Before we had apps to book our movie tickets, we would have to go the theater to book our tickets. My wife and I are avid movie watchers. Before the kids came along, movies were a big part of our weekends. There have been weekends when we watched five movies. The bookings for the weekend would start on Wednesday or Thursday. So I would go to the theater and stand in a queue to buy the tickets for all the movies we planned to watch over the weekend. This is even before multiplexes. So I would actually go to two or three theaters to book all the tickets we needed. While I would be standing in the queue, I would look at the much shorter women’s queue and wonder why they wanted a separate queue if they wanted to be seen as equal to men.
It was several years later that I realized that if not for the reserved queue, the women might not even be there. Imagine the conversation at home when a woman announces that she is going for a movie. The first objection would be that they would have to stand in a queue with men pressing in from behind them on to men who were standing in front of them. This would of course be followed by objections about being in a dark hall surrounded by men.
Similarly, a strange thing you will see in Indian restaurants is the Family room. You couldn’t use that area of the restaurant unless you were with a woman. Yes, Indian restaurants had them long before pubs had “couples only” entry rules. The reason again is the same. If it wasn’t for the reserved space, women would not have been allowed by the families to go to a restaurant.
Given our patriarchal views, bringing women into the mainstream required making safe spaces where they could be free. If not for these spaces, women would continue to be house bound under the guise of protecting them.
This can be better explained by another affirmative action, reservations for the backward castes. Let’s take the case of seats reserved in colleges for backward castes. People like to point out that there are people from the forward castes who are poorer that some people in the backward castes. On this basis there have been demands for reservations for poor forward castes. This argument misses the main point. The poor forward caste student cannot go to college because he doesn’t have money. That problem can be solved by giving him money or free tuition. But a student from the backward caste couldn’t go to college, period. It had nothing to do with whether he had money or not. He was not allowed into the college because of his caste.
In the same way, the women’s queue at the theater, or the reserved seats in public transport, or the Family room at the restaurant isn’t for the comfort of the women or to put them ahead of men, they exist just so that the women can be there. It has nothing to do with the capability of the women.
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