Book review: None of the pleasure, all of the guilt

In the early Nineties, Sudha Menon was living her dream. Married to her college sweetheart, she was working hard to prove herself as a journalist in Bombay and didn’t think twice before taking up challenging assignments, even when she was pregnant. Life was a breeze, until she became a mother. Then came guilt. A mother’s guilt. Instead of challenging patriarchy and its prescribed gender roles, Menon embraced the new-found guilt and, more than two decades later, decided to write a book about it. In Devi, Diva or She-Devil: The Smart Career Woman’s Survival Guide, guilt is the hero.

The book is a compilation of interviews Menon has conducted over a period of time. It has anecdotes from the lives of a number of accomplished women, including Olympian boxer Mary Kom, actor Lilette Dubey, India’s first female sports journalist Sharda Ugra, film director Farah Khan, Unilever’s head global of human resources Leena Nair. The book, its cover claims, “will help the contemporary Indian woman negotiate the professional world”. It talks about labels, and claims to challenge them. It may sound relatable. It’s not.

“This book is about the labels women are given. ‘Devi’ is the domestic goddess who keeps a perfect house with lavender-scented cushions and gourmet food. ‘Diva’ is the woman who has it all. ‘She-Devil’ is the boss at the workplace who’s a bully and hard-to-please — women are always being labelled,” Menon said in an interview to an English daily recently.

The book, seemingly out to break stereotypes about women in leadership roles, sadly ends up making new ones while reiterating the ones that exist. In the preface, Menon bares her heart to us, recalling the struggles she faced as a young mother. The book and has many other successful women talk about their own professional and personal hardships.

While the author has done a decent job in getting all these successful women to open up and share their stories of struggle, the accounts, while individually entertaining and brave, read the same. Guilt is their constant companion. And these are women at the top of their game, with unlimited resources at hand. They can hire full-time care for the child, buy breast pumps to store their milk and don’t have to restrict themselves to their homes.

Though the lives of all these successful women are laced with mother’s guilt, the book doesn’t, for a moment, question or even wonder where this guilt comes from.

It comes, of course, from centuries of oppression, from years of social conditioning that tells young girls that their ultimate goal in life is to have a perfect family complete with kids and a providing husband. Which is why even today parenthood means different things to men and women. While for modern men it means one-month paternity leave, for women it means giving up on their career.

When Menon could not take the guilt of having to leave her daughter at her parents’ as she went to work, she quit her full-time job and settled for a work-from-home arrangement. “The flip side, and there is always one, is that I lost out on the big career moves... it slowed down my career growth considerably because I simply could not switch jobs”, Menon writes in the book.

That I started reading this book on International Women’s Day is plain ironic. The same day Mira Rajput — whose only claim to fame is being married to actor Shahid Kapoor — created an uproar on the Internet when, while trying to defend her choice to be a stay-at-home mother, she spoke disparagingly of working mothers.

“I am a homemaker and wear that label with pride... I can raise my daughter, I can be a good wife and I can set my house the way I like. I love being at home and love my child. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I wouldn’t want to spend one hour with Misha and then rush off to work. Why did I have her? Misha is not a puppy. I want to be there for her”, Mira said.

Sudha Menon, more than two decades ago, did the opposite. She went back to work three months after she had a child. And while these two women may lay claim to different flavours of feminism, they have one thing in common: choice. Both of them chose to do what they did with their lives. But for lakhs of ordinary women who are not born into privilege and never had a choice, these two are role models. And when role models endorse patriarchy, in different forms — one by looking down at working mothers, the other by not questioning gender roles — they set the fight for equality back by a few decades.

For a woman of Menon’s stature to go all out endorsing patriarchy is disheartening in the least. We should be raising our daughters to be free-thinkers, so that they can demand to be treated fairly, at home and outside, instead of teaching them how to cope with the guilt they’re meant to feel every time they take a decision that takes them away from home.