A woman is always expected to do something. Her life becomes the reflection of other's expectations and desires which unflinchingly have to be fulfilled by her. These expectations are from her family and after marriage from husband's family and of course the society at large which constantly keeps on realizing a woman that what her 'roles' are and what should be her conduct and what she should do and what she should not do. A woman since birth is always taught about the direction and meaning of her life berefting her of all the independence, right to choose and right to decide for herself that what kind of a life she wants. A woman's life is so much bounded by the norms of patriarchy that it becomes inescapable for her to come out of this system of patriarchal notions which have become so entrenched in society and our daily lives that we even fail to realize their presence as they are now invisible and at the same time omnipresent part of our lives. And, these patriarchal assumptions have bounded the destiny of a woman where there is a perpetual resonance of the ideas that how women should be controlled so that they do not transgress or over leap the defined notions of behavior, character, duties and her responsibilities.
These expectations and assumptions grows out of the constant 'gendering' and social constructions which forces women to adapt in the patriarchal system. Women are always differentiated on the basis of her biology(sex) but the gender is characterized by the social underpinnings, the gender is made out of the norms which are constructed by the society and has nothing to do with biology. Women are always expected to be soft, sacrificing, adjusting, docile, soft spoken and should have fecundity. All these qualities are termed as 'feminine' where as courage, valor , strong are 'masculine'. This divide between masculine and feminine creates expectations and assumptions from a man and a woman. Therefore, these traits are made to be created in us through social constructions by family and society. As Simone de Beauvoir has mentioned in her book 'The Second Sex','One is not born a woman but is made one..' These qualities are not seen as the virtues of a good person which every person must have but are put in the garb of masculine and feminine which makes the life of a woman under perpetual pressure to suit the norms whereas a man is favoured by the patriarchy so he enjoys the dominant position.
Except the process of reproduction nothing is natural related to women then why it is always assumed that she has got to do certain tasks. Margaret Mead in her works mentioned that 'Motherhood is a biological fact and fatherhood is a sociological fiction' which means that everything what a women does from child rearing to all the domestic chores can very well be done by a man. But it always assumed that these are the tasks entitled to be performed by women. Therefore why women are always expected to do certain things considering them as the 'natural order of things' bounding them from centuries inadvertent of the fact that the patriarchal system in which we are living in is so pernicious for women, thus killing their identities and individual being.
However there is a dire need to understand that what we assume is not natural but are social constructions which make our identities as a 'man' or a 'woman' whereas if made everything gender neutral then there will be no distinction between a man and a woman, will also unbound women from the clutches of expectations. We need to free women from the patriarchal web which have bounded their destinies !
