Time to learn

I was born and brought up in the walled city of Delhi. Ours was a joint house hold where my father and mother lived with his uncle and aunt along with their son and three daughters. It was a big family indeed. We lived in that part of Delhi where the people were old fashioned and traditional to the core. In spite of this fact our family was quite surprisingly different in some ways. The biggest difference was that the men of our house believed in doing their own laundry. The women were strictly forbidden from washing the clothes of the men folk.

The initiator of this norm was my father’s uncle that is my grandfather. He was a great swimmer and practiced wrestling too. This involved the ritual of an oil massage which in turn resulted in his under garments to become stained with oil. He did not want any women of the house to even touch his clothes for the purpose of washing them. After he returned home from his swim he would take a bath and at the same time wash each and every cloth that he had worn. All the men followed suit and it was a daily practice for my father and uncle to wash their clothes at the time of taking a bath. The biggest advantage of this practice was that there was no clutter of any dirty clothes piled up. Also the women were saved from the additional burden of washing the clothes of the men.

When I grew up and got married I found that my husband too had this great habit of washing his clothes himself. Although my mother-in-law objected to this saying that since he was now married it was the duty of his wife to do his laundry. My husband simply smiled as he went on with the washing of his clothes. He told her that he may have got married but it would not bring any change to his years of long habit. He did not see any reason to bring any change in his routine of doing his laundry. Now my mother-in law had no option but to accept his decision.

Then I read about the survey conducted by a third party on the habits of doing house hold chores and specially laundry. The stats revealed that 2 out of 3 children take it for granted that house hold chores and laundry is a mother’s job. Majority of the men agreed that laundry is a women’s job. All this reminds one of gender bias and the prejudice which men have against women.

I am happy that I never faced this situation neither at my parent’s home and thanks to my husband nor after my marriage.

I am happy and relieved that Ariel and BlogAdda are taking the cause of women doing all the house hold chores and laundry all alone. They are inspiring the men to come forward and give a helping hand to their women by #ShareTheLoad.

 “I am joining the Ariel #ShareTheLoad campaign at BlogAdda and blogging about the prejudice related to household chores being passed on to the next generation.”