“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy its own way,” writes Tolstoy at the start of his famous novel Anna Karenina. We can say quite the opposite about the families in our contemporary society: unhappy families are all alike; every happy family is happy in its own way. And all this is because of girls. Why and how we shall try to briefly understand.

Our contemporary family is more or less extension of agrarian family that we have had for thousands of years. It has absorbed changes though grudgingly while retaining its core; patriarchy.

Patriarchy is a product of agricultural society. It is closely associated with rise of private property which assumed the form of a guiding principal and ethical norm. Private property is thus patriarchy’s bedrock. How to transfer property has been the issue. Since it was to be transferred to one’s kin the role of woman became crucial as she was / still is the lynchpin of the family structure. So she had to be controlled to ensure the legitimacy of one’s offspring. It’s an irony of history that woman who helped introduce agriculture that ensured surplus food production liberating humans from the uncertain gains of hunting and gathering became a victim of her own revolutionary achievement. She liberated the society from the food scarcity but got herself enslaved. She not only became a pawn in the game of private property but also turned into a piece of property that eventually became the honour of the family. The ethical mask she was forced to wear was a guise that concealed her real social function; to be a conduit for transferring property.

Woman became honour and honour needed to be protected with rules and norms, and with force when necessary.

Strangely, while being treated as honour of the family she was relegated to being its appendage having no more value than being perfunctorily functional; producing babies and raising them especially male children who would mostly inherit the property. To legitimise this injustice man invented myths regarding woman’s natural place and her purportedly defined natural role that touched two aspects of her being; physical and moral. Her physical being / body while being highly coveted by man was held in contempt as it was considered weak and fragile, and impure in certain days. That’s why, men still believe, it needs a male protector; father, brother and husband and at times lover. Her role in perpetuating the human existence is invariably underestimated. It’s taken for granted since it is thought to be natural. As to the moral side, all the moral/ ethical values which supported the notion of her as being less than what she is became part of the superstructure; a weakling in terms of moral. Hence she needs constant moral guidance.

‘Frailty, thy name is woman’ coupled with ‘woman, you easily yield to temptation’ has been a double-edged sword dangling over her head for thousands of years. But in recent times we can see things changing in ways visible and invisible. Modern education is one of the major drivers that has triggered the phenomenon. Notwithstanding our regressive syllabus, misogynistic academic ethos and reactionary teachers education has proved to have a liberating experience for our girls. Leaving home, going to school or college or university, to be away from the repressive parental gaze is something that builds girls’ self-confidence and facilitates their social mobility.

Educational and academic activities introduce the girls to a wider intellectual, and social world that broadens their vision which induces them to think as individuals independent of patriarchal dictates. A process of self-realisation makes them relatively intellectually alive, socially dynamic and culturally refined.

There is an increased realisation among girls that education is the key to their liberation in a tradition-ridden society. That’s why the rapidly increasing number of girls in educational institutions has threatened the status quo as the boys find it hard to compete against them. There has been, for example, a demand that girls’ admissions into public medical colleges be restricted. They outnumber the male students because they beat them when it comes to admission policy based on merit. The bulk of educated girls gets employed with education and health sectors. But their very presence creates a social and cultural crisis for the families as the norm is to get a girl married as soon as possible. Firstly, the education doesn’t allow the parents to marry off girl early. Secondly, after the education a girl becomes more ‘choosy’ as she refuses to tie the knot with the man chosen by her parents without her consent. The situation is having an impact on almost all the classes and their cultures.

Landed gentry finds it hard to marry off their educated daughters to their cousins who are usually imbecile school/college dropouts. So their traditional plans of keeping their agricultural properties in the family become uncertain. Farmers don’t have the luxury of owning big properties but they have strong caste bias and clannish ties. The problem for them is how to find suitable matches for their educated girls from their caste and clan. Urban middle classes face the same challenge. Thus the challenge the educated girls pose to the patriarchy have multiple implications for our society. 1, a large segment of our population that has been dormant hitherto is now in a process of self-understanding that would enable them to realise their potential challenging the male hegemony. 2, this newly enabled segment softly crosses caste and in some cases class barriers which have kept our society obnoxiously divided and have resulted in arresting our social, intellectual and cultural development. 3, it would change family culture and social norms by softening the gender differences. 4, it would help explode the myth of woman’s role manufactured by patriarchy when our girls join the productive force of the society which would emancipate them from the talons of gender oppression.

To sum up, the girls equipped with knowledge and skills are going to make our future different from what we traditionally thought it would be. So beware of girls; their emergence can be a threat to the man’s world.

A Punjabi folksong says girls are sparrows with a tenuous hold. Taufiq Raffat, our finest English poet, says “sparrows will survive.” Surely they would because they are tightening their hold on life. — soofi01@hotmail.com

Published in Dawn, September 23rd, 2024