Members of the Women Writers? Forum of Assam demonstrate against the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act in Manipur outside the Assam Assembly

Politics of patriarchy

Nagaland chief minister Neiphiu Rio recently announced that the state cannot afford to set up a women?s commission. Like a typical gender-blind patriarch, he added flavour to his argument by saying that the northeastern states do not need a Women?s Commission as the societies here are egalitarian and there is no gender discrimination. Rio is one of many who believes that a woman is the reigning queen of the kitchen and is happiest serving food to her family and spending her life as a housewife (read domesticated animal). Women?s commissions seek to extricate the woman from her role as a captive slave of the kitchen and help bring her resourcefulness and discernment into the realm of politics and economics, areas which men have usurped for centuries.

On second thoughts, one cannot really blame Rio. His counterparts in other states did not set up the women?s commissions out of a sense of commitment to women?s empowerment. They were all forced to do so by women?s groups who rose in arms and protested against their government until they achieved their goals. Nagaland has been in a state of conflict for almost 60 years, throughout which women have borne the brunt of the conflict. Security forces and militants have mercilessly raped them. They have lost their husbands, sons and brothers to the low-intensity warfare. There is a proliferation of female-headed households due to the high divorce rates and because men have become casualties to the conflict.

Gender game

The very fact that there is not a single woman in the Nagaland Assembly should tell the true story of Nagaland politics. Men would find it hard to contest and win elections if their wives did not supervise the kitchen and saw to it that the volunteers were fed and looked after. Men will of course spend their time in the sitting room discussing strategies for winning elections. They forget that if at any point of time the kitchen mistress decides to pack her boots and call it a day, they would be lost in more ways than one. They would not even get their morning tea as they would not know how to make it.

This is where the understanding of gender is so important for modern statesmen. The word ?gender? in modern feminist jargon goes beyond the realms of masculine and feminine gender which we learnt during English grammar lessons. Gender is a cultural construct of male and female as opposed to the biological one. Culture defines the roles that men and women should play both in their homes and outside it. However, since gender is a cultural construct, like culture, it is not constant. Neither is it sacrosanct. History has proved that it is possible to change the gender-defined roles of both the sexes. Biology, on the other hand, compels a woman who is the ?not-so-better? half to go through the pangs of menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, breast-feeding et al.

Endless drudgery

Unfortunately for a woman, after she has completed the biological process of child-bearing, she is pushed into the gender role of washing, feeding, educating and cooking until the child grows up into a woman or a man. But that is not the only role women play.

In all the tribal states where the slash-and-burn method of cultivation is practiced, the presence of women as farmhands is mandatory. Planting, weeding and harvesting of paddy are all done by women. They also fetch water and firewood, sometimes from a great distance. On them lies the burden of caring for the elderly and the sick. Women are multi-taskers and they do their work incredibly well. In tribal cultures, a man will not sweep or wash utensils or clothes. He thinks it below his dignity to cook.

Child-rearing is seen as an exclusively female role. You do not usually see men holding feeding bottles or changing diapers. Nor do men get up at night to serenade the crying babies. The excuse is that men cannot lose sleep because they have to work the next day. But doesn?t the woman have to work too? Yet when the children grow up and become ?somebody,? a man proudly proclaims that so and so is his son or daughter, as if he solely underwent the process of child-bearing and nurturing. Does this not sound familiar? If you begin to add up all that the woman does, a man?s work would seem relatively easy.

Bottle-feeding, nappy changing and baby-sitting are not a woman?s responsibility alone. Caring for and nurturing a child is the joint responsibility of both the parents, never mind if the man is working and the woman is a full-time home-maker. Home-making, incidentally, is a 24x7 job which is yet to be defined as ?work?. When we employ maidservants, we pay them good money for their work. We also benignly put up with their tantrums and their slipshod work for fear that any complaint will be met with severe tongue-lashing followed by a quit notice.

Home truths

Housework has its own politics. They say that participatory democracy begins at home. When a woman gains some leisure her husband loses it. Hence there is always a stiff resistance by men to allowing women any leisure. Housework is monotonous and repetitive. It kills creativity because all that housewives talk about is food and recipes and the burden of rising prices.

It is precisely because housework is so boring that a man would rather repair a cabinet or fix a fuse rather than wash dishes. Men think that housework is degrading. They never apply that same argument when it comes to their wives doing the same job. In one sense therefore all men are schizoids as they are divorced from the reality of maintaining life. Hence they play games with life.

On the other hand, a homemaker, often referred to as a housewife, must put up with the tantrums of the entire family. Besides ensuring that food is ready on the table, the clothes well-ironed and the house is neat and clean, she also has to look after the kids who are entirely dependant on their mother.

The task of tutoring school-going kids very often falls on the mother, ostensibly because the father loses his temper too fast and kids end up being terrorised and forget what they have learnt.

What a convenient excuse for the man to put his feet up, read newspapers or watch television, while his wife slogs at the kitchen, and the children memorise their lessons at the dining table. In fact, dining tables these days double up as study tables because mothers need to supervise their kid?s studies and they have no time to do that away from the kitchen.

Political freedom

With so much of a domestic burden, can a woman come out of her home and take part in politics? Men will of course say ?no?. Their argument is that it is a woman?s sacred duty to run the home and to see that the children do not go astray. And if children do stray, the blame rests on the mother for having failed to serve as an example of virtuosity. But there are examples of courageous women who managed to circumvent the cumbersome process of being feminine and have stepped out to claim their rights. At the moment they are in the minority. That is why we need women?s solidarity groups to help get women into politics.

Talking about political empowerment of women is meaningless because no man would volitionally allow that to happen. Women themselves must claim the political space they have allowed to remain vacant and empower themselves.

The voices of women?s organisations in Nagaland have remained mute. Except for Rosemary Dzuvichu who raised the banner of protest against Rio?s patronising statement, the others seem to have taken it lying down. Women in Nagaland must be able to make policies that are more humane and reduce the number of those who tend to stray into drugs and alcoholism. They must be in active politics and the setting up of a state commission for women is the first step in this long struggle.