No your honour, it's not the 'duty' of the wife to do the housework

Take one step forward, slide two steps back. That unfortunately seems to be the pace at which reforms in women’s rights are progressing in India. It took a brutal gangrape of a medical student to bring molestation and rape into the public eye. Our Parliamentarians made stirring speeches calling for harsh punishment for rapists, and angry citizens rejoiced when a sessions court judge handed the death sentence to the four men convicted of raping her. [caption id=“attachment_1155675” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representional image: Reuters[/caption] Later, Home Minister Sushilkumar Shinde addressing a Chief Minister’s conference on matters of national concern, spoke of the need to change Indian perceptions of women and their role in society. Given a stunning judgement delivered by a Bombay based family court, he has a long way to go. According to this report in DNA: A family court while hearing a divorce case noted that a woman not doing household work and insisting the husband hire a domestic help or asking the mother-in-law to do the work amounts to mental cruelty to the husband.  The petitioner also alleged that his wife did not wake up early in the morning and did not prepare tiffin for him. The idea that it is the woman’s sacred duty to wake up early, prepare breakfast for the husband and do all the housework is so ingrained in the Indian psyche, that the idea that she wouldn’t want to do it is in a word, unthinkable. And this is by far, not the only ruling of its kind. In 2010,  the Bombay High Court (HC) in an order upheld a divorce on the basis leaving the house of the husband to stay with parents without informing or taking the husband into confidence is a conduct against matrimonial duties and amounts to cruelty. ‘Cruelty’ as can be seen here, is a subjective term, and often seems to reside in the judge’s own point of view and from what he or she deems to be the husband’s or wive’s duties in the marriage. More often than not, such perceptions are so rooted in gender bias and patriarchy that there is little or no recourse for women to break free of the notion that their success or failure as a spouse is solely based on their ability and willingness to do the housework and wait hand and foot on their husbands. Academic qualifications and earning capacity be damned. This notion of women as homemakers and caregivers is also what indirectly leads to their harassment. Working women, women who travel or live alone, women in the company of men they are not married to are all aberrations from their publicly accepted role, and are therefore seen as fair game for attack. Interestingly (and unsurprisingly) the Hindu Marriage act does not list ‘failure to do housework’ as one of the conditions under which a man may divorce his wife. Reasons for dissolution of the marriage include  continuous period of desertion for two or more years, conversion to a religion other than Hindu, mental abnormality, venereal disease, and leprosy. It goes without saying that any marriage will include duties and responsibilities - which include housework, child rearing and the provision of financial security. However to say that any one of these things should be determined by gender alone is damaging and regressive. The woman should not ‘have’ to do all of the housework and the man should not ‘have’ to bear the financial burden of the family. As long as we continue to enforce such biases at the court level, the treatment of our women and the parameters on which they will be judged will never really begin to improve.