ESSAY

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The Second Sex and the Third Shift

Three shifts; career, home and self/soul, Amrita Gupta Singh says that women are forced to function between these three shifts but in the third shift ‘She’ regresses into guilt and self torture.  The author probes into the third shift in women’s life by taking examples from the works of three contemporary women artists namely Surekha, Vidya Kamat and Hema Upadhyay.

What is the third-shift, in the context of a contemporary woman’s life? This concept intrigued me immensely, as it applies to the psycho-social spaces, the choices that we make as career women and as individuals in a capitalist scenario. Gender always is an issue, right from the cradle to the grave, and it is only a miniscule ratio of privileged, educated, financially independent and self-assertive women, with effective leadership skills and passionate ambition (one again cannot deny the role of supportive partners here) who are able to break glass-ceilings in the work-place. A contemporary woman is expected to chart out a perfect balance between her career (first shift) and her home (second shift), achieving bigger salaries and maintaining starched collar-cuffs and fresh nappies at home. Whether it be the woman who makes papads in Dharavi, and saves the extra money for her dowry or the savvy corporate executive, who ‘contributes’ to her own ‘lavish’ marriage, the story remains the same, though the contexts may differ; a woman is expected to have a home and family along with a thriving career, in today’s competitive market. On the flip-side, women are also expected to give up careers after marriage; some could be out of a conscious inner choice, or for others, societal pressure.

Managerial skills are put to practice in both the first shifts and the second shifts, while the self-doubt and self investigation continues relentlessly in the third-shift; or the psychological plane where we seek to discover our true selves, outside forms of cultural engineering. Living as we are in the age of anxiety and robotic structures, third-shift angst is a painful reality in most minds of women. Juggling between demanding home-fronts, military regimes at work, PTA meetings, dealing with growing up children in increasingly unsafe environments, third shifts occur in travels on local trains, in the shower or at other momentary spaces at lunch-break, where the questions range from professional anxieties to self perceived derelictions on the home-front. Here the battle is with internal glass-ceilings, of social conditioning across generations and contemporary individualistic ways of thought.

Mappings of third-shifts put forth questions of whether working women are spending enough time at home, oscillating between interrogations of guilt, values of goodness and nurturing, self-sacrifice, self-criticism/flagellation or self-acceptance. Third-shifts are composed of negative whispers and positive utterances, a psychological phenomenon which can take the form of an ‘exhausting ritual’ or a ‘virtual oasis’ which provides solutions to our fragmented selves. With gender roles being in a state of constant flux, breakage of stereo-types of ‘male’ or ‘female’ behavior, the third-shift is a glocal phenomenon today, given the rapid social transitions of our times. In her book The Mismeasure of Woman, social psychologist Carol Tavris describes the relentless mental dilemma of a woman's third shift:

“A woman who leaves her child in day care worries that she is failing as a mother; but if she leaves her job temporarily to stay home with her child, she worries that she will fail in her career. A woman who cries at work worries whether crying is good, since she is a woman, or wrong, since she is a professional. A woman who spends endless hours taking care of her husband and ailing parents feels that she is doing the right thing as a woman, but the wrong thing as an independent person. A woman who cannot penetrate her husband's/partner’s emotional coolness alternates between trying to turn him into one of her expressive girlfriends and trying to cure her “dependency” on him”.

Being a curious observer, I often search for third shifts in my everyday encounters; and I have come across the phrase ‘a victim of our lifestyles’ in one of the conversations in the ‘Ladies’ first-class train compartment in Bombay. The woman in question was a corporate executive, smart and assertive, who often has these inner battles of not spending enough ‘quality time’ at home with her children, and of course the traditional expectations from her as a ‘woman’. She multi-tasks exceedingly well, keeping both professional and personal machineries well-oiled, yet she suffers from painful depressive rituals of the third shift. Another woman changes psychic gears, and says that her colleagues would not recognize her behaviour at home; she is a fire-spewing ‘dragon’ at work, and a demure lamb at home, who doesn’t assert herself much, preferring not to shift the power equations at the home-front, which is largely patriarchal. Such daily radical shifts in role-playing must be exceedingly difficult, and she simply acknowledged it in the phrase “What to do, I am a woman, a ‘bahu’…I do take back a considerable pay-check home…but I have to know my limits and decorum, my parents taught me not to raise my voice”. LIMITS, the word pecks at my brains agonizingly….my third shift.

To know how a modern woman is represented in visual culture, I went to Google Images, and typed in a generic ‘The Modern Woman’. To my surprise, the first image was that of the Hindu multi-armed goddess, Durga, followed by illustrations of multi-armed ‘modern’ women multi-tasking, while remaining physically attractive, via the symbol of gym-weights, or a woman draped in a red revealing western dress, while making ‘rotis’, a sexual being in a traditional role. The others ranged from Greta Garbo, Hilary Clinton to Condoleezza Rice, a veiled women’s rally in Dhaka on International Women’s Day in 2005, an Iranian woman in fitted western wear with her head covered in a scarf, juxtaposed against a burqa clad woman, a ‘brown’ South Asian woman in front of a computer, and ofcourse the ‘fair’ billboard plastic beauties with ‘perfect’ bodies.

