Take me to 2122, Please!
I want to travel to 2122 and see how the lives of women have changed. Virginia Woolf wrote “A Room of One’s Own” in the 1920s and I read it almost a century later. She expected women will cease to be the weaker sex after a hundred years. Although conditions have been bettered for women, we are still struggling to belong in a world built by men for the men. Woolf’s expectation still remains wishful thinking.
Most of us didn’t have to fight for education or access to information. But there are places where women are still fighting for those rights. It is another century of struggle for them to reach the point we have reached. The inequality of all this is depressing. Those of us who had an education and earn a living, know that the struggle doesn’t stop there. The discrimination and bias in workplaces kill the women’s spirit slowly and mercilessly. On top of that, the unequal distribution of household work burdens and stresses women around the world. It feels like we have to do twice the work of men to have financial independence. Men are supposedly “helping out” in the duties of running a household. This generation is better than my father’s generation who still leaves his plate for my mother to wash. Even then we are nowhere close to bridging the women’s unpaid work. The book that describes the struggles of our generation is Invisible Women by Caroline Criado Perez. I was ricocheting between anger and extreme sadness while reading that book.
I watch the younger girls with admiration these days. Their self-assurance and confidence are what most of our generation lacked. I want them to continue in this journey and see what differences they are going to bring to this world in the next hundred years. The older generation of women needs to unlearn many things that were taught by patriarchy. Hopefully, the flagbearer women of patriarchy will become extinct in hundred years. But more than that, I want to see how the men are going to evolve. I hope they will be better than my generation. But will we reach a stage where everyone is treated equally regardless of gender? Take me to 2122, please!
