As a wife, we need encouragement and support from our husbands during our quest to step up and be the women we want to be.
The path to achieving success becomes easier if we are blessed with a supportive husband – Indra Nooyi, Nirmala Sitharaman, Kiran Majumdar are just the examples.
But, unlike these famous and successful women, some of us are still stuck with husbands who live with the regressive thought that their educated wives should only be cooking and taking care of household chores.
And one such well educated yet regressive man took to social media to seek suggestions on how to stop letting her educated & ambitious wife from joining back the workforce after becoming a mom!
This man, who proclaimed to work with TCS, shared on TCS Confessions – a community for TCS employees to share confessions:
“I am a father of two kids and happily married. Working in TCS. My wife used to work in TCS aswell. We met in TCS. I didn’t want her to work after marriage. But she did. We fought. After our first kid with lot of coaxing she stopped. When our 1st kid was 4 years old she said she wants to join back. So to stop her I planned our 2nd kid. Now that kid is around 3.
And I can sense that she wants to do some management or analytics course. I see browsing history in her laptop every night. I am sure she would someday ask me if she can do this and later join some job. I don’t want that. I want her to raise my kids; look after parents.
So for time being we relocated out of India for TCS onsite. Here she can’t have a maid also to help her so she is busy with kids and maintaining my house and when my parents visit every months she has to take care of them.
I want suggestions how to stop her from having aspirations to work again. I love her. I don’t want to hurt her. But i think a wife should be raising kids and looking after the family at the end of the day. This job and all can be of interest for sometime.”
After reading this if you don’t feel disgusted and disheartened, then probably you are part of the problem.
In a country like ours, where women are struggling hard to shatter the age-old regressive thinking, this post by an educated man strips naked the ugly mentality of our society.
Women are just good for taking care of family and kids. Educated and ambitious women need to succumb their aspirations and give in to the decisions of her male family members.
While this husband makes us hang our head in shame, it’s heartening to see many women coming forward to criticize the sexist and male chauvinist thought process.
And it’s not just women who criticized this thought process. Some of the balanced men also came out strongly against this medieval mentality and supported the wife.
In our society today, where women face brutal abuses – both mentally and physically, it is important to strongly protest against and break this age-old thought process. Women today have proved their mettle and all they want is to not be stopped from achieving their dreams.
At I For Her, we stand with all these women who are battling all the odds and creating their own identity. We want this message to go out loud and clear to people like this husband:
“You’re not God! So, stop acting like one and let your wife live her dreams. If you don’t, she might just turn in Kaali and snatch away what is rightfully hers”