Wednesday, March 9, 2016

Washing clothes not a female domain


I am joining the Ariel #ShareTheLoad campaign at BlogAdda and blogging about the prejudice related to household chores being passed on to the next generation.

When I read about the Ariel contest on reducing gender prejudices and washing clothes my mind went back to my childhood when the ‘Dhobi’ used to come to our place to collect the laundry fortnightly and came back after 15 days to deliver the washed and pressed clothes. He and his wife took turns. It did not seem unusual back then that a man came to collect and deliver the laundry.  
And when we traveled past the river on the outskirts of our town both men and women could be seen washing heaps of clothes and drying them.
However when families became smaller and washing machines had not yet entered the household it was the mother or the ‘kaamwaali’ who washed the clothes along with the household chores which are considered ‘ womanly duties’.  And when the washing machines finally did enter the households it was still the women who did the laundry as with all the other chores. Even the ‘kaamwaalis’ were taught to operate the machine.
As I grew up I saw this transition and imbibed that indeed there are a set of different chores allotted to both men and women. I longed to outsource the laundry as it was time consuming and interfered with my free time. And I longed to go out with friends on the weekends.  But here I was stuck on Sundays with the cleaning and the laundry of the entire week.  
If I made any plans to go out with friends on Sundays I made sure I did the laundry on Saturday nights. (I work 6 days a week). It was always at the back of my mind that why the chores can’t be shared? Why these prejudices?
The society has defined separate roles for men and women and I learnt that these prejudices are imbibed and handed down from generations. There is nothing womanly about washing clothes and nothing manly about repairing the electric fuses in the house. These roles have been defined to suit the dominant ‘male culture’ with women at the receiving end. If my man washed the clothes it would not make him less manly. After all I go out and work.
And the Ariel share the load drive awakened my senses and I realized it’s time we women took up the challenge to oust these prejudices. There is no such thing as male domain and female domain.


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