The Disappearance By Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

According to Hinduism the female was created by Brahman as part of the duality in creation, to provide company to men and facilitate procreation, progeny and continuation of family linage. The Vedas suggest that a woman’s primary duty is to help her husband in performing obligatory duties and enable him to continue his family tradition. Her primary duty is to give birth to his children and take care of them. Hinduism is a predominantly male dominated religion. Woman play a secondary role. The situation is gradually changing. It is difficult to draw generalizations about the status of present day Hindu women because of society is complex. In general, life in cities is much different from life in the rural areas. Those who live abroad live in different conditions than those who live in the country. Yet, we have ample indications that women are still subject to many restrictions and disabilities in rural area as well as urban areas. The financial independence of woman and the education levels of the family play an important role in this regard. Women in urban areas face numerous challenges in their professions and personal lives. But overall, life is better for them compared to the past. Love marriage outside of the caste or community are scorned and sometimes the couples are killed or excommunicated by the elders in the family or village. Widows can now have a life of their own and even remarry. They draw a lot of sympathy. But

Upper caste women may undergo dramatically different experiences than lower caste women. For example, lower caste women do not practice sati, because it is mostly prevalent among upper caste women. Thus, they may not comprehend how sati may function as a tool of control of female sexuality. On the other hand, upper caste women may not comprehend the experiences of widow-remarriage as practiced by lower caste women. Granted that, Mohanty makes a great point by asserting that it is impossible to analyze and treat Indian women as an ahistorical and monolithic group of people. Indian women are heterogeneous, and significant attention must be given to the components of race, class, imperialism. Furthermore, given their background, many of Western feminists in India were supporters of the colonial government and saw themselves as agents of the civilizing mission. They believed that Indian women were incapable of speaking for themselves, and thus were also incapable of liberating themselves. They disregarded that Indian women were victims of both British imperialism and the patriarchal Indian society, and thus the oppression they faced greatly differed from that of Western women. If anything, western women participated in their

Yet in America, it is quite different. As stated by Paul Hockings, the Indian culture believes that a woman must obey the men in their lives in a certain order. For instance, a woman should obey her father first, next her husband, and finally her son. The head male of the family, whether it is the father, husband, or son is in charge of the entire family. The head male is also important in arranging marriages. The head male of the family, has to compensate or receive compensation at the time of a child’s marriage. In the Indian culture, the primary purpose of a marriage is to bring families together. It is usually not done out of love or romance. If a marriage is not approved or arranged by the parents involved, then the act is frowned upon. In America, marriages are not typically arranged and people do not receive compensation during a

According to Lynn Gehl, women who marry outside their own community lose their status within those boundaries and will not be able to regain their original level of influence upon transferring to their husband’s community. The Indian Act marginalized women and made them an outsider within their own culture (Ghel, 2000, p.67). This oppression stripped women of their rights socially, politically and economically and made them dependant people by European standards. The Indian Act took away the voice and influence aboriginal women had in their communities by creating a sexist environment dominated by their male counterpart. Taking away the traditional equality and replacing it with a male-supremacy frame of mind disenfranchised women of their right to fully participate in decision making processes within the family.

The book mentions about the mental confusions, insecurities and the effort to understand their spouses. The writer has expressed simple and usual emotions of a womanhood, fidelity and family. A tint of Indian culture is reflected in each chapter indicating how a bridegroom and groom select each other, the nature of an Indian woman and how she takes up challenges in her life, reconciling the roles of a daughter, an ex-wife, a wife and a mother, the strength of the human spirit and their passion to survive and fight for a good life. It also features the distinctive qualities of Indian relatives highlighting their interest in an individual’s marital life and how offensive it is to the society to find a married woman talking to an unknown man. The book also focuses on the pain of a mother to see her unhealthy

In the typical Indian family, gender construction manifests itself especially in the roles of men and women in the household. As Judith Lorber so aptly put, “gender is a process of creating distinguishable social statuses for the assignment of rights and responsibilities” which in turn, creates the social differences that define a “man” and “woman” (Lorber). It is these differences that are used to construct and maintain an established gender order within the family. In the conventional Indian family, the order is such that the roles of the women in the household revolve around the roles of the men. This structure was something that I saw from an early age in my parents’ marriage. Though my parents defied the Indian norm of the arranged marriage, they still represented the quintessential model of an Indian couple in many other ways. My mother left her job to become a stay-at-home mom when I was about six years old. However, even before she left her job, she was implicitly expected by my father to shoulder most of the housework including cooking, cleaning, and caring for my older brother

Gender roles are the portrayal or demeanor learned by a person as appropriate to their gender, determined by the prevailing cultural norms. Currently many women and men are trying to escape the traps of society that force them into a precise “women” or “man.” Why are women who want to better the way they are, seen as wrong because they want to one-up men. To what extreme will culture go in order to manipulate women into believing they need to live by certain rules created by the thought that men are and will always be better than women. The goal of our research paper is to show the gender norms in each culture, and to inspire the readers regardless the gender to diminish the boundaries that gender roles, and society form and try to demand from an individual. We will first address communication between the genders, the gender norms in the Mexican culture followed by the Russian culture and the African culture. Then we will address the genders at work and home as well as the eyes of society. In many different cultures, the stereotypical aspect of how women should be, result in women being inadequate to express their true feeling and thoughts because of the fear of being dishonored, thought of as less and the fear of being less of a women than those that remain in the women stereotypes.

