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Hello and welcome to TOI’s monthly roundup on gender, politics and culture. In a world where men still run most of the gigs and hog the mics, here’s where we say it like we see it:
1. Menopause
Breaking the taboo
We’ve been misled about menopause, The New York Times has informed us — there’s relief for each symptom, we just don’t know how to seek it. Meanwhile, celebrities are all over it.
Gwyneth Paltrow is rebranding menopause as ‘aspirational’, Pamela Anderson is sharing her struggle, Naomi Watts is trying to mainstream menopause and modeling lube for dry vajayjays — “more than one billion people worldwide will be menopausal by 2025. . . that’s a whole of dry”
2. So why are we waking up to it now?
Women have been around all these years, but science is only just piecing together exactly what happens during this key biological event. Menopause, the end of a woman’s fertile years, and the many years of perimenopause leading up to it, are rarely discussed in the open. Women whisper to each other about a cluster of bewildering symptoms affecting their mood, bodily and sexual functions. They guess and grope their way through this passage. Any cultural attention paid to it has been negative, we hear of hormone fluctuations and hot flashes making women ‘menopausal’ (cranky and unpredictable). Evolutionary biologists have speculated on why women even carry on living after their procreative function has stopped. One of the first gynaecologists to write about it in 1966, Robert Wilson, likened it to a castration, a point after which women lose some ‘feminine essence’
3. Whispers to big business
Medical treatments have evolved, some have been brought back — hormone replacement therapy, which was junked as having dangerous side-effects, is now back in favour. And after all these years of trivialising women’s pain and denying their symptoms, there is finally an industry paying attention to this life stage, with a gold rush of wellness products. This new attention has, of course, trailed the realisation that women are economic agents, and have more power in the world than they used to. They work later into their lives, and have more means to care about their own well-being.
4 Discovering the upside
But there’s another secret that women have discovered for themselves as they hit the feared midpoint of their lives: it’s not that bad. Menopause is a transition; it can be painful and unraveling. It brings one to a life-stage that is disparaged by a male world, which only acknowledges one form of female power — youth and beauty. But as many women find to their pleasant surprise, there is freedom to be found there. In their middle age, many women shed the idea of who they’re supposed to be, and make contact with who they are. It is not obsolescence, but renewal.
Seen and heard
Portrait of motherhood Artist Madeline Donahue’s take on motherhood is visceral and beautiful, capturing the many feelings that come with it. From anxiety at having to juggle far too many things, and of course the love for one’s child, her colourful art offers an unfiltered and unvarnished glance at what it means to be a mom.
Fated to become mother
Speaking of motherhood, this quote by Bonnie Burstow from her book ‘Radical Feminist Therapy’ captures the strange position daughters sometimes find themselves in — feeling a false sense of superiority to their mothers, yet destined to become her. The quote reads, “Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
Gender news from the world
Crack in the stained glass ceiling
In a first, Pope Francis has allowed women to vote at an upcoming global meeting for bishops in October. Women have previously been allowed to attend, but not vote. Five religious sisters will now have voting rights
Two reads you don’t want to miss
Being funny pays off more for women
A Harvard Business Review study has found that women benefit more from being humorous than men do. Generally if women are warm, they are seen as less competent so, it’s a struggle to be efficient while not coming across as cold. Humour makes them look both warm and affable. The reason isn’t that amusing — it’s because women are not expected to be funny that they surprise people who then tend to view them more positively
A buxom mermaid causes stir
Overly sexualised or an ode to plussized women? That’s the question some are debating after a rather voluptuous statue of a mermaid popped up in Puglia, Italy. The figure has noticeably large breasts and a prominent derriere, causing confusion among and outrage on the internet. Made by students at a local art school, it was meant to be “tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy,” the school’s head teacher told The Guardian.
Kadambini Ganguly, India’s first female practising doctor
1. Menopause
Breaking the taboo
We’ve been misled about menopause, The New York Times has informed us — there’s relief for each symptom, we just don’t know how to seek it. Meanwhile, celebrities are all over it.
Gwyneth Paltrow is rebranding menopause as ‘aspirational’, Pamela Anderson is sharing her struggle, Naomi Watts is trying to mainstream menopause and modeling lube for dry vajayjays — “more than one billion people worldwide will be menopausal by 2025. . . that’s a whole of dry”
2. So why are we waking up to it now?
Women have been around all these years, but science is only just piecing together exactly what happens during this key biological event. Menopause, the end of a woman’s fertile years, and the many years of perimenopause leading up to it, are rarely discussed in the open. Women whisper to each other about a cluster of bewildering symptoms affecting their mood, bodily and sexual functions. They guess and grope their way through this passage. Any cultural attention paid to it has been negative, we hear of hormone fluctuations and hot flashes making women ‘menopausal’ (cranky and unpredictable). Evolutionary biologists have speculated on why women even carry on living after their procreative function has stopped. One of the first gynaecologists to write about it in 1966, Robert Wilson, likened it to a castration, a point after which women lose some ‘feminine essence’
3. Whispers to big business
Medical treatments have evolved, some have been brought back — hormone replacement therapy, which was junked as having dangerous side-effects, is now back in favour. And after all these years of trivialising women’s pain and denying their symptoms, there is finally an industry paying attention to this life stage, with a gold rush of wellness products. This new attention has, of course, trailed the realisation that women are economic agents, and have more power in the world than they used to. They work later into their lives, and have more means to care about their own well-being.
