On Selling “Womanhood” to Young Women
My mother grew up in a household where obedience was not merely praised but enshrined. Parental authority was the first principle and the final argument; deviation was a breach in the natural order. A “well-behaved” daughter was considered not only virtuous but complete. Dreams, especially for women, were not outlawed but still exiled, kept at the margins like inconvenient truths one pretends not to hear.
After her college education — lauded in theory, rendered meaningless in practice — she entered a soft-edged captivity typical of her time. No chains, no raised voices, just a steady, suffocating insistence that a woman’s sphere ended at the perimeter of her home. The world outside was treated not as hostile but irrelevant, a place that existed for men and newspapers and public announcements. One simply did not step out unless escorted by permission, purpose, and propriety. A woman with a profession was a breach of decorum to a system that did not need to punish because it had perfected the art of expectation.
Marriage shifted the axis of her life. My father, unburdened by the micro-orthodoxies of her parental home, saw no danger in a woman possessing her own horizons. With his encouragement she resumed her education, learned to drive, and began to work. She later said, without bitterness but with the relieved perplexity of someone who had avoided a narrowing fate, that her in-laws were more “liberal” than her parents — liberal in the older, more capacious sense: permissive of human expansion.
When I was a child, she flooded the house with books. They multiplied across surfaces like a benign contagion, nestled into cupboards, teetering on tables, forming miniature cityscapes on bookshelves. She read as though reclaiming stolen years. Perhaps she sensed that language had the power to unlock interior worlds. Perhaps she wanted to ensure that I would never grow up starved of curiosity. She encouraged me to think, to question, to refuse the meagre offerings of circumstance. Most importantly, she offered what she herself had been denied: the freedom to choose among possibilities.
She spoke very little of “patriarchy”. Perhaps that was an accurate word. All I know is that she moved through the world like someone who had once seen a locked door and could never forget the sight of it.
And yet, narratives of liberation must be handled with care. Freedom can easily become a sentimentality, a story polished for retelling rather than lived as a practice. The memory of imprisonment can outlast the imprisonment itself, creating a romance around struggle that sometimes obscures the present reality. The self that rebels can become so attached to the drama of rebellion fails to notice when the walls have receded.
There are doors in this world. Some people pass through them without ceremony, hardly aware of the hinges. Others must claw and scrape for entry. My mother had to rattle the door, pick its lock, and negotiate her way into an expanded existence. I, by contrast, found the same door standing slightly open. My task was not to force it but simply to walk through.
It took adulthood, with its financial anxieties, accumulated responsibilities, and sudden reversals, to understand that crossing a threshold is not always triumph but an initiation. Freedom, once exercised, becomes indistinguishable from duty. When I became the one who earned, who steadied the house, who tended to the fragile scaffolding of family life, I discovered that what my mother called rights, I would have to call responsibility. What a blessing that was! One inherits possibility only to transform it into labour.
There comes a time in every young adult’s life when they are tempted to adopt the available vocabulary of grievance. The language is seductive, almost theatrical: glass ceilings, internalised misogyny, generational trauma. These terms do name genuine phenomena, but they also function, in the wrong hands, as ready-made scripts. Borrowed language can make ordinary disappointments look like heroic struggles and routine frustrations like evidence of systemic conspiracy. One’s failures suddenly acquire grand explanations; one’s victories acquire an aura of resistance.
I found myself unable to speak that language. It felt both derivative and dishonest. I had not been wronged by the world. I had simply met it. To frame my difficulties as structural betrayals felt like an insult to those, like my mother, whose constraints had been real, not rhetorical.
More dangerously, grievance would have stripped me of agency under the guise of empowerment. If history or society or one’s family is responsible for every limitation, then one becomes a spectator in one’s own life, a puppet whose strings have been replaced by indictments. Such a worldview offers absolution but at the price of adulthood.
One of the understated responsibilities that falls upon women is the responsibility of presenting womanhood to the next generation as a condition worth inhabiting. In contemporary discourse, this task has become unexpectedly complex. Public narratives about gender often oscillate between triumphalist empowerment and chronic grievance, leaving little room for the textured realities in between. Within many households, daughters grow up overhearing accounts of womanhood framed primarily as a sequence of obstacles—patriarchy, unpaid labour, invisible burdens and the erosion of personal time. These concerns are not trivial, yet the emotional tone in which they are transmitted matters. When a girl’s earliest exposures to adult femininity are saturated with frustration, she learns to approach her own future with suspicion. Even in circumstances where her options are far broader than those her mother once had, she may internalise the idea that to become a woman is to enter a domain defined by constraint. The effect is subtle but durable: a young person unconsciously inherits not only her mother’s memories but also her mother’s mood.
My mother, who had lived through constraints far more complex than mine, did not hand down the comfort of complaint. She gave me something more austere and ultimately more useful: the habits of thought and the expectation of action. Her life demonstrated a truth older than any ideological framework: that freedom is not merely the absence of constraint but the presence of clarity, will, and courage.
She did not ask that I admire her journey. She asked, instead, that I continue it. Not loudly, not resentfully, but with the conviction that adulthood consists not in declaring one’s oppression or one’s liberation, but in the daily, unglamorous practice of choosing, and then bearing the weight of those choices. Perhaps this is the form of inheritance least visible to the world and most consequential to the self: not the bequest of suffering, nor the bequest of grievance narratives, but the bequest of open doors.
And that is what rounds the circle: the recognition that my mother’s freedom and mine are neither identical nor oppositional, but successive acts in the same unfolding human project, the project of becoming, with whatever materials one is given, a person capable of seeing clearly, acting bravely and above all, telling the truth about one’s life.
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