HOUSEWIFE: THE WORD THAT DESERVES BETTER DEFINITION

Let’s move to an imaginary class room situated in the rural region of the South Indian state of Karnataka. A teacher enters the classroom with a bunch of papers.

- Vignesh S G

There are not less than fifty students in the class. The teacher distributes the papers among the students. The papers require the students to share the occupation of their parents. The majority of them enthusiastically fills the column which requests the students to share the occupation of their fathers. The teacher watches confusion in many faces, when he asks the students to fill the column which requests the students to share the occupation of their mothers. He tells his students to write ‘house wife’ if your mothers do not have any specific job. For the students, it is a new term. The majority of them happily uses the term. The politics of ‘house wife’ begins that moment.

If you think deeply, you will also get to know that like those children you have also picked the term ‘house wife’ involuntarily. The term has remained among us silently. We have mistakenly let the term remain unquestioned for decades. Why we have not yet raised any challenge against the term? Why we have let our children do the same mistake we have done?

The answer is simple. A large section of us is careless and carefree, especially about those things which matter to the women population of the country. We need to change that attitude.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court of India, through a recent judgement, has showed us indirectly on how we should handle the politics around the term ‘house wife’.