In India, the phrase ‘strong woman’ is almost always meant as a compliment. It appears in WhatsApp forwards about mothers, in speeches about single parents, and in casual conversations about women who seem to have handled more than life usually demands. Strength, in these moments, becomes a kind of shorthand for endurance.

Being called a ‘strong woman’ isn’t unfamiliar to me. In the eyes of society, I was the model ‘strong woman’ – financially independent, opinionated, feminist, but still bending just enough to remain palatable within a patriarchal society. It was easy to call me a strong woman when I had barely become one, not because I had done anything remarkable, but only because life had arranged itself abruptly.

After my father died, I began working while still finishing my graduation. It was the practical thing to do, and to most people around me, it quickly became a story of resilience. Relatives said it with admiration, friends said it with pride—you’re so strong. Somewhere along the way, the label settled over me like a quiet expectation. Once you are the strong one, there is an unspoken understanding that you will keep being strong.

My mother navigated the loss differently. As she reprised her role as a homemaker, grief didn’t arrive for her as resolve or productivity. Her grief came with the gradual loss of confidence in the small tasks that once felt routine. For the world, she wasn’t a strong woman anymore.

The contrast was striking. I was treated as the strong one because I kept moving—studying, working, functioning. My mother, who had held the family together for years, was now seen as fragile. People were quick to sort us into categories. In a country that often celebrates the idea of the “strong woman”, it seemed like a neat story.

But the more I have thought about it since, the more I realise how incomplete that story really is.

In India, strength is one of the most common compliments given to women. It is used generously for mothers, daughters, wives and especially for single mothers—women who are seen to have survived circumstances that might have broken someone else.

In theory, strength is empowering. In practice, it often becomes yet another expectation placed on women.

The idea of a strong woman was marketed to us since we were little girls. We saw the characterisations clearly in ad films and iconic Bollywood movies. The ‘Santoor mom’ is a strong woman: she is soft and youthful as a mother, but a boss lady at work. Aisha from the film Wake Up Sid (played by Konkona Sen Sharma) is a strong woman: she moves to the big city, lives alone, but is nurturing and loving towards unemployed Sid.

I spent my initial years of adulthood taking pride in how I navigated through the curveballs life threw at me. But over the years, the endurance wore down. That’s when I saw the irony. That the most acceptable ‘strong woman’ is often a girl who is independent but still bends at the will of our patriarchal society, just at the right angles to not cause any waves.

My epiphany led me to cringe at every International Women’s Day post I saw, marketing the same tributes to women who have “faced everything with courage”.

The ‘strong woman’ narrative rarely allows any flexibility.

Once a woman is seen as the strong one—the daughter who stepped up, the mother who held everything together, the single parent who raised children alone—it becomes difficult for her to step outside that role. Strength becomes less like a compliment and more like a social assignment.

At the same time, women who struggle more visibly with grief or pressure are quietly placed on the other side of the story. They become the ones people worry about, the ones seen as fragile or overwhelmed.

The problem with this neat divide is that real life rarely fits into it. Strength and vulnerability are not opposites. Most women experience both, often at the same time.

Yet the cultural script remains simple: the strong woman who carries on, and the fragile woman who cannot.

If the ‘strong woman’ narrative is flattering in theory, its consequences in real life are far more complicated. In many Indian homes, the label does not just recognise resilience—it quietly demands it.

This becomes particularly visible in the lives of housewives and single mothers, who are often held up as symbols of strength. The homemaker who keeps the household running without complaint. The single mother who raises children alone while navigating financial and social pressures. These stories are told with admiration, but they also come with a subtle expectation: that these women will continue enduring whatever comes their way