Cool Women
Trad wife is boring old anti-feminist wine in an aesthetic bottle. But, its popularity with young Gen Z women in India reveals a failure of our feminist imagination.
When I was fifteen years old, I saw a really cool woman. I was on a plane with my family. She was sitting in a window seat in the aisle across from us. Alone. She was wearing a delicate shawl, wore glasses, and had her laptop open in front of her. Just before the flight took off, she requested the air hostess to bring her a glass of water. She then tied her hair, shut off her laptop, and looked outside the plane window.
This was at a time when air travel, a woman travelling alone, and laptops — all had a feeling of aspiration attached to it. The woman was both a promise of adulthood, and a sign that post-liberalised India really was on the brink of being a “superpower.” To a fifteen-year-old me, the woman was the ultimate cool — an independent, working, glamorous woman.
I suspect I am not the only one who would’ve thought like that. For women my age, growing up in middle class families in the late 1990s and early 2000s, getting a good job was the goal we worked towards. That it would bring freedom, money, and a fulfilling career was assumed. I saw my mother being brilliant at her job, take pride at work, and establish her own identity.
We were young girls who were brought to believe — at schools and in our homes — that we were as good, if not better, than the boys. So, we competed like that. We discovered passions that we thought we could make careers out of. We looked with shining eyes at high-achieving women; both Kalpana Sharma and Sushmita Sen were considered idols by different girls I grew up with. Reaching college, we roughly knew what careers we wanted. And the average take-home pay our pursuit of passion afforded us.
The question of “where’s a woman place?” seemed a little outdated even in circles away from my staunchly feminist ones. We knew financial independence held the key to living our lives the way we wanted. And after nearly a decade of working, I can say it was a promise that held. There still are fewer joys in life than buying something from your own money.
Which is why, I was taken aback when I saw a revert to traditional gender roles being talked of in hushed, aspirational tones by young women I would speak with. Especially, the idea of a trad wife.
The trad wife subculture, for the uninitiated, is basically a movement that believes women should go back to being mothers and homemakers, largely originating from influencers on social media platforms like Tik Tok and Instagram. They make aesthetic videos of baking a cake, or bringing up their children, and advocate for a lifestyle where men earn, and women — while being fully aware of their choices, we’re told — take care of their homes. Because, traditional gender roles serve “a purpose.” Because, if you have time, money, and a lifestyle that’s being financed by a man, is it really that much of a problem.
It’s all quite boring, yaar.
If you’re a feminist in India, the idea that we should take joy in only homemaking and childrearing is not a “redefined look at gender roles,” despite the aesthetic Instagram reels. It’s the patriarchy we know all too well. A big part of the feminist movement in India in the 1980s was centred around the rights of women to work, so really, we truly have been down this road. So, then why are these trad wife adjacent ideas of “marry rich men and never work a day,” or “I will make a pizza for my man even if he wants it at 3am” grabbing young Indian women’s imagination?
Where are their cool women?
One reason is, a genuine disillusionment with the idea of “work.” I love working with young people, because they are far more capable of taking an objective view of work and the benefits it brings. They have higher expectations from work, and no qualms about voicing those. But — and this is a crucial but — this sometimes means that they overlook the very real benefits that come with doing a job. Meaning, and money. Yes, money. We live in a capitalist world. And, a patriarchal one too. Having money of your own, that you can access when you want, and spend how you want it is still the safety net for women to make decisions you otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. This is not to say burnout isn’t a problem. Or, that the kids are lazy.
But there is a difference in the way that women in their thirties think of work from the way a woman in her early twenties does. For feminists of my generation to not acknowledge this, opens up the chasm of feminist goals rather than bridge it.
If a 21-year-old living in one of India’s biggest cities is thinking that the ultimate cool thing to do is to be in a place where she doesn’t have to earn her own money; we need to ask ourselves, why?
The second, and the bigger failure of imagination than the reluctance to bridge the generation divide, is how we keep asking — can women have it all?
The binary of a “woman at home” and a “woman at work” continues its hold on feminist imagination, because we aren’t thinking if there are perhaps other places for women to be.
Maybe she wants to be perpetually at play; just chilling. Maybe she wants to be in the world by travelling around; but not fully at home or work. Why are we, as feminists, subscribing to a binary that limits us, rather than using the powerful diversity of the feminist movement — especially in India — to dismantle those very binaries? We need all kinds of new, fun, kickass women to think of as cool. And the first step to do that is to to think of the women we want to be.
Sometimes, we could also take our cues from the young girls we once were. In January this year, I was on a flight. I was returning from Pondicherry having celebrated my thirty-first birthday with my best friend. I had landed the ultimate catch — there was no one sitting next to my glorious window seat. I wore my glasses, took out my Kindle, and suddenly was hit by a realisation that still makes me smile as I type this.
I’d done it. I was that cool woman who awed me all those years ago. So, here’s what I did next.
I switched off the Kindle. I asked for water. And then, I looked outside the plane window.
Students of the J.J School of Arts at a picnic, Bombay, 1937. This is one of Homai Vyarawalla’s earliest images published in the Bombay Chronicle. Courtesy the Homai Vyarawalla Archive / Alkazi Collection of Photography.
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I love this so much, thank you
Hmm.... it's interesting....even more so from the other side of 40 , when I realise that there comes a time in our journey arcs when we realise how hollow our aspirations were....
Your journey from an awestruck 15 year old to patting yourself for becoming one is hopefully part of an ongoing longer journey. It takes us longer than that to evolve and understand feminism and even more challenging to extract our real inner self and soul from media inflicted larger than life images of successful women. Each person's choice has to be understood in the context of the person's situation and vision, not through reductionist generalizations.
A lot can be said about women's agency to honour their choices , the reality beneath both the cool women and traditional women that needs to be understood case- wise, not in some glibly generalised manner but that would churn out another piece by itself.
Hope as a fellow sister, you take the comment in the spirit of open discussion and not otherwise.