Reply to An immigrants musings on the SAHM vs working mom debate

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm kind of surprised at the last few PPs who are pouncing on OP for presenting her experience as a Pakistani woman.  I'm a first generation American to Indian parents who continues to have very close ties to India (visit frequently and am very close to cousins who live there), and I feel like that's a willfully narrow view of women's status in that region.

For context, I have a STEM PhD and my mom is a physician.  All of the girl cousins on my Dad's side have advanced degrees (actually, come to think of it, on my Mom's side too) except my sister...and I'm pretty sure my Dad still has money set aside if she ever wanted to go back to school.  We were encouraged to get the best educations we could by my grandmother, who was married off very young and denied most of her desires to be educated.  That said, even in our progressive family there is a clear difference between how our careers are perceived compared to my brother's and male cousins.  Our careers are nice-to-have status symbols...evidenced by my aunt who keeps wishing my doctor cousin would stop working.  My mom is the only DIL in my Dad's family who worked after being married (though both my aunts are well-educated), and she caught a lot of flak for it.  Despite the fact that I'm probably more ambitious than my DH, I'm constantly being asked about how my career decisions are impacting DH and rarely the other way around.  I've had conversations with many of my cousins' friends who, before getting married, talked about how they hoped they would have a MIL who "let them work".  Similarly my own friends who live in India express gratefulness that that they have MIL's who "let them work".  Granted, these are all fairly UC/UMC people, but there is a clear sense that women's careers are for fun, not important parts of their identity and definitely secondary to their identities as wives and mothers.

As you move down the SES ladder, things can be even worse.  The perceptions of women's role and place is fairly complex, but it's willfully ignorant to pretend that there is universal support for women working outside the home...or evenbeing educated.  The Delhi bus rape, the experience of Nobel Laureate Malala Yousafzai, and honor killings in Pakistan (highly recommend this year's Oscar-winning documentary short now on HBO) all speak to ongoing patriarchal views of women's roles in society.

While OP's original framing did set this thread up to turn into a WOHM vs SAHM debate, I'm very surprised that she's being slammed for pointing out that the US is a more egalitarian society than Pakistan (or India).  My aunt (Mom's sister) is a well-respected economist who focuses on the nexus of women's rights and land ownership.  She only in the last decade (can't remember exactly when) was able to get passed landmark legislation that allowed women to inherit land by default.

I agree that there is definitely a minority of well-educated and wealthy female professionals in India who have the means and support to pursue high-powered careers...but it's ridiculous to pretend like this is the norm for women in that part of the world.  Even just considering the fact that those women rely on a large domestic staff (paid very low wages by US standards) starts to paint the bigger picture.  Have any of the PPs asked themselves what the lives of those workers are like?
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