India parents 'reject newborn girl for baby boy'
The article I chose to talk about features a troubling story from the country of India. In the last week of March, two babies were born in an extremely busy hospital in the city of Jodhpu in Western India. One baby was a boy, the other a girl. The two children were mixed up and were given to different parents. Now, the recipients of the baby boy, we actually gave birth to the girl, refuse to give the boy back to the real parents.At first, one might ask "why?". Why won't the parents take their baby girl back, the same one they spent 9 months nurturing. As the article states, "Indian society has had a long history of discrimination against girls" and that "Parents in India tend to prefer baby boys to girls for economic reasons".
This story is a classic tale of sexism, which we have spent a great deal of time discussing and reading about through out this course. It also tackles the idea of how much more of an uphill battle woman have to climb in the country of India, a topic that we did not venture into as deeply. The idea can be applied to so many other cultures around the world as well. This was part of my thought process when choosing this article, to discuss a topic that we may not see in our everyday lives, or at least not to this extreme.
I want to dive deeper into the a quote I mentioned earlier in the article, stating that Indian parents prefer male babies due to economic reasons. What reasons? For one, woman in India are not encouraged to work nearly as much as woman in the United States. The husband is looked at as the working one who must provide for the family. Through research and asking some good friends from India, I found that the ideal of an Indian woman is not too far off of the American ideal of a woman.. 50 years ago. According to Friedman, this was the ideal:
"The suburban housewife—she was the dream image of the young American women and
the envy, it was said, of women all over the world. The American housewife—freed by science
and labor-saving appliances from the drudgery, the dangers of childbirth and the illnesses of her
grandmother. She was healthy, beautiful, educated, concerned only about her husband, her
children, her home. She had found true feminine fulfillment. As a housewife and mother, she was
respected as a full and equal partner to man in his world. She was free to choose automobiles,
clothes, appliances, supermarkets; she had everything that women ever dreamed of."-Friedman
The passage was referring to woman in the time of World War II. I believe this is a problem that a culture can still have the same ideals. When a culture has ideals like this, you see problems like parents not wanting to welcome in their own baby girl.
The article "A Day without Feminism" by Baumgardner and Richards really stuck out to me when thinking about this article. The day they write about is the everyday life of many woman in other cultures. I believe all societies could use a little more feminism and while it is an uphill battle, it is certainly attainable.
BBC News. (2012, April 02). India parents 'reject newborn girl for baby boy. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17587284
Baumgardner, J., & Richards, A. (2000). A day without feminism - manifesta: Young woman, feminism, and the future. Farrar, Straus and Grioux.
Friedan, B. (1963). The feminine mystique.
An added note to India and the concept of sexism is the fact that India also still has arranged marriages, usually for economic benefit. Adding to the idea that boys are preferred over girls, if the family had taken their girl back, rather than having her work, they would have to spend time and money to make her marriage material so as to land the economically benefitted male husband. It is really unfortunate that such a tradition still exists in age where many are trying to promote the notion of love as being a key concept in marriage, such is not always the case in India.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, this is really sad. That said, I do not believe that just because the marriage is a love marriage all cultural norms will be void. The bride's side still has to deal with the all the wedding expenses and the money or gold they pay just to have their daughter married. Unfortunately, there are many parts of the world where women are being oppressed and not treated equally as men and it is very common in many cultures for women to stay at home and men go out and work and bear the expenses of the family. I can see why this family would have preferred a son over a daughter. Also, sometimes it is not even about the expenses or loss that the family goes through but rather the prestige that a son brings and one is always ashamed to have a daughter in such countries because they feel as if the daughter can bring them shame in society, not realizing that men can also do the same thing. It is unfair how society judges females so harshly while letting males get away with almost anything but this is the sad truth of our world.
ReplyDeleteI have previously read about the disadvantages of a woman. In Indian society it costs a lot of money to have a daughter instead of a son. When your daughter is ready to be married the parents of the daughter has to pay the future husband and family a dowry. Many people in the Indian society can't afford to match their daughter with whom they like if they don't have very much money. In Indian society having a son is one of the goals of most of the Indian family's. It's hard to believe that in this day in age that these things still happen, but this is how their society works.
ReplyDeleteThis is really sad, but it really happens and these are their cultural norms. Women in their society aren't really looked as a higher individual.