Innocent Mothers, Dancing Girls
The latest arsenal in online gender wars is the "innocent mother,” often positioned against “dancing girls.” But what about the pyaar-hua-ikraar-hua before Mother India?
I love watching people dance. I think dance inherently brings a sense of joy with one’s body like few things can. If you’re dancing offline, I will join. If it’s online, I will watch. But it seems most of the Internet — or at least, men — don’t agree with me. Every other day there’s a video of women dancing in a college with the caption, “Look at our education standards” as if none of us have ever fought enthu first-years to watch a Western Dance Society perform in a dark, sweaty auditorium. That the public commons of the Internet is rife with sexism is not news. What is new is a stereotype to morally shame young women for being a little too free. And it’s a stereotype that pits feminists against mothers. The innocent mother, specifically.
From an ill-advised research rabbit hole, I found that this innocence can be broadly described thus – they care for and only think about the family, they don’t have any demands, and they know little about the world. But zoom in a little, and you find that innocence starts looking less like an adjective, and more like economics.
Look at the latest figures from time-use surveys from 2024 in India. Women spend 289 minutes in a day on unpaid domestic work, compared to 88 minutes by men. Apart from domestic work, if you look at caregiving activities – aka taking care of children and the elderly, or you know, being a mother – women spend 137 minutes a day. Men? 75 minutes.
These numbers play out in the families we know. Generations of women have spent a significant chunk of their lives being the anchor of their homes – tackling domestic work, in-laws, social responsibilities, and child rearing. In more cases than not, they were thrust into these responsibilities before they could establish their own identities. In this context, the much-touted “innocence,” is not a choice but an inevitability. If the expectation to be successful as a wife, and later as a mother, means spending your days in the care of others, where is the time to ask, “But wait, who am I?”
It's not as if those of who chose to work got away easy. Their careers came with the additional perk of “triple work” – ghar bhi, bacche bhi, office bhi. Earning money brought independence but also an additional dose of guilt. It didn’t matter that the children of working mothers grew up as decent, law-abiding, sensible adults. In an example of patriarchy being a full circle, these very adults are now young mothers who are being guilted in 2025 for using daycare.
Perhaps the biggest argument that even innocent mothers themselves rail against their “innocence” is in the children they raised. More and more women are joining colleges, with university enrollment seeing a year-on-year rise of 26% as compared to 3.6% for men in 2024. “Marriage penalty” is still very much a reality for women, sadly. But the more educated the woman is, the less likely she is to drop out of work after getting married. Across the world, and in India, women are choosing to marry later – giving themselves a chance to figure out who they are, and to try what it feels like to be an Imtiaz Ali lost-hero, instead of the in-love-heroine.
The thing with mothers is, it can be hard to think of them as whole beings before they became mothers. But the thing also is, of course they were. Before “innocence” in all its varied, complex, and patriarchal meanings took over our mothers’ personalities and made them paragons of virtues in our heads, they were girls. With likes, dislikes, ambitions, desires, and identity crises all their own.
Sometimes, that girl flashes through. Like in this reel, of a woman dancing on “Uyi Amma” with moves I can only describe in a cliché as smooth as butter.
Watching this video felt like a stern reminder to the feminists of my generation. It’s undeniable that our lives have the potential to look radically different from the lives of our mothers – in choices, possibilities, and freedoms. Which is why, our feminism needs to cross over this nonsensical binary of innocent mothers and immoral feminists, and like they say in Mumbai, thoda space banana padega.
We need to gently nudge this mask of “innocence” off. And see our mothers for the girls they once surely would have been.
We need to ask if they’d like a break, put on some loud dhinchak music, and then – do a little dance.
Thank you as always for reading. The first quarter of 2025 has brought with it life changes, which has meant a neglect of this Substack. However, I have looked at every notification of a new subscriber with gratitude. I would love to hear from you, so hit “Reply” if you have thoughts. If you liked reading this, send it to your mother, your partners’ mother, your friends’ mother, you get the drift. If you didn’t like reading this, send it to that one person who hates “Uyi Amma,” which truly is as catchy a song as they come.
I’ll write again, soon.
Well written piece.