Skip to main content

Working Mothers

Hello everyone!! here I am back with another queer inquisitive thought of my mind..."Working Mothers". I have often wondered that when a child is asked to introduce oneself, the sentence he is asked 'where does your father work ?, and your mother what does she do?", "is she working or not?"
Why can't the question be reversed and the question asked about the father is also asked similarly for the mother.
Surprising the concept of maternity leave always existed, and most of the women preferred to take it after the child is born as that is when the responsibility doubles. But what about Paternity leave?, it took us so many years to realize that a father is also responsible for a child's upbringing. A mother who joins office soon after child birth is looked down upon. Instead of supporting her people will ask her "why so soon it's only 3 months or 6 months." Did anyone for once ask the new father, "why so soon it's only been a day or two."
I often wonder it is not about the enactments, it is about the mindset. Even if these laws are passed will the male chauvinism in the society accept the fact that they will be staying at home feeding or changing diapers of the child while the woman attends her professional duties. There are big corporate houses who provided the benefit of paternity leave but men don't take it, they feel a sabbatical will make them miss opportunities at work.
Women of child bearing age are often discriminated at work place companies often avoid hiring them, Some women complain about adjustment issues after returning from their sabbatical. If we want to work towards an egalitarian society the responsibilities between a man and woman of the same household should be divided equally and such terms coined raising gender discrimination should be avoided.
We should take a conscious decision and delete this term of "working mother" or "career woman" from our vocabulary. These words often send wrong messages and are inappropriate. All such terms used should be ungendered: for example we used to have policeman but now it sounds more appropriate to use police officer, similarly initially it was stewardesses now it is flight attendants.
The term "Working Moms" has such a negative connotation to it that often co-workers discuss how much a working mother can get away at the pretext of her child. Language changes and evolves around with our world. Certain words or phrases become antiquated as they become redundant or improper and of course what may sound offensive to me may not be so for others. The fact that the term "working dad" makes us scrunch our face is telling you how problematic the term "working mom" is. 

Comments

  1. If you want to delete the term "working mother" from your vocabulary then why would you prefer to use it as tittle for your article? It may be like "why not working father it be".

    ReplyDelete
  2. If only u would have understood the depth of this title and refrained from the montony..the whole purpose of this title was to make such people aware of its disadvantages...

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Log Kya Kahenge!!

This is not just a quarantine frustration blog, on the contrary I am quite enjoying my quarantine period. It's not everyday that we get a chance to discover ourselves and spend quality time with our loved ones. This blog is created to find an answer to all those subconscious thoughts which we bury somewhere and eventually give up on the tussle that life throws at us constantly. I am just trying to speak my heart out and reach out to all those who think alike. Please feel free to judge and comment as I am new here and any sort of comment is most welcome, will wait for them with open mind. Till then enjoy reading!! The Question that always haunts a human mind is "Am I doing it right","should I do it","can we take the chance", so on and so forth. We think and think till we do what we are exactly expected to do not by us but by all those judgmental eyes waiting to grab that single opportunity where one can be demeaned for doing it in an improper way.

Optimistic vs. Realistic

Today when everything around has slowed down and we are stretching ourselves to achieve our full potential by managing both home and office, we often tend to loose ourselves in all the hustle bustle. We follow the same routine and have become machines. In this everyday tussle we forget who we are and what are our wants. This is when we start sinking in the world unknown and we 'try' and search the brighter side of our lives but when we fail to do so we tend to curse our luck and everything around us. If you have noticed closely, we will always find two sort of people around us firstly the Optimistic category who will just overlook the negative and ugly things around. I feel they live in a wonderland of their own and wish to see only happy things around them. This style of facing our life is definitely good as we stay away from worries and tensions, but the discord strikes when something bad happens and we can't look beyond the sadness that is when we sink into the dark un