Sebastian, are wildly attracted to each other. Finally, Sebastian proposes that she become his mistress. This is not agreeable to the fiery ‘bluestocking’ (as feminists were called then). It’s got to be marriage or nothing, she says. He tells her she is asking for too much. If he marries her, he will lose the queen’s favour, his standing in society and his position as the chief strategic adviser for the election campaign of the Tory party. “Do you want to see me ruined?” he asks her. In the end, of course, he realises that life without her is itself a form of ruination.

In the climactic scene, Annabelle and her fellow suffragists are sitting in the Ladies’ Gallery of the parliament when the usher announces His Grace, the Duke of Montgomery. He gets up and says a long speech in support of the Married Women’s Property Act. And then, to shocked silence, he resigns from the Tory party. In a predictably melodramatic scene, Annabelle asks Sebastian how he could do such a thing. He tenderly returns her words to him: “A very clever woman once told me to think about on which side of history I want to be. I made my choice today.”

As Dunmore says in the Author’s Note, The Married Women’s Property Act was amended in 1882, two years after the duke’s speech in parliament. It allowed women to hold on to some money and property under certain conditions after marriage. It would take another 36 years before women would be allowed to vote in the UK, but ultimately, it seems the duke did find himself on the right side of history.

It took a romance novel to make me see the injustices women suffered in the Victorian era, so much of which still exist today. We might have won voting rights, the right to own property, and the right not to be treated as chattel. But we have still not changed the patriarchal mindset that sees women as second-class citizens. The battle might have been won, but the war is far from over.

So I set out to understand how things are for women in India today. THE WEEK asked eight women from politics, media, activism, entertainment, business, sports, literature and governance what they wanted for women in their field, and how far they think women have come. Most of them seemed to feel that yes, we have come a long way. According to journalist and Rajya Sabha MP Sagarika Ghose, the real change in gender-defined stereotypes for women in media came with the advent of television.

“A lot of women journalists got the opportunity to go into the field with their cameras, because television is a hungry beast,” she said. “You have to keep feeding it with news. So you can’t afford to discriminate between men and women. The structured gender inequalities that existed in the 1990s in newspapers didn’t exist in television, simply because it was too fast, too big, too quick.”

Similarly, two-time Olympian Anju Bobby George said that the scene in sports has changed substantially for women since the time she was active in the early 2000s. She said in her time, there were many religious and social barriers. George was criticised for wearing shorts and sleeveless T-shirts. She was scared to wear a two-piece like European athletes, even though that would have been more comfortable. Her mother faced much resistance for letting her go pro, and was told that her daughter would never find a good husband. “Today, things have changed radically,” she said. “Women athletes are getting their due. They can focus on their game, instead of worrying about what they wear or anything like that, which was the case in my time.”

But most of these women also felt that we had some way to go to build a truly equal society. Social activist Aruna Roy said that when it comes to visibility, women have gained some ground, and are seen socially, politically and economically in various spheres. Even in rural India, women are more visible as they step out of their homes and participate in large numbers in the MGNREGA (Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act). They have always worked, but now, their work is getting recognised. When it comes to empowerment, however, much remains to be desired. “True empowerment happens when the mind changes―when we accept challenges and reject traditional morality in favour of Constitutional morality,” she said. “It requires breaking free from deeply ingrained social norms. Women have not broken entirely free from tradition.”

Many women told me about the seemingly small ways in which patriarchy rears its head in their lives. After all, so often it is the small symptoms that are indicative of a larger malaise. Best-selling author Anuja Chauhan told me about a plumber who kept blaming the faulty plumbing on sanitary napkins stuck in the pipe, until Chauhan pointed out to him that there was no one of menstruating age in their home. “It might be a small thing, but symptomatic of so much more,” she says. “That whatever goes wrong, it is to be blamed on a woman’s uterus.” Roy told me how, when people speak to her, despite her being a highly qualified IAS officer, they always address her husband. Dr Sonali Pattnaik, a writer, researcher and educator in the areas of literature, film studies and creative writing, told me about how she always felt unwanted as a child, because people kept telling her how her parents had wanted a male child and got her instead. When you keep hearing that at such an impressionable age, it is difficult to assess what kind of damage it might have done, she told me. A female journalist told me how, when she went to interview a politician in Chandigarh, he turned to his secretary and said derisively, “What, she is going to interview me?” Ghose recounted an incident in Parliament when a woman from another party was asked to speak on the budget. Her colleague said in a snide aside, “She’ll be the right person to speak on this. After all, she manages the expenses of her kitchen so well.”

