Edited by Sanjana Hira
“Our whole social environment seems to us to be filled with forces that really exist only in our minds”, claimed Emile Durkheim. Such forces rise to existence owing to a set of shared beliefs, ideas, and moral attitudes which operate as a unifying force within society. This has in turn led to the formulation of a social phenomenon called conditioning that has had the power to determine and direct the course of people’s actions and their mindsets. Why does this paradox called conditioning only have negatively stimulated consequences to it in popularity?
Conditioning in the socio-familial manner mainly has to do with the concept of patriarchy. Patriarchy defines roles in life to be predominated by the male in the family while conditioning allows a woman to feel that it is right to be subjugated to anything that a man says, when involved in the institution of family. The woman is trained to believe that it is necessary for her to act a certain way in order to be accepted and that the best thing to do is listen. Her voice is silenced, and she is convinced that having a voice is itself blasphemy.
Her actions, or the lack of them thereof, are repercussions of her ingrained sense of upbringing and the mantra of “Do not make your presence felt, do as asked to do, do not raise questions.” An ingrained mechanism is at play that prevents the conditioning from ever dying completely because in order for it to die, questions must be raised, and that is unallowed for. Women, therefore, are the flag bearers of succumbing to patriarchy even if men might be at its forefront.
An in depth analysis of Durkheim’s reading concludes that the greatest incidence of suicide exists among those subsumed in social groups. Durkheim’s data revealed that the highest suicide rates were found among those who were most socially integrated. He goes on to explain the concept of social cohesion and how men and women inhabit “different social worlds.”Another angle to the case is that married and employed women tend to have lower suicide rates than unemployed housewives who are most submerged in family life.
Another argument to this is the conception that a woman must adjust to the family she is marrying into after marriage but the same is not expected from men. During the institutionalization of marriage, she is said to be “given away”, basically taking away all her agency of existence as a separate entity and reducing her to an object of belonging whose ownership is being transferred. She is thus expected to act in only pleasing ways towards her new family, such that her individual identity is sacrificed in the need to conform to the expectations of her upbringing.
The woman is often under scrutiny; her every move is policed in a sense that there are few things that she can actually even do with respect to her own self and body. She is faced with threats of rape and honor killing for matters such as her choice of clothing, the decision of which should only lie with her. Recently in a video that surfaced on social media, an elderly woman was seen shaming a young woman on her choice of clothes and claimed that wearing such clothes is a direct invitation to be raped by men. She was also accused of giving men the agency to rape women based on the clothes they wear and “put them in their place”. It is of humour to note that in India, in the majority of the rape cases that have been filed, the victims have in fact been fully clothed girls (sometimes even going to school).
In the Indian society, the onus of safety for women definitely lies in how they act in a social sphere. But here again, the elderly woman who uses the threat of rape as a patriarchal tool is herself a victim of ingrained patriarchy that has taught her that wearing such clothes would be regarded as promiscuous and “asking for it”. The only way to start by changing her belief in the system of patriarchy is by educating her kindly and patiently as to why it is wrong.
This must be engineered in the broad sense as well. Creating awareness about the effects of patriarchy on the mindset of a woman and how she is conditioned by it to believe that it is the right thing to do needs to be an immediate case for addressal. Awareness is the only way to bring about a complete stop to the vicious cycle of societal conditioning on women especially and that can start from any place. Every small seed of rebellion will lead to a tree planted away from the shade.
References from the article:
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Kushner, Howard, Claire E Sterk “The Limits of Social Capital: Durkheim, Suicide, and Social Cohesion” American Journal of Public Health. 2005 July; 95(7): 1139–1143.
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Kushner, Howard I. “Women and Suicide in Historical Perspective.” Signs, vol. 10, no. 3, 1985, pp. 537–552. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3174265.
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Johnson, Kathryn. “Durkheim Revisited: Why do women kill themselves?” Suicide and Life Threatening Behaviour 9 (Fall 1969): 149-53