Love And Liberation: Can Women Ever Have It All?

Every time I watch Little Women, my heart unfailingly resonates with Jo. Somehow, it always always beats for Jo. Never for Amy. How can I resonate with a woman who chose love over a career? How can I idolise Amy who couldn’t feel the power of being a woman? How can Amy be my feminist icon? How can Amy shine for me when Jo is the light?

I have, shamelessly, been prejudiced toward Jo. Tears come rolling down when she says, “Women, they have minds, and they have souls, as well as just hearts. And they’ve got ambition, and they’ve got talent, as well as just beauty. I’m so sick of people saying that love is all a woman is fit for.  I’m so sick of it. But I’m so lonely.”

I’m like- You, Go Girl!!!

Amidst the chaos of my heart, I often neglect the last part of the sentence, “But I’m so lonely.”

Somewhere, Jo’s sentiments take me back to when Julia Roberts in Notting Hill said, “I'm also just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her.”

In a world full of hatred and prejudice, we all seek love. Love is all we need, all the world needs yet, it’s scorned. It’s not a worthy pursuit. We want love, but we can’t chase it. Love is blind, but we can't be blinded by it. We are ‘free’ to love as long as it doesn’t threaten our freedom.

Discourses on Love

In the 21st century, modern discourses on romantic love and relationships have surfaced. The change is accompanied by the advent of cohabitation, decriminalisation of homosexuality, advancements in contraception, and liberalisation of divorce laws. We no longer live in a world where self-sacrifice is the mantra of a loving relationship, rather mutual growth defines modern love. 

We can feel a paradigm shift in the essence of love where the focus is on practicality than idealism. If ever the option of choosing between career and love presents itself, we gotta choose a career, isn’t it? In this sense, modern love stands tainted by the radical feminist critique. 

Radical Feminists on Love

Feminists, particularly the radical ones, argue that ‘falling in love’ breeds self-denial in women. Simone De Beauvoir argues that love is ideological, a patriarchal tool to reinforce gendered norms and structures. It's an illusion that makes you feel transcendent like you are making a choice, exercising your autonomy, But, in reality, it’s a cage designed by patriarchy to entrap women and feed them with this ‘false consciousness’ that love is liberating. 

Beauvoir’s analysis is of importance as it stresses two key arguments: firstly, love reproduces women’s complicity in patriarchal social relations. Blinding them with the feeling of ‘autonomy and choice’, it uses it to tyrannise her. Secondly, women’s complicity operates at the level of desire. Love is anything but servitude. In a society that operates on skewed notions of morality and chastity, women aren’t allowed to love, let alone embrace it. So, ‘falling in love’ seems revolutionary, a way to resist the patriarchy. 

But, does this freedom to follow our heart’s desire truly set us free, or chain us in the same cage, from where we sought liberation?

Other feminists like Shulamith Firestone, and Andrea Dworkin all saw love as divisive and destructive for women. Love, according to them, popularises and validates the patriarchal notions of the division of labour and emotions between a man and a woman. Love is walled by feelings of self-sacrifice and compromise, which is nothing but a prison for the women. This is specifically true for heterosexual relationships. Focused on seeing love as a form of resistance and charmed by the illusion of choice, we often lose sight of the larger political and social battles we have been fighting for ages. 

Ti-Grace Atkinson wrote in Amazon Odyssey that ‘love is nothing more than a special psycho-pathological state of fantasy which operates as a response to gendered power relations and also supports them through the delusion that it is the most desirable state for women to be in.

toh kya sab bas moh-maaya hai?

Are we not, unconsciously, doing to ourselves exactly what patriarchy has done to us? Prescribe the rules, and define what women can have, what they should want, what is theirs and what isn’t. Are these criticisms, not a nuanced, intellectual way to scream that ‘women can’t have it all’? 

Somewhere, there is a girl who cares more to be loved, she wants to be loved. And right beside her is a girl who is content and loves her liberty a little too much to give it up for any mortal man. And, watching them is a woman who is sipping coffee with her partner, who she is in an open relationship with, while scribbling in her diary. 

What does this mean? Can women have it all? Is love deemed an undeserving realm for the feminine soul? Or perhaps, should we surrender to the philosophy of "to each their own," letting the individual heart chart its unique course? 

Someday, let’s meet for a cocktail night and navigate the tapestry of love and liberation. 

Views expressed by the author are their own