Then I decided to go one step further and see how clued in men were to what women wanted. How many Dukes of Montgomery were there among us? Here, the responses varied widely. There were some, like a school friend of mine, who had given the matter careful thought. “I work in a multinational company in Dubai, with a presence in over 100 countries,” he told me. “I experience first-hand how I am discriminated against because I am brown. A white person will always be assumed to be superior. I only experience this at work, but I imagine this is how women feel every day of their lives.” Women, he told me, don’t want pity or charity. They want equal opportunities, people appreciating them for their individuality. It is very easy for society to shape all women into one template. He feels that in many ways it is women themselves who limit women. When your grandmother or mother keeps telling you that you can’t do this or that because of your gender, you obviously grow up with a sense of insecurity, he said. He gave the example of his wife who, he told me, was one of the strongest and smartest women he knew. She should be running the school she works in and yet, she limits herself, because of a lack of ambition and sense of complacency, which is not exclusive to her, he felt.

Then there were the men who might not be there yet, but still genuinely tried to understand things from a woman’s perspective, like Malayalam filmmaker Don Palathara. “As someone who was brought up as a man, it is very difficult for me to imagine or understand the subjective reality of women, because you are on the other end of the spectrum,” he told me. “It is only now, through my daughter, that I’m slowly understanding what it feels like to be a woman. In a society like ours, she constantly hears, even from her classmates, how boys are better than girls. When she comes home and tells me how she could not do this or that because of her gender, I feel for her.”

Then there were the men who felt that things have never been better for women. Like a male journalist I met who told me that most of the women journalists he knew were bold and ambitious women, and he could not think of anything that they lacked. Film critic Mayank Shekhar said, during a session at the Alliance Literary Festival in Bengaluru, that things have never been better for women in cinema, with more women behind the camera bringing critical feminist issues to the forefront. We might not have progressed when it comes to politics or religion, but we have done so in leaps and bounds when it comes to women in cinema, he said. Pattnaik, who teaches film studies, disagreed. Women do not exist in silos, she said. They are part of the society in which they live. “What does it mean to say that this is the best time for women?” she asked. “It can’t be. Then which women are we speaking about? Are we not speaking about Muslim, dalit or working-class women?”

Then there were men, and I suspect most men fall into this category, who admitted that they had no idea what women wanted, and who had not given it much thought. “I wish I knew,” said Booker-shortlisted author Jeet Thayil, with a casual shrug. I asked him whether he thinks we are living in a patriarchal society. “Yes, of course,” he told me. “Just look around you.” But in what way? I pressed. He quickly excused himself, saying that his friends were waiting for him.

In all fairness to men, it is not easy for them to understand what is going through a woman’s mind. A cousin told me about her pre-teen son who recounted to her how men were ogling his female friend when they were travelling together in a bus. “Next time, why don’t you put a protective arm around her shoulder?” she asked him. “But amma,” he told her. “She might not like that.” He is right. In these charged times, it is difficult to know where to draw the line between chivalry and harassment.

As Palathara said, it is also difficult for men to put themselves in women’s shoes because they haven’t had the lived experience of a woman. One is reminded of a scene from the American show F.R.I.E.N.D.S, in which Ross says that the Braxton Hicks contractions that Rachel, who is carrying his child, just experienced is no big deal. “Most women don’t even feel them,” he says. A miffed Rachel retorts, “Hey, no uterus, no opinion.” But perhaps in this case, what Thayil said about male writers writing female characters holds true in real life as well. “Many men can write female characters better than women; it depends entirely on the writer. Take [Gustave] Flaubert’s Madame Bovary or Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina,” he said, describing how they could get inside the head of their characters. Perhaps, similarly, there is a mechanism by which men can understand what it is like to live with a uterus; it’s called empathy.

Finally, I decided to turn the lens on the one person whose internal landscape I am most familiar with: myself. It was disconcerting to find in how many ways I, being a woman, had been blind to a woman’s plight. When the female journalist told me about the Chandigarh politician’s condescension towards her, I wondered why I had never experienced anything like that. Had I just been extremely fortunate? The truth, I realised, is not that these things had not happened to me, but that I had been conditioned not to see them. So much of gender is about conditioning. Was that why I had buried that sense of irritation when I was asked to clear the table after meals instead of my brother? Was that why I felt a sense of inadequacy because I was still unmarried? Was that why I had always looked at women activists as too angry at injustices I just could not see? I remember once telling a friend how smart I considered a woman I knew, because she could get her husband to do something by making him think that it was his idea in the first place. My friend looked at me and asked, “But why should she have to do that?”

Why indeed? When John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus, said that men want to feel needed, while women want to feel cherished, he might certainly have been talking about some women. Some of us want to decorate Venus, while others want to explore Mars. But all of us want to be seen for who we are, regardless of our gender. And we might even get there someday. If that day ever comes, I, for one, want to be able to say with the Duke of Montgomery that I was on the right side of history.