Reclaiming her time

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Recently, I watched a video made by a content creator. It showed a woman and her husband, a homeopathic doctor. The man said he had not wanted an engineer or a doctor for a wife; he had wanted a housewife and had married her despite her “only being 12 th pass”. The woman said her dream was to achieve a lot in life and become independent. “When the kids become independent, I will stand on my own feet,” she added.

The video generated quite a buzz, with many feeling sorry for her that she was going to wait for several more years to fulfil her dreams. As the Nobel laureate Anne Carson writes in her poem, ‘Time passes time’: “Time passes oh boy. Time got/ the jump on me yes it did.”

Sometimes, women are married off early and sometimes girls are married off before they become women. In this piece, Abhinay Desphande writes about how the practice of child marriages continues in Telangana. The girls say they enjoy school but they are forced into marriages due to their family’s financial constraints. He writes, “...Some become mothers while they are children themselves.” These girls don’t even get the chance to figure out what their ambitions are, let alone pursue them.

While many girls and women have little choice, struggle within unhappy marriages, or feel tethered to their responsibilities, there are also more women, especially in urban areas, who are finding ways to buy more time for their own dreams: by postponing marriage so they can focus on their careers, by freezing their eggs or choosing not to have children, or by staying single to travel, start small businesses, write, or work for causes they believe in. I’m in my late 30s, and my women friends are all at a different stage of life. These are women with some level of privilege.

But even women with privilege struggle in other ways with the swift passage of time. For instance, there is still an expectation that women should look young. When actor Katrina Kaif stepped out a few weeks ago for an event, she was mercilessly trolled online, including by middle-aged men with pot bellies, for her postpartum body. Women who refuse to dye their hair are trolled too; a piece in The Guardian noted that going grey can come at a cost. The consequences of ageing go beyond appearance: research by Ian Burn, an economics professor at the University of Liverpool, found that age discrimination in recruitment in the U.K. begins at least 10 years earlier for women than for men.

Women resist all these expectations in different ways. In Maharashtra’s drought-prone regions, women who lost their husbands to suicide are refusing to remarry, reports Radheshyam Jadhav.