In Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, marriage is not merely a romantic milestone but a critical financial and social strategy.
The five Bennet daughters face the “marriage market,” a space where survival depends on aligning love with wealth, status and propriety.
Bollywood’s Dum Laga Ke Haisha revisits arranged marriage through a modern and refreshingly realistic lens. The film explores body image, educational disparity, and societal expectations.
Sandhya, the female protagonist, eventually finds love, but not before enduring repeated insults about her weight.
In Disney’s Cinderella, the prince’s search for a bride among countless women turns beauty into a kind of currency, highlighting a patriarchal system where a woman’s worth is often measured through appearance and the male gaze.
From 19th-century England to contemporary cinema and timeless fairy tales, these stories reveal a consistent truth: women have historically navigated, and continue to navigate, systems that prioritise survival, social approval, and appearance over autonomy.
Yet these narratives do not exist only in literature and films. They quietly echo in everyday conversations – in casual remarks, passing jokes and unsolicited observations. Women’s Day perhaps offers an opportunity to pause and listen to these remarks more carefully.
Prima, a young professional, remembers an incident from her university days. “Someone used to like me, but the feeling was not mutual,” she says. “At one point, I gained some weight, and the guy came up to me and said, ‘Thank God you are not my girlfriend. I couldn’t show you to people.’”
Journalist Sumaiya Shams recalls attending a workshop where a fellow female journalist asked her a routine question: “What does your husband do?” When Sumaiya replied that she was not married, the response came with visible disbelief. “Oma! Kenoooo?” — roughly meaning, “Really? How so?”
The assumption that a woman must be married runs so deep that any deviation from it often appears surprising. For Sabira Chowdhury, a 52-year-old professional who works at a reputed NGO and prefers to remain single, such assumptions have followed her for years.
A male colleague once remarked to her, “You are still being a burden on your parents.” Sabira’s response was simple: “How do you know who is a burden on whom?”
That question effectively ended the conversation.
Momtaj Mumu (not her real name), a theatre artist, says she frequently hears a familiar remark: “Media-y kaj kora meyeder biye teke na” — implying that women working in media or show business rarely sustain marriages.
Such comments are not limited to strangers or social settings. Once, during a conversation at my workplace, a colleague remarked about a female coworker who looked particularly elegant in a saree: “I feel like ordering tea whenever I see a girl wearing a saree.”
The remark may have sounded humorous, but the association it drew between femininity, traditional clothing and domestic service was unmistakable.
On another occasion, when tea from the office canteen was delayed, a senior colleague joked: “Age janle bou kei niye ashtam office e!” — “Had I known, I would have brought my wife to the office.” Such humour often reveals how deeply domestic expectations remain attached to women’s identities.
Assumptions about women’s lives appear in everyday encounters, too. While shopping for squid at a superstore in Dhanmondi, I was once approached by a friendly woman who asked, quite naturally, “Does your husband like squid?” For the record, I am not married.
Tazrin, a brand and communications lead at an international organisation, says one of the strangest remarks she often hears is: “You neither look like a manager nor like a mother.
“People say I look too young for a leadership role,” she says. “And apparently, I don’t look like a mother either. I wear T-shirts, jeans, kamiz, saree – everything. Maybe in our society, mothers are not supposed to be fashionable.”
While writing this piece for my feature editor, who is now a grandmother, I found myself remembering a remark from an old schoolfriend.
Before sharing it, perhaps it is important to acknowledge that not everyone who makes such comments intends harm. Often, they emerge from long-standing social conditioning rather than deliberate malice. Many of us, knowingly or unknowingly, fall back on these assumptions because they are so deeply ingrained.
The comment from my friend was simple: “You might not be able to raise children if you stick to journalism.”
Literature, once again, offers an interesting mirror to these attitudes.
In the novel “Tetul Bone Jochhna” by Humayun Ahmed, a famous line reads: “Jid er purush hoy Badshah, jid er meye hoy…” — implying that determination makes a man a king but a woman something far less respectable. Dr
Tasnima Alam Moumita says her mother-in-law would often quote this line. From literature to cinema to everyday conversation, the pattern remains strikingly familiar.
Yet women continue to challenge these assumptions; sometimes through quiet resistance, sometimes through humour, and sometimes simply by asking a question that stops the conversation in its tracks. Like Sabira Chowdhury once did. “How do you know who is a burden on whom?”