4 Discovering the upside
But there’s another secret that women have discovered for themselves as they hit the feared midpoint of their lives: it’s not that bad. Menopause is a transition; it can be painful and unraveling. It brings one to a life-stage that is disparaged by a male world, which only acknowledges one form of female power — youth and beauty. But as many women find to their pleasant surprise, there is freedom to be found there. In their middle age, many women shed the idea of who they’re supposed to be, and make contact with who they are. It is not obsolescence, but renewal.
Seen and heard
Portrait of motherhood Artist Madeline Donahue’s take on motherhood is visceral and beautiful, capturing the many feelings that come with it. From anxiety at having to juggle far too many things, and of course the love for one’s child, her colourful art offers an unfiltered and unvarnished glance at what it means to be a mom.
Fated to become mother
Speaking of motherhood, this quote by Bonnie Burstow from her book ‘Radical Feminist Therapy’ captures the strange position daughters sometimes find themselves in — feeling a false sense of superiority to their mothers, yet destined to become her. The quote reads, “Often father and daughter look down on mother (woman) together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.”
Gender news from the world
Crack in the stained glass ceiling
In a first, Pope Francis has allowed women to vote at an upcoming global meeting for bishops in October. Women have previously been allowed to attend, but not vote. Five religious sisters will now have voting rights
Two reads you don’t want to miss
Being funny pays off more for women
A Harvard Business Review study has found that women benefit more from being humorous than men do. Generally if women are warm, they are seen as less competent so, it’s a struggle to be efficient while not coming across as cold. Humour makes them look both warm and affable. The reason isn’t that amusing — it’s because women are not expected to be funny that they surprise people who then tend to view them more positively
A buxom mermaid causes stir
Overly sexualised or an ode to plussized women? That’s the question some are debating after a rather voluptuous statue of a mermaid popped up in Puglia, Italy. The figure has noticeably large breasts and a prominent derriere, causing confusion among and outrage on the internet. Made by students at a local art school, it was meant to be “tribute to the great majority of women who are curvy,” the school’s head teacher told The Guardian.
Kadambini Ganguly, India’s first female practising doctor
- “This young lady married after she made up her mind to be a doctor and has had one, if not two, children since. But she was absent only thirteen days for her lying-in and did not miss a single lecture since,” wrote Florence Nightingale in a letter to a friend while inquiring gushingly about one ‘Mrs Ganguly’ in sexism-steeped India of 1888. Three years later, a Bengali newspaper would call the same Mrs Ganguly a whore.
- Women were seen as unfit for science, let alone medicine, when Kadambini Ganguly —one of India’s first two women graduates —became a doctor after marrying her much-older progressive widower friend Dwarkanath Ganguly and securing a hard-won admission in the Calcutta Medical College (CMC) in 1883.
- Born in 1862 in Bihar’s Bhagalpur to a school principal named Brajkishore Basu who was part of the Brahmo-Samaj-led Bengali Renaissance, Kadambini studied in a gender-equality-propagating school started by her father along with his friend Durgamohan Das. As was the law at Hindu Mahila Vidyalaya, she spoke English with her peers during school hours.
- After passing out of the school, Kadambini had to secure a special dispensation from the University ofCalcutta to appear at the entrance examination. In the assigned separate room from the men, along with Sarla Das, she wrote the papers, missed the first division by just one mark and startled the English vice-chancellor of Calcutta university by scoring second-highest marks in science.
- Her next alma mater, The Calcutta Female School—now renamed the Bethune School—became the Bethune College after it began to recruit new teachers exclusively to teach Kadambini college-level classes. Oxford had not yet allowed women to graduate when, in 1882, Kadambini—along with Bethune School’s future-first-womanprincipal Chandramukhi Bose—became one of India’s first two women graduates after finishing her BA.
- The distinction didn’t exactly open doors. The principal of Calcutta Medical College (CMC), R Harvey, was against female students and the Indian Medical Council backed his decision to refuse Kadambini admission. She would be a married woman by the time she was allowed to enter the CMC in 1883 following the intervention of Augustus Rivers Thompson, lieutenant general of Bengal, who argued in her favour and who foresaw, in newsprint, a “not so distant time when Calcutta hospitals shall be partly officered by lady doctors”.
- Nearly all the women doctors and nurses in India at the time were European and thus alien to Indian customs and traditions. Anandibai Joshi—popularly cited as India’s first woman doctor—had died soon after returning from the US with her medical degree in the late 19th century when British doctors were paid 450 while their Indian assistants earned 50.
- Convinced that a British degree would help her be treated on par with her white counterparts in India, Kadambini sailed to Edinburgh and returned with three diplomas in 1893. Even that didn’t help though. Once, after attending to a tricky childbirth where her expertise possiblysaved the lives of both mother and child, Kadambini found herself being asked to eat her lunch with the maidservant and then to clear the area. “Kadambini’s daughter was in tears when she saw that all her mother’s learning would not prevent her from being called a ‘dai’,” writes Kavitha Rao in her book ‘Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine.
- Later, Kadambini—who had grown increasingly interested in political activism over time— made her presence felt at the sixth session of the Indian National Congress where she made a speech proposing Pherozeshah Mehta’s name for president in 1890. In the years following her husband’s demise in 1898, the mother of eight, stepped away from activism. Kadambini’s end came suddenly on October 3, 1923.
- Today, if a ward at Calcutta Medical College is named after this mother of eight who was India’s first practising woman doctor, Kadambini’s legacy also got a hat-tip in a Bengali TV serial that showed a lady shocked by the sight of the figure at her door. “Where is the doctor,” the lady asks. “This is a woman. ”
– Curated by Ketaki Desai and Sharmila Ganesan Ram. With inputs from Amulya Gopalakrishnan
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