In the Indian society women were viewed similar to slaves, in the fact that they were not allowed to possess any property. All of “the wealth in which they earn is acquired for him to whom they belong” (“From The Laws of Manu” pg. 64). Women of the Indian society were also given away by their father in marriage, therefore, they were not given the privilege to choose their significant other. The Indian society viewed women as being a piece of property rather than a human being. A woman was also not allowed to independent from their father or husband.

This made men feel even more powerful, because women would listen to them and couldn’t do anything about it. “Linking women’s adaptability to their training as wives in their culture of origin (a logic that again caricatures such cultures as uniformly patri-archal), Mukherjee understands immigration through a marriage

In Trumpet, Jackie Kay engages with the distinctions and confusions between biological sex and constructed gender through the use of multiple narrators. Each character has their own views and confusions of gender and sex and their feelings towards this particular situation involving Joss Moody. There are characters whom believe that gender and biological sex are the same and others whom believe that there is more fluidity involving the relationship between the two, and believe that gender is constructed and not under a biological category. Biological sex is defined by our anatomy as female, male or intersex and it includes our internal and external sex organs, chromosomes and hormones. Whereas gender is the socially constructed roles, behaviours,

As women are expected to be a particular way depending on their culture, by challenging what is normal in their society they find a sense of individuality and in this case can be dangerous. As women find their true selves, they become stronger than a society’s masculinity can hold. Therefore, there are expectations that cultures place on women but not men to keep them in their place. These include the nurturing, doting wife and mother role or the polite, dainty and modest bachelorette role. When a woman breaks from this, she finds no need for a man to care for her, and can

This joint family, like any social organization, must face problems such as acceptable division of work, relationships and specific family roles. These familial relationships are managed on the basis of a secular hierarchical principle. In fact, all Indians owe respect and obedience to the head of the family, who usually is the father or the oldest man of the family community. In The Gift of a Bride: A Tale of Anthropology, Matrimony and Murder by Nanda and Gregg, it is explained that, “females [are] placed under the perpetual guardianship of first their fathers and elder brothers, then their husbands.” (Nanda & Gregg 22) Thus, all the spending decisions, studies and profession, or marriage, are exclusively the responsibility of the father after the possible discussions with the other men of the family. Age and sex are the basic principles of this hierarchical system. The eldest sons enjoy greater unchallenged authority than their cadets. Of course men have more authority than women, but older married women have an important role within the family. In fact, the authority of a woman depends on the rank of her husband inside the group. Traditionally, the wife of the patriarch rules over domestic affairs and has considerable power over the other women in the community, especially her daughters- in-law.

In this book, there is a Women’s Union, which has the best interest in helping these women within these societies. One of the most memorable examples is of a woman who talked about her ex-father in law at a meeting the Women’s Union held, and she discusses the hardship she encountered. “Her father in law had come home drunk and forced his way into the room where she was sleeping with her children. In front of her children, he has held the sharpened edge of a da to her throat and tried to pull off her sari. When she attempted to fight him off, he had gashed her arm with the machete, almost severing the thumb of her left hand. She had flung a kerosene lamp at him and his lungi had caught fire, giving him severe burns. For this she has turned out of her marital home, although her only offense was that she had tried to protect herself and her children.” (Ghosh, 76). This quote shows how the woman was punished and forced out of her own home due to protecting herself and her children. If she had not, this man had the intention to rape her. However, since it was her husband’s father, she was looked at for being in the wrong. One would think the father in law should be the one forced out of the home, due to being an obvious threat, but this is clearly not the case. Another example is how the Women Union took Kusum under their wing, attempting to protect her from

An analysis of example can be derived from the aforementioned discriminatory sexist roles in India that prior to globalization highly favored the male population verses the female population. The female population in India has previously been less than second class citizens. Indian women's cultural roles have been previously defined by traditional customs that are centuries old and no longer apply in this day and age. Previous to globalization, Indian women were to take total domestic responsibility. They were not allowed formal education as the majority of teachers and pupils were male, and the chances of a female remaining chaste was slim in those settings, and related to tradition, females

In today’s society, the imagery of men and women are portrayed in their different personalities. The ideal male is always characterized as being competent, stable, tough,