We have a woman president, Pratibha Patil, who looks ofcourse, extremely docile, complete with a covered head and dubious political will, we have had a woman Prime minister, Indira Gandhi, (who was loathed for her dictatorial ways, not that I support the Emergency) and women political activists in the Indian Freedom Movement (Kamaladevi Chattopadhya, Sarojini Naidu, Vijayalakshmi Pandit, Rajkumari Amrit Kaur and Aruna Asaf Ali, to name a few). Women were integral part of Gandhi's non-violence movement. Even uneducated women across class/castes sacrificed time and materials volunteering, campaigning, protesting, fasting, and donating to the causes of freedom. Now, we have Kiran Bedi, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Geeta Kapur, Mahashweta Devi, Gaura Devi, Medha Patkar, Arundhati Roy, Kalpana Chawla, Barkha Dutt, Shabana Azmi, Sania Mirza, Shushmita Sen, Flavia Agnes, Bhanwari Devi and also, the gutsy and legendary Phoolan Devi. There are numerous touching stories from everyday life of women who have battled all odds (a fine example is my mother, Mira Gupta) and sought to achieve their individual dreams. Today, in India, "women's empowerment" is an electioneering slogan; there is a ministry for women and child development. There are laws against female foeticide, domestic violence and sexual harassment in the workplace. The number of working women is up-surging, yet there are dowry deaths, escalation of rapes and other sexual crimes, female foeticide (even in educated urban contexts), arranged marriages and ‘ideal’ soap opera ‘beautiful bahus’, engaged in incessant moral tirades. In Indian traditional households, the man always bowed down to the moral superiority/authority of the ‘mother’ and the ‘wife’, amply justified in Indian popular cinema of the 1970’s; the women negotiated power relations themselves and most statuses were chalked out in terms of age and given social criteria. In the modern Indian family, especially in urban areas, the husband and wife confront each other, as competitors, in many matters involving decisions and control over resources. The new generation of women is also not insulated from global values of feminism and equality of rights that is now contained within a western discourse as against the traditional ones. How do we define Indian feminism, and create meaningful debates on sexuality, family or professional choices? This is where, I feel, women suffer from depressive and sometimes, suicidal, third shifts.

In the context of contemporary art, three works by urban Indian women artists come forth in my mind, which depict the realm of the third shift very clearly. Firstly, the digital prints and video installations by Surekha, titled ‘Spaces of Silence’ 2007.  Surekha creates a cell, a dark space of feminine labour within the confines of a kitchen. Multiple photographs of claustrophobic urban kitchens, piled with unwashed utensils interact with red roses, where all human presence is excluded. It is assumed to be natural for women to wash utensils, here Surekha brings in the politics of water and via the symbol of roses, she also subverts what the emotive aspects of love would mean in this politics of household labour arrangements among co-habiting couples, and its implications in domestic discourses of gender equality. Opposite the photographs is a video installation, in the form of a triptych with fast-forwarded images of women kneading dough and producing food, in de-humanized robotic gestures. In the dialectical relationships between the kitchen, food and the insertion of the roses, Surekha forwards questions of how, despite a large number of women moving into the paid labour market, domestic labour involves both production and consumption and also has an emotional component/confinement (the third shift), where women do double labour as an expression of care for their families and also to avoid conflict in relationships. If one has to be ‘awarded’ with red roses, deviations from traditional roles of ‘nurturing’ and ‘mothering’ are not allowed in patriarchal domains. Surekha argues that housework (the second shift) produces gender through an everyday enactment of dominance and submission, questioning such ‘naturalized’ gendered behaviours in public discourse.

Vidya Kamat’s ‘Skin-1’, 2007 which is from a series of digital photo-montages, depicts the whole dilemma of the ‘modern woman’, in a game of gender roles and the relentless third shifts we are subjected to. Imprisoned via our social conditioning and cultural codings, where the Indian woman is posited as a ‘goddess’, revered in religion, festivals, house-hold rituals and nationalistic art, Vidya subverts the semantic significations of this term, by juxtaposing her urban privileged liberated self, in western wear, veiled underneath the clothes of a Hindu goddess. She defiantly gazes at the viewer, crossing her arms over her breasts in an act of active denial of the male gaze and right of choice over one’s own body, slashing at predatory patriarchal fantasies of the woman as a sexual being. Such a complex layering of mythology, modernity and gendered constructs of the female body via iconographical parodic improvisations and manifestations of the divine is a powerful image of urbanite allegories that echoes the dilemmas of numerous urban women trapped between traditional ‘goddess’ roles and contemporary aspirations; This image, in my view, is an interrogation of monolithic patriarchal domains and its establishments of gendered behaviour, the binaries of Indian ‘culture’ and individual identity. While Hindu mythology and religious ideology have always recognized the strength and power of a woman, and in post-independence India, women were granted constitutional equality, (at least in principle), the contradiction of values attributed to the ‘modern woman’ is clearly seen in matrimonial advertisements, which require girls with high education, good careers but traditional home based values, aka the ‘mother’ and ‘goddess’ value. The constant bombardment from the media of global aesthetic and cultural images have led to the construction of imagined ideals of both masculinity and femininities that men and women find hard to realize, especially as such imaginary constructions are a blend of the old and the new. This is where the third shift arises, in the constant battle of multiple identities.

Hema Upadhyay in the work ‘Urban Dance’ (2004), centrally positions the urban working woman in the context of Bombay, who travel in its frothing local trains after completing all domestic responsibilities and report to work. In her characteristic style of super-imposing minuscule photographic cut-outs of herself against painted surfaces, Hema brings in the aspect of double labour, she enacts the life of the feminine populace, who are engaged in daily activities of eating lunch in the work-place, or waiting for public transport, and other banal activities juxtaposed against a vast pictorial terrain of apartment blocks and street-lights. The apartment blocks allude to the home, a monolithic presence in the working woman’s mind (the third shift), even while at individual professions. At the top of the painting, are headless torsos, almost floating presences in dancing gestures, which brings in aspects of class divides in a globalized scenario, the ‘urban archipelago’ which privileges only the exclusive ‘noveau-riche’. In this painting, the first shift (work) and the second shift (home) meet at various points and Hema questions the exclusions/inclusions, the contradictory significations and domestic entrapments that collide viciously in a commoditized psychic landscape.