Indian Women On Being Told To Learn Cooking For Marriage & Not Because It’s A Survival Skill

In most Indian households, you will find mothers and grandmothers asking young girls in the family to learn how to cook and perform household chores in a bid to make them marriage material. The guys, on the other hand, are fed and not made to enter the kitchen because it’s apparently not a place for them. Cooking is presented as a gender role, a skill necessary for women to look after the household and not a basic survival skill meant for all people, irrespective of gender and age.

Indian women took to Twitter to share how they rebelled against learning how to cook when the elders in their house told them to because it was presented as a gender role, something that women ought to learn, and not because it’s a practical necessity.

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The conversation began when a woman who goes by the Twitter username @smishdesigns wrote that she was told that knowing or not knowing how to cook would dictate her worth in the “marriage market” and hence, she didn’t learn it.

Similarly, several other women revealed that not learning how to cook was kind of a protest for them against patriarchal practices because their mothers and grandmothers used to tell them that eventually, they’ll have to feed their in-laws.

Thankfully, there were a couple of women who came from families that taught them that knowing how to cook is necessary in case they had to live alone in different cities for education and work.

Everyone belongs in the kitchen. It’s where you get all the food!

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