Staying Home And Being Free

STAYING STAYING HOME AND HOME AND BEING FREE BEING FREE

Words by Habibah Jaghoori

Audre Lorde said, ‘I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of colour remains chained.’

The discourse on freedom has been one to exist since the beginning of civilisation. Humanity has experienced and tried many different ideologies, cultures, economies that have all used ‘freedom’ as their forefront and yet, the world we live in today, has humanity in the greatest captivity to date. Life itself has been commodified. Sentiments such as ‘earning a LIVING’ have been ingrained and normalised. The mere act of being alive comes with a cost and that is a culture that strips people of their humanity.

The culture that Capitalism breeds stunts women from attaining their dignity, honour, growth and it prevents them from reaching their independent identity. In an environment free from a profitdriven economy and Western values, women can achieve scholarly, personal and ethical growth. Women can achieve political growth.

Women can become pioneers for essential social issues that will no doubt expand humans in their intellectual and spiritual developments, and women can achieve it all without having to change, compromise or neglect their characteristics and needs.

But there needs to be a certain notion that has to be left behind in this struggle for liberation. That is, women who stay at home are being left behind.

Isolating women from practices such as housekeeping and raising children with the false ideas of freedom and growth is not honouring women. It’s an intentional motive to drive women to the labour markets for the purpose of accumulating profit at their exploitation. Capitalism has bankrupted the values that are supposed to be the sweeter aspects of life for all people.

With genuine consistency, social progression will build. It’s regressive to shame women for choosing the traditional path in life. Having this choice and making it should be celebrated and supported rather than undermined through false narratives of it being ‘backwards.’ You will see a revolutionary, a martyr, a scholar or anyone that has shaped the discourse of humanity in a positive way and you will see a mother with strong willpower, firm determination and inspiring patience that is standing over them.

Under Capitalism, women in the workforce face certain pressures, humiliation and are held to different and objective expectations that inevitably transcend the boundaries of respect, pride and self-esteem. It’s a toxic reality that is normalised and even praised under pretences of ‘hustling’ and ‘girl-bossing.’ It is the system we have to change, and it is the rotten cultural foundations we have to uproot in order to break new grounds which welcome and allow women at home or not, to have the complete freedom to study, write, learn and pursue their passion.

A healthy, reasonable and precise pathway to liberate women from all forms of sexism is to not emphasise the need for equality, as equality is hardly paramount to justice. Western culture has made out women to be the objects of sexual exploitation, through advertising or in entertainment under the guise of sexual equality and liberation. But all it has done is realised the mass profit-hungry and destructive beauty industry constantly capitalising on the insecurity that it perpetuates. All it has done is normalise competition, carnal standards and harmful diet cultures. The result of the beauty industry complex is women left without the power to live without judgement, with the need to continuously perform for the male gaze, and as secondary importance in fields of academia and politics.

In a truly feminist society, women will be free. Women should be admirable housewives if they want to be, or they will be respected even without partners or kids if they choose so. Women will decide for themselves what they want, and they will have the right to choose it. This reality is the blossom of an overthrown and abolished economy that’s only function is to make profit. It’s a deep relief by a revolutionised culture that places human welfare and advancement at its centre. When women are liberated from the disturbing and inhumane restraints of capitalist values, then all people are liberated. To achieve this, we must toss aside the fight for complete equality because equality does not mean justice. We must fight for equity.