The other day, I had dinner with an old friend, a friend with whom I had not spoken since we went our separate ways nearly four years ago. It was one of those things where you knew the next time you see each other you’d be having the same conversation: where have you been, what have you done, where are you going. He was as didactic as ever, this time preaching that people don’t change—they grow. True to his word, I was not at all surprised that he hadn’t changed. To him, I was still the impressionable girl four years his junior and he my wise, intellectual tutor.

I sensed resentment. Something in his tone, really, signaled that the age difference was not his only concern; that is to say, he was threatened by more than a young girl—no, woman—who could engage him substantively.

He admitted, over the purchase of gelato, that he resented me. He resented me because while he had endured four years of Mechanical Engineering and Plan II classes, it wouldn’t matter what I was doing. My English Honors major could have been a degree in glitter and ponies for all he cared. He insisted that I could walk into the Honors Day ceremony and any Pre-Med bastard with an eye for the aesthetic would love to make me his trophy wife and I’d be free of labor my entire life. This to-be hubby could hire me a nanny, maid, and cook, all of whom would work daily as I pushed my designer-clad baby in a pricey carriage while sporting the latest labels. He contended that I was wasting my time and energy when I could easily be riding the coattails of a man, a man who was working so hard in order to have a beautiful and unproductive woman at home.

I don’t think it’s radical that I don’t want that lifestyle. I don’t think it’s extremist that I want to buy a Fendi bag with a credit card that I’m responsible for paying off for the sheer delight of knowing that I’m responsible for my reward. I am a feminist. I shave my legs, I don’t hate men, and I’m not particularly militant because that’s not what feminism is. I believe that women deserve to progress—no more, no less.

But feminism, he furthered, has been obsolete since women won the right to vote and even more useless since women were allowed in the work place. I blame this ignorant view on his upbringing—to me, everything you know and feel about women has everything to do with the women you’ve known in your life.

I grew up under the watchful guise of one of the fiercest women I know. Even at 18, I’m petrified at the idea of her wrath and will consider myself under her jurisdiction always. Growing up, my father was often away (as many fathers in the oil industry have been), so my mother was the one to warn me against boys, review my workbook completions, and correct my ill behavior, all while stirring some pot or the other. She was an English major too, partially raised by nuns who were the kind who insisted that even being on your deathbed was no excuse to miss an exam, and partially raised by a woman whose values she applies to life daily.

My sister took after our mother’s fierceness (sans Tyra Banks) with a vengeance. Having been subjected to high school in Kuwait, she defied all expectations in a misogynist culture and graduated as Valedictorian, rising above her male peers and administrators who told her she couldn’t do it. But now, as she prepares to graduate from Georgetown with a JD¹, all our South Asian community cares about is when she is getting married and, subsequently, when she will be birthing children galore.

These asinine inquiries directed to wards my family instill in me a mixture of confusion, resentment, and embarrassment over the presence of a double standard. Why is it that women are encouraged to pursue university education and high-powered careers, but are told not to do so at the expense of creating a family?

An Indian friend I had in high school was one of the most sheltered people I’ve ever known. Her parents kept her under house arrest to spend three years in academic solitude. Nobody really knew this until senior year when she was ranked in the top ten of one of Texas’s most prestigious public high schools but was still confused about the birds and the bees. She moved on to Rice University to pursue a degree in neuroscience or some other complex scientific field. I asked her one day what she would do with her name-brand education later, and she said quite nonchalantly, to my disturbance, that her parents expected her to do the “right thing” and get married and that would be that.

According to my father, the “right thing” would be far from that medieval notion. He begs to me pursue a top law school every chance he gets , so I can be self-sufficient, from which I derive that I will be free of having to rely on a man.

But this hypocritical notion of progress—that is, the idea that we as South Asians are progressive because we encourage our daughters to go to Harvard, med school, and better yet Harvard Med—is precisely where there is still a need for feminism , especially in the South Asian American community. We need it because of this double standard in which the order of expectations for men and women are different. For men, it’s college, work, wife, kids; for women, college, husband, kids, and maybe work.

I am ashamed. Aunties, don’t you want your daughters to save themselves from the problems that you yourselves have faced? How can you want your daughters to be complacent when all the other women around them are striving for success?

I am, proudly, a self-righteous young woman who shudders to think what would have happened had I been raised with an ambitious brother instead of a successful sister. Perhaps then I would have made any discrepancies in our successes accountable to gender. The aforementioned friend with whom I shared such a provocative meal admitted that having been an only child with a bread-winning father and truly passive mother accounts for his views on women. Likewise, I believe that another Indian friend of mine who has an engineer father, CPA² mother, and analyst sister would not be so respectful of women if it were not their shoes (of the heel and non-heel variety) he needs to be filling.

But I was raised in a house where the male to female ratio was 1 to 3, and the most empowering conversations were over hot stoves and our steaming convictions. So I’m taking it upon myself to say what so many daughters and sisters cannot and have not. Eliminate the double standard and push your self-purchased designer stroller on your own terms.

Footnotes:

¹ JD - Juris Doctor -Professional Doctorate in American Law

² CPA -Certified Public/Practicing Accountant

Photo Courtesy: Brice Canonne

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