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Its difficult for me to see how its difficult for women to push the realms of the domestic sphere are the back of her list of priorities and take up paid employment outside. Whether by social obligations or by choice, women I’ve seen are bound to small things like feeding the baby, doing the grocery, changing the cushion covers or even just ordering the maid around… men seem to leave it all unnoticed. Sometimes those sociological explanations on why women are so much less involved in the labour market make sense to me. Human Capital Thoery, women as slaves of the wage slave and Patriarchy are come alive in the lives of women I’ve met and seen and been with.    

My mother was twenty when she married my father, a young scholar who my maternal grandfather thought had a bright future and whose parents he thought had enough for his daughter to live comfortably. When my mother was pregnant with me, she was doing her bachelors in Science and with no domestic help and the view that its the woman’s duty to do the dishes, wash the clothes, cook, clean. It needs little guessing to say that she was overburdened and the whole idea of employment outside is out of question. Later dad went to cornell to do his MPhil and mom was momentarily employed as janitor in Cornell West Campus Dorms where again she did the cleaning, the sweeping, the wiping, the cleaning. If it was here, she’d probably even not do that. Then we moved back and after almost 8 years mom took a job again. This time as an office assistant at a Travel Agency which she quit two years after. The whole episode brings me to Sylvia Walby’s theory on Patriarchy… Patriarchy confines women to domestic roles and the patrirchal public sphere makes it such that Women prefer the comfort of the home to the harshness of the labour market which offeres them menial manual jobs.

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An aunt just did her masters in Nepali and has been wanting to teach wherever they’re ready to take her, to this, her neuro surgeon of a husband is rather unsupportive. It seems that the neuro surgeon requires his wife to be what Fran Ansley calls, “the taker of shit” by bearing all the burden of his household and work load. Her work in the houehold becomes a hidden tax to the owners of B and B hospital and the demands she puts to her husband as a housewife ( a washing machine, a bigger refrigerator, a sony cybershot), creates demand of the global capitalist goods… it all fits into thoery

I’m working with a woman who inspires me and scares me. what inspires me is her zeal to do her PHd no matter what and the way she finishes her job no matter how late she stays up to put her kid to sleep so that she can work or the fact that she’s even working. But what scares me is the way she’s lost job opportunities because of a pregnancy and the back breaking thesis on prison women she could not complete because of her marriage and her kid. It scares me to think how the Human Capital Theory though proved wrong by some sociologists comes to work.

 I guess individual cases could be fit into thoeries… but something makes me think that most lives of women do fit into thoeries and there are a few exceptions..