Let me tell you about Jayamma. She lives in the slums of Trivandrum, India, works grueling factory hours for less pay than the male workers, and has a husband who gambles away their family income. When Western feminist scholar Martha Nussbaum wrote about her, she concluded that Jayamma must be brainwashed by patriarchy or why else would she accept such obvious injustice without complaint?
Now the things is Nussbaum never actually asked Jayamma what she thought about her situation.
This story sits at the heart of one of feminism’s most uncomfortable contradictions ;we want to critique oppressive systems, but we also want to respect women’s choices. The problem is, what happens when women’s choices seem to perpetuate their own oppression? And more importantly who is deciding what counts as oppression in the first place?
When Your Feminist Friends Think You’re Doing It Wrong
You’ve probably seen this play out in real life. Maybe it’s the girl who posts “stay-at-home girlfriend” content on TikTok, proudly making her boyfriend coffee every morning. You’d see comments like “What’s going on your resume when you break up?” “Blink twice if you need help.” Or it’s your friend who gets back together with her toxic ex for the fifth freaking time, and you’re internally screaming because she’s clearly trapped in a cycle of emotional manipulation.
The automatic response is to assume these women just don’t see what we see. If only they were more “awake,” more feminist, more like us then they’d make different choices. It’s the same logic that Nussbaum applied to Jayamma that these women have “adaptive preferences,” choices that look like freedom but are actually internalized oppression.
This theory sounds compelling until you realize it gives educated, progressive people permission to speak on behalf of women they’ve never met, from circumstances they’ve never experienced, making decisions they’ve never had to make.
The Delhi Women Who Complicated Everything
Now Uma Narayan, an Indian feminist who actually bothered to interview women in Delhi instead of giving theories from a distance found something very fascinating and uncomfortable. She concluded that these women were just passive victims of false consciousness that western academics imagined.
Take women who usually criticize other women for showing “too much skin” or being “too open about sex.” On the surface, this looks like internalized misogyny, right? But Narayan discovered these same women secretly envied women with less restrictive families. They were living with this constant internal conflict while following and also questioning the norms around them.
Even more eye opening were the Bangladeshi women who chose not to pursue education. Western observers saw this as form of internalized patriarchy, these poor women had been conditioned to believe education wasn’t valuable for them. But when researchers actually talked to these women, they found that these women did value education desperately wanted it for themselves. But faced with limited resources, they made calculated decisions about their families’ survival.
These women understood how patriarchal their societies were. That’s exactly why they chose to educate their sons instead of themselves not because they believed women were worth less, but because they knew their societies treated women as worth less, making sons’ education a better long-term investment for the family’s economic security.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Such Choices
The truth is that these women were simultaneously perpetuating patriarchy while making rational decisions within their constraints. They weren’t brainwashed but were strategically playing a rigged game as best they could.
When a woman chooses to wear a pantsuit instead of a sundress to a job interview: is she being authentic, or following professional expectations that underscore masculinity? When you straighten your hair for a formal event, are you internalizing beauty standards or contemplating the interpretation of your appearance?
The answer is both, and neither. It’s more nuanced.
A good example can be black women in low-resourced communities who stay with abusive partners rather than call the police. From outside view, this may represent toleration of violence. In actuality, it is a considered option: calling the police could mean a partner is killed, neighborhoods suffer further criminalization, or children grow up fatherless from not only abuse but state violence.
These are more sophisticated moral and strategic decisions, than evidence of brainwashing.
Why This Matters Even to Your Feminist Friends
The most insidious part is how this criticism tends to flow in one direction. Women making traditionally feminine choices get scrutinized for their “internalized misogyny,” while women making traditionally masculine choices like “prioritizing career over family” get celebrated. But when you look at it, both sets of choices happen within the same patriarchal system that values masculine traits and devalues feminine ones.
When feminist philosopher Serene Khader revisited cases like Jayamma’s, she found something western academics had missed; these women aren’t lacking in critical thinking skills. They’re often engaging in more sophisticated analysis of their situations than their “would-be” saviors.
Jayamma might not complain about her low wages, but that doesn’t mean she’s unaware of the inequality. It might mean she’s calculated that complaining would result in losing her job, leaving her family in an even worse position. It might mean she’s choosing to direct her limited energy toward keeping her children fed rather than fighting a battle she knows she can’t win.
The women Narayan interviewed in Delhi weren’t simple-minded about gender norms instead they held complex, contradictory views that reflected deep thinking about their circumstances. They found ways to navigate restrictions while maintaining their dignity and helping their families.
This doesn’t make their situations just or acceptable. It makes them human agents worthy of respect rather than objects of pity.
A Different Way to Think About It
So where does this leave us? We can’t just retreat into “choice feminism” where any decision a woman makes is automatically empowering. Some choices really are constrained by oppressive systems. But we also can’t assume that women making choices we wouldn’t make are simply deluded.
Instead, maybe we can get curious rather than judgmental. Instead of asking “Why doesn’t she see how oppressed she is?” we might ask “What does she see that I’m missing?” Instead of assuming we know what liberation looks like for someone else, we could ask what their actual constraints and priorities are.
It’s about recognizing that the Instagram influencer and the PhD candidate are both making choices within a sexist world that limits all women’s options, just in different ways.
Most importantly, it’s about remembering that if feminism is supposed to be about expanding women’s freedom, it has to start with taking women seriously as people capable of complex reasoning about their own lives even when their reasoning leads them to conclusions we find uncomfortable.
The women making choices you disagree with aren’t waiting for you to save them. They might just be solving problems or dealing with something you didn’t even know existed.
-This article has been written by Divyanshi Sindhu (2nd Year).
