adhunika blog

By Priyobhashini

I have written this to a friend who is stuck in an extremely unhappy relationship (marriage ). And the only thing holding her back from walking out, is the fact that even her parents want her to try it out harder. The main bone of contention between my friend and her husband is the fact that he doesn’t give her much time. He spends every evening out on his own with his friends and when she protests this, he says this is something he cant let go of and she will just have to learn to leave with it.

My friend says that she married for companionship and a family life, and if he chooses to spend all his free time without her, why should she spent her whole days and weeks running his house, his servant, the cooking, the maintenance of his house and looking after his mother too. What for she asks?

Her mother-in-law says, she should try “harder” to please her man, and if he doesn’t change, she will just have to accept it and learn to live with it, since, traditionally women hold a relationship together by a little compromise.

Her own mother doesn’t her to come out of a marriage with the bad name of “her” walking out.

Below is what i wrote to my friend. I would really appreciate if you comment further on this. (more…)

“Working woman” is no longer a new term in Bangladeshi Culture. In addition to those special feature pages in the mainstream newspapers these days we are seeing TV shows highlighting women’s careers, success stories, and issues concerning working women. The focus is really to encourage women to join the workforce and feel them welcome in this arena. In all these TV shows, newspaper columns women guests are asked how they manage the balance between their work and other household responsibilities like cooking, parenting etc -   traditionally known as “women’s responsibilities”.

It sometimes makes me curious, are we really making the room for women to work outside home when we are keeping the same expectation that they will take care of their all other traditional responsibilities even though they work outside? Managing household duties and children alone is a 24/7 job, and it is literally impossible for a woman to fulfill those when she is also working fulltime outside home. Naturally other grown up people in the household has to take more responsibility to keep the house running and in most of the cases the other significant people in the household are the husband and sometimes the in-law family. (more…)