Maggie cuts her hair

💇🏻‍♀️Why did Maggie cut her hair? This story was in my English text book as part of ‘A mill on the floss’. A girl called Maggie cuts her hair as a rebellion when someone mocked her long hair. She just went up and asked her brother to cut them. The mother was furious but the father was quiet. Maggie is a different sort of heroine, she is not talking romance or desirability like Austen or Brontë sisters. She is tumultuous, rebellious, and prone to mood swings and anger. As Rachel Vorona calls them - Too Much Heroines—women who, in the face of patriarchal dictates, cannot or will not contain themselves emotionally, sexually, physically, or intellectually

💇🏽‍♀️Why did I cut my hair? I am not sure. The memory fades but I must be 4 or 5 years old, much before the story. The streak of rebelliousness brewing at a young age. Harmless stories of Maggie were meant to discipline young girls but rather than discipline it made it ok for a girl to cut her hair. My daughter did the same when she was 3 years old. I think it was about curiosity or playing with scissors. Either ways she went further and even cut her eye lashes. Now that’s a rebel without a cause.. but then every next generation feels like that. Eventually when Covid hit, cutting your entire family’s hair became a skill you didn’t know you would need one day. They all ended up looking like katora/ bowl styled hair. 💇🏾‍♂️

My mother must have had the same thoughts. Probably I wanted to try something dangerous (not so dangerous after all), or was it because I didn’t like how my mother made my hair. My hair was not easy - they were pretty, all silky and slippery, but never stayed in rubber bands. My mother and I had struggled getting them in. Later when I went to a strict girls convent school the Nuns insisted on two twisted plats folded in halves with a blue ribbon like a good Indian traditional girl in the early posters on good boy and good girl. My mother with her 3 sloth like kids chopped off my hair in a blunt cut which I maintain to till date. Wear a hair band, she said. Having no experience in managing long hair, I struggle now with similar hair texture of my daughter. I blame my fat fingers which can’t hold silky hairs in plats and twist them beautifully into works of art like other mothers. 

💇🏾‍♀️Why do women cut their hair? Mostly a mundan is a ritual for both Hindu boys and girls believed to improve the hair quality. In olden ages shaving heads was a ritual for widows to make them unattractive. To think of it, these women looked even more beautiful unbridled by those long hair. Most women I know, cut their hair to experiment and look good. Getting a complete makeover by simply loosing a few inches, albeit hair. I don’t have to even change my wardrobe and a hair cut gives me a fresh face to look at everyday in the mirror. I do believe and insist, that I can carry bangs which is borderline statement for me and many women. These happen once a year or the big moment when I need that extra pump. 

💇🏼‍♀️Why did a woman cut her hair? My sister in law did it. It became a big deal in our conservative small town Punjabi family. My mother and her mother wondered and worried like all mothers do. Hair not here, is something the men in my family have always struggled with. My mother was worried that my sister in law was reducing the family average hair and also ‘log kya kahenge’. The log, aka people, said a lot. They didn’t stop at asking if she has got a disease or is there a problem in the family <wink wink>. Their knowledge limited to relative connectivity of baldness and sickness or madness, basis what they heard of in media. My heart goes out to women who have to do this as they heal, but this tells a lot about women who judge other women. 

💇‍♀️Why can’t women cut their hair? The movement of scissors and the ease with which they just come off. The weightless burden of gender, beauty and patriarchy. I asked my sister in law, why she did it. She gave a vague answer, something about how she felt good doing it. But her answers don’t have to fit my level of suitable reasons or justify anything to me. She wants to do it again but her kids tell her no. One day she mocked my red hair and said they are too much, and I retorted, someone who gets bald can’t comment on my hair colour. Over time we have become comfortable in each other’s weirdness, in a world where we all must be normal. Boys wear blue, girls wear pink. Girls have long hair and boys have short. Otherwise your identity is too fluid and loose for them to understand and fit you in the prescribed definition of the society and genders. 

💇🏿‍♀️So let the Maggies cut their hair. When I see young women posting their bald heads on social media, I feel their gentle streaks of rebellions like the color of rainbow flag or ribbon on your collar. It’s a strong voice and sentiment, a silent one but a powerful one of accepting themselves and rejecting others. Hair here and every where. We make statements with and without hair. A world where women do not dress for a man’s honor, or standards of society and fashion. Where clothes or hair do not control their minds and their boundaries, curtailing them to homes but allow them to step out to shine under the sun, blow with the wind, and dance in the rain.

#blog #amillonthefloss #women #georgeeliot #feminism #classicfiction #englishschool