Book Review By Harsimran Kaur

Rating: 4.5/5

I, the woman, belong to a world

Where the patriarchal sacrum holds me tight

Crushes me of my spirit and determination,

I talk to myself

If the woman I am made to be

Is the woman I am?

The heart and the mind are eclipsed

By the male panjandrum

The scrutiny, the scrounging and the scurrility,

Time has come

I implore with a clarion call,

Subservience is no more my sheath

Connubial congestion is not my sheltering carapace

Reproductive bliss is not an emotional emulsification.

The creator created a man and a woman

To be an equal partaker

Not one given carte blanche of insipid discretions

And the other to befall in drudgery

Isn’t all this a true legacy for women; rich or poor, educated or illiterate, liberal or conservative, domesticated or working—the patriarchal condescension leaves us not. How hard we try, our entire life is sequenced by the paterfamilias of Father, Husband and then the Son; though the longevity of one denies the other to bridle the dynastic loop but the invidious noose around a woman’s neck is a subjective reality.

The brotherhood of men is a corrigendum which requires a cornucopia of sisterhood to end the patriarchal chicanery. Patriarchy is a mindset, which for centuries, with its puritanical rigidity has shredded women into flakes bereft of a distinct structural identity.

Shaili Chopra in her new book ‘Sisterhood Economy’ talks about the identity crisis women face. A woman is toxically bound to a reproductive cage incandescently ripping her off the ideological convictions that she succinctly weaves. Now the same threads stands loose for there is no time to give them shape and dexterity—education seems like a filler to pass on the years till matrimony holds the reign of life or the inflated ambitions form a stubble that would eventually burn to finally ingratiate the cultural prejudices connecting women to a walking womb. Shaili takes a candid and ‘fit into heels’ approach that has reduced women to a sacrificial goat.

The book is a woman’s clarion call to let not the sediments of dust sway in the direction where patriarchal dystopia gathers the particles in the palm to be churned and minced for pleasure. Our society has schismatic provisions for anything relating to women. Their wandering to fetch for their dreams is termed as ignominious and is desperately fitted into an insouciant deferring daub for leaving her kids with a nanny. Faking of orgasm to please her husband—a surreptious modesty she is proud of even if she if robbed off her own pleasure; cornering her emotions as a damp squib fallacy. Matters worse than this are the mandatory domesticity and the surrounding polemic of unpaid labor disparagingly handled by feminist and women NGO’s.

Shaili is articulate and witty, helping women voice their opinions—her dilemma reflects her sensitivity to problems women face. For the book, she travelled extensively to know women of different age groups bearing the colossal burden of womanhood. Her approach is roasted flat bread with no room for a plateau of pity or a mountain of masochism. She validates the progress of women in building an economy not only defined by ‘GDP’ but corroborated by the emotional and intellectual belonging. In our society, the capabilities of women have become a stiffened neck which must be fixed to give credibility they deserve and finally would be a contemporaneous de-facto in pushing up the economy blades.

The book is formidable journey of women who rose from the slumber to make a mark for themselves—ordinary women with extraordinary spirit—launching their own small scale business to unrecognized labor of beauty parlor economics. The acrimony of ‘mothers’ and ‘mother-in-laws’ to perfect their ‘daughters’ and ‘daughter-in-laws’ too acts as sharp edged knife bleeding them off their pertinent desires.

Let’s not label them as ‘marriage-material’ or put them in a reproductive cage. Scathing of ‘divorce’ and ‘single woman’ is a demonic attitude of the ‘cultural propagandist’ – notoriety that has blemished women a ‘money suckers.’

The value of women is not assessed through paid or unpaid labor or by the sacrificial spirit of domesticity but by treating her as a human who too has needs, is ambitious and can be opinionated.