A Room of My Own

To the women of the modern age — 
I wish you self esteem so high you can still be humble. 
I wish you boundaries so firm you can still be kind. 
I wish you confidence so strong that you feel no need to weaponize your independence. 
I wish you competence so great you can share your wealth with others, assured in your ability to generate more. 
I wish for you to know the strength and grace of men once again. 
Most of all I wish you the humility to know when such things are being offered to you, and the wisdom not to mistake them for oppression.

There is something faintly tragic about the modern young woman who, standing in her own kitchen with love in her heart and joy in her labour, must wrestle with the suspicion that she is somehow her own jailor.

She is not abused. She is not neglected. Her marriage, by every honest measure, is a happy one. She married for love, not arrangement. Her husband is the primary provider. He pays the bills, yes, but he also folds the laundry and remembers to ask about her headaches and rubs her feet without being asked. And he does so without complaint or posturing. He does it because it’s their life. Shared, intertwined. It is, by any measure that predates the invention of the hashtag, a happy marriage. 

And yet—there it is. That voice. The one that whispers not in her husband’s tone nor in her own, but in the insidious language of the zeitgeist. The voice that tells her that, if she is to be found sweating in the kitchen while her husband reclines with a book, some injustice must be afoot. The arrangement is temporary—the woman will join him soon enough—but in that instant, the voice hisses: See? You are the one working. He is the one resting. You are the cook. He is the thinker. You are oppressed. 

It is the genius of modern ideological movements that they have succeeded in making guilt the companion of joy. A woman may choose to build a warm, fragrant, beautiful home, and yet the prevailing discourse will assign her not agency but false consciousness. The very word “choice” has been corrupted: it is permitted only when it conforms to certain pre-approved scripts. A woman may choose to climb a corporate ladder, to reject family, to deconstruct everything handed down to her—and this will be called liberation. But should she choose to embrace her domestic life, to devote herself as a free woman to the nourishment of a man she chose and children she birthed, then she is told, with patronizing certainty, that she has been duped.

One is reminded of the totalitarian practice of insisting that people deny the evidence of their own eyes or articulate their thoughts for themselves. What she sees—the small happiness of a well-cooked meal, the glow in her husband’s face, the peacefulness of a home where someone has taken the trouble to care—must be dismissed in favour of abstract notions about power structures and invisible shackles. The very concept of a woman happily engaged in her domestic world is treated like an elaborate lie she tells herself.

What makes this voice so insidious is not its volume but its familiarity. It doesn’t come from an obvious enemy. It comes from peers. From women she went to college with, from Instagram reels and “relatable” content, from the chirpily self-assured tones of podcasts hosted by women who seem constantly dissatisfied but relentlessly certain of their righteousness. These are not Mad Men-style patriarchs; they are the girls she grew up with, telling her now that unless she is engaged in struggle—preferably against something within the walls of her own home—she has forfeited her autonomy.

The ideology is rarely explicit. It is never, “Don’t cook.” It is, “Why are you the one cooking?” It is not, “Don’t love your husband.” It is, “Why does your identity revolve around your marriage?” It is not, “Don’t take pride in your home.” It is, “Are you sure your pride isn’t just a mask for submission?”

If she were to post a photograph of a home-cooked meal—let’s say, her grandmother’s recipe, lovingly prepared on a Sunday afternoon—she will receive two types of responses. From older women, perhaps a nostalgic comment. From her peers, thinly disguised concern. “Hope he’s helping too!” “Don’t forget self-care!” “Just make sure it’s not becoming a habit you’re stuck with.”

As if devotion is dangerous. As if love, when expressed through food or home, becomes an act of betrayal—not of one’s self, but of feminism, of ambition, of some larger narrative of womanhood we’re all apparently supposed to be upholding.

What results from this is not liberation, but paranoia. A woman who has the full measure of modern education, who is perfectly capable of independent thought, must conduct an internal tribunal against herself every time she places rice on the stove. And if she finds herself momentarily irritated—if her husband, having finished his chapter, stretches luxuriously in the air-conditioned bedroom while she stirs lentils—then the voice has its “Aha!” moment.

And God forbid she admits to being happy. There is no narrative for that anymore. To be content in married domestic life is to be dismissed. It is to be told, in effect, that you do not understand yourself. That you are, at best, simple. At worst, brainwashed. If the reader has not yet guessed, I am that woman.

Where once women were told by men what their place was, now we are told by other women where it must not be. The kitchen? A prison. The bedroom? A battlefield. The living room? A stage for performative egalitarianism. The only legitimate sites of identity, we are now told, lie outside: in the office, in the startup pitch, in the activism seminar. Marriage, especially a happy one, is now treated as a cave from which the real woman must emerge, blinking in the light, to discover her true self. What a strange contortion!

What has happened to us, that we have so thoroughly lost faith in the wisdom of ordinary love, in the unglamorous pleasures of tending to another, of building a home? We have turned skepticism into a virtue and warmth into weakness. To feel fulfilled in marriage is not progressive; to feel perpetually aggrieved, however, is fashionable.

What no one tells us women is how isolating this can be. I often feel I am speaking a language that has gone extinct. The word “grihastha” meant something once—a stage of life, not a trap. It acknowledged the sanctity of the everyday: of making a home, raising a family, working not merely for money but for a life worth inhabiting. But now, to share the stories of one’s grihastha life—be it about a lovingly ironed shirt or a warm cup of tea set beside your husband’s book—is to risk being seen as unserious. 

And yet, I do not feel lost. In fact, it is precisely when I am engaged in these tasks that I feel most anchored. The work of the home, when done with love, becomes not drudgery but devotion. And yet, even I, with my articulate thoughts and reflective habits, must fight the voice in my head that isn’t my own. 

But when I finish the housework and return to the same cool room, when my husband smiles at me and sets the table without needing to be asked and asks me how my day was, I win over the voice once more. I remember who I am and what I believe. I remember that my husband has his own sweaty moments too—after long hours at work, after the slog of an hour-long commute, or when he stands under the harsh sun fixing the broken water tank so I won’t have to bathe with a bucket again. I remember that the kitchen, far from being a cage, is a room of my own. A room where the women of my family once stood, preparing meals full of warmth and sustenance, showing me how it is indeed possible to establish a happy association with the hearth.

And if, in the end, I do succeed in vanquishing that voice entirely—and I like my chances—it will be because my husband’s unselfconscious masculinity helped me to embrace my own femininity without shame or suspicion. Because he led with steadiness when I faltered, spoke plainly when the noise in my head drowned out my better judgment, and endured, with admirable patience, my inevitable lapses into doubt and borrowed grievance. If I have known peace, it is thanks not to the disembodied chorus of well-meaning sisterhoods urging me to reclaim what was never stolen, but to a man who did not see love as a contest and who bore the cost of my internal war without ever charging me for it. In the final accounting, I owe my happiness not to the prevailing orthodoxy of my generation, but to the one person it would have me regard with suspicion. The irony, I suppose, is almost too perfect.

Image Source: Julie and Julia (2009)