After forty, something shifts. You stop apologising. You start asking inconvenient questions. This is one such question—about kitchens, care work, and why feminism must begin at home.
The Question That Arrives Late—but Necessarily: Who Decided that Cooking is a Woman’s Destiny?
This question dawned on me only recently—and perhaps it had to. There are moments in a woman’s life when clarity arrives late, not because she lacked intelligence, but because social conditioning is remarkably efficient. Even women who proudly see themselves as empowered often wander through a maze—one constructed by marriage, motherhood, and the quiet tyranny of expectations. The forties, interestingly, tend to dismantle that maze. They return to women a question they were never encouraged to ask: Who was I before I became everything everyone needed me to be?
Who This Question Is—and Is Not—For
Let me be clear. This question is not directed at working mothers who have parental support, domestic help, or the economic flexibility to outsource care work. Structural privilege cushions exhaustion. My concern is with those women who are equally employed, equally evaluated, equally exhausted—yet singularly responsible for sustaining everyday life at home.
A Feminist Childhood: Education Over Domestic Grooming
Growing up, my father believed that education was not a hobby but a vocation. Childhood, to him, was not rehearsal for domesticity but a time for intellectual and personal expansion. Long before feminism became fashionable, he practised it—by ensuring that my time was invested in learning, not grooming for marriage. That faith made me who I was at the time of marriage: a doctoral scholar, an Assistant Professor, and someone brimming with ambition, confident that professional life would be expansive rather than constrictive.
Marriage, Motherhood, and the Recalibration of Ambition
Marriage and motherhood, however, recalibrated that confidence in ways I did not immediately understand. I found myself perpetually fatigued—physically drained, emotionally brittle, professionally inadequate, and personally disoriented. From the outside, nothing seemed amiss. I had a supportive partner and a loving family—conditions society insists are sufficient guarantees of fulfillment. I believed this narrative too. After all, I had “done everything right”—secured my PhD before marriage, planned responsibly, complied dutifully.
The Normalisation of Exhaustion
What unsettled me most was not exhaustion itself, but the ease with which it had been normalised. Patriarchy rarely announces itself as oppression; it arrives instead dressed as virtue. A dense network of myths—carefully repackaged as love, sacrifice, and responsibility—seduces women who attempt to balance professional ambition with marital and maternal life. These myths function as what feminist theory has long identified as ideological soft power: they do not coerce, they persuade.
When Cooking Becomes Moral Duty
From the vast repertoire of such “naturalised” social scriptures that define the ideal wife and the loving mother, I isolate one here—leaving the rest for another reckoning—the moral pressure placed on women to cook. Framed as instinct rather than labour, cooking is stripped of its status as work and elevated into a marker of feminine virtue, making refusal appear not as exhaustion but as moral failure. It is in this quiet translation of labour into love that patriarchy secures its most efficient compliance.
The Unquestioned Script: Why Is the Wife Expected to Cook?
The quiet, unquestioned expectation that I would cook—daily, unfailingly—regardless of workload, deadlines, or depletion. This might sound banal to many. But let me ask the question we are trained never to articulate: why is cooking assumed to be the wife’s responsibility in a nuclear family where both partners are equally employed? Why is food—not just its preparation but its planning, procurement, and anticipation—coded as feminine labour? Why is this labour seen not as work, but as an extension of womanhood itself?
From Preparation to Anticipation: The Mental Load of Food
We are told women are “natural nurturers.” That claim alone deserves an essay of its own. But cooking? In households without extended family support or domestic help, why is the mental and physical burden of feeding the family automatically assigned to the woman—even when her professional responsibilities mirror her partner’s in intensity and accountability?
The Myth of the ‘Natural Nurturer’
Historically, this division of labour rested on a material logic. Until the late twentieth century, many families depended on a single male breadwinner while women managed the home. Expecting women to handle domestic labour then was not merely ideological; it was structural. But that world has shifted. Dual-income households are now the norm, and ironically, even the marriage market disfavors unemployed women. Yet domestic expectations have not evolved alongside economic realities.
The Second Shift in Practice
In every institution I have worked in, I have seen women rush home after office hours—not to rest, but to begin their second shift. Dinner must be cooked. Lunch boxes prepared. Breakfast planned. The next day must be pre-emptively organised. Professional excellence is pursued under the constant pressure of domestic readiness.
Learning to Cook After Marriage: Duty Without Desire
I followed this pattern too—reluctantly, clumsily, dutifully. My engagement with cooking began only after marriage, and I have never pretended to enjoy or excel in it. Before the inevitable accusation arises—no, my parents did not fail me. They prioritised my education, and it brought me here.
Training Girls Early: Celebrating Domestic Conditioning
Yet I still hear parents proudly announce that their ten-year-old daughters cook “wonderfully.” Are we meant to applaud this? Celebrate the early conditioning of girls into domestic responsibility—irrespective of their intellectual promise?
The Quiet Realisation: I Am Allowed Not to Cook
For years, I believed I had no choice. That exhaustion did not exempt me. That disinterest was irrelevant. That opting out was unthinkable. Until one day—quietly, without drama—it occurred to me that it is entirely normal for me not to cook on a given day. And if I am not cooking, my husband can—and should—step in. Not as a favour. Not as “help.” But as a co-inhabitant of a shared life.
Not ‘Helping’ but Sharing Life
This should not require negotiation, gratitude, or ideological justification. Someone has to cook. If the wife is not in the kitchen, the husband must naturally enter it. Anything else is not tradition—it is convenience masquerading as culture.
De-Romanticising Motherhood and Food
And please, spare me sermons on motherhood. After the stage of breastfeeding, there is nothing biologically feminine about feeding children. Food is nourishment, not maternal essence. To insist otherwise is to romanticise labour that exhausts women and absolves men.
Not Cooking Is Also Feminism
Perhaps this is what the forties offer—not rebellion, but refusal. A refusal to carry inherited scripts without interrogation. A refusal to perform care as destiny. And finally, the courage to say: I am allowed not to cook. And that, too, is feminism.
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