I often think of women as shapeshifters, not because they lack a shape of their own but because they navigate changing landscapes like water, carrying entire worlds within them yet always harbouring the latent strength to erode boundaries and make their own way. Growing up, I saw this elemental grace unfold within the walls of home.
I remember my grandmothers exchanging recipes while also passing down their wisdom about when to speak, when to remain silent, and how to navigate the shifting moods of the men in the family. In the safety of those spaces, I watched them tease each other, giggle at old memories, mocking and cursing their husbands, and quietly exhuming dreams that life had pushed aside. During long, slow afternoons, while putting oil into each other’s hair, they spoke of their frustrations, unmet expectations, and the small, daily battles which they had somehow learnt to survive with no prior preparation. They caught and held their laughter, disappointments, dreams and frustrations, acting as gentle reservoirs for stories that had no other place to flow.
As a child, I often drifted away from those conversations. I didn’t understand what those moments carried. As an adult, for a long time, I looked at these moments through the eyes of a woman who had learnt to question patriarchy. I saw the compromises, the silences and the limitations placed on the women before me, and I often thought: they deserved more. Yet, in revisiting those memories, while holding anger towards the structure, I found myself facing a contradiction as well: do compliance and adaptability always equate to surrender? After those family gatherings, something always seemed different. The women appeared lighter, calmer, and less burdened. The realities they returned to had not changed, but something within them would shift.
Even now, in such conversations, I see vulnerability and agency existing at the same time. I see women carrying disappointments while simultaneously creating spaces of healing. I see the unfairness of a system that confined their choices, but I also see how they found room for themselves within those constraints.
My own conflict made me question a common understanding of agency.
When we talk about women’s empowerment, we often imagine visible moments of resistance: women speaking up, challenging authority, breaking away from conformity, and demanding change. These forms of resistance are necessary and have transformed societies. But are these the only ways women exercise agency? And can every woman afford the risks that come with open defiance?
Naila Kabeer’s Renegotiating Patriarchy: Gender, Agency and the Bangladesh Paradox tackles this normative notion and shows that women often exercise agency within the very structures that constrain them—through negotiation, adaptation, relationships, strategic choices, and everyday practices. As Abu-Lughod (2002) also argues, Western feminist critiques of patriarchal norms that privilege women’s freedom and liberation may have relevance in particular historical or cultural situations, but it is possible that different desires, aspirations, and capacities shape the subjectivities of women who experience other histories, cultures, and languages.
Agency, then, is not always a dramatic act of breaking free. It is also the quiet ability to carve out a small sanctuary for oneself within an unequal world—a continuous, unspoken renegotiation against the odds.
And perhaps this is precisely where agency meets healing. Long before formal therapy had a name or place in our world, these women were pioneering their own medicine by witness-bearing for one another.
While Western feminist vocabulary and therapy often value speaking openly, naming harm, individual choice, confrontation, and self-actualisation, other communities may express personhood through patience, care, humour, endurance, storytelling, spirituality, and collective belonging.
The modern therapy model has definitely offered important possibilities for many people. But it also comes from a specific social and historical context, one shaped by individualism and the capitalist assumption that care is a commodity to be accessed primarily through specialised services.
But what happens when healing defies the modern or Western parameters? Sharing stories and experiences and flowing through life’s struggles together are the exact mechanisms through which people survive hostile realities. This is a marginalised and largely forgotten language of care. It may not wear the clinical vocabulary of the modern world, but it is definitively no lesser a version of healing.
The irony is that we mistake unfamiliar forms of agency for the absence of agency, just as we mistake unfamiliar forms of healing for the absence of healing.
A woman may not openly challenge the authority around her because the consequences of doing so are simply too costly. As political theorist James C Scott (1990) suggests, while marginalised groups (in this case, women) are acutely aware of systemic injustice, their capacity for overt rebellion is tightly constrained by the severe sanctions such efforts provoke. Consequently, they deploy “weapons of the weak”—covert strategies (ranging from folk tales, provocative or mocking songs, intrusive noise, disapproving silence, sexually irreverent discourse, and taunts) designed to win tacit gains or express discontent safely. They build solidarity with other women and construct emotion-based worlds where they can momentarily exist beyond the roles imposed on them. It is often at this juncture that a woman begins to value her chosen networks and ties, over her given ones.
This is not to accept oppressive structures or romanticise a woman’s capacity to endure suffering. Rather, it is to recognise the intricate complexity of women’s survival. True empowerment cannot always be measured by a singular, Western-influenced definition of freedom. Instead, we must ask an essential question: what do women themselves consider meaningful, valuable, and worth protecting?
The women I grew up with were neither simply enduring patriarchal structures, nor completely free from them. They were constantly negotiating, shedding and preserving parts of themselves within worlds that often limited their choices. Their exchanges and shared moments were not substitutes for legal justice or professional care. But these were evidence of the fact that human beings have always created ways to seek comfort, meaning and connection even within difficult circumstances or limiting structures.
Perhaps healing is not always found in sitting with an expert in a private room, and agency is not only found in public acts of defiance. They also emerge in kitchens, drawing rooms, friendships, and communal spaces.
S Arzooman Chowdhury is researcher and practitioner in gender justice and human rights. She can be reached at [email protected].
Views expressed in this article are the author's own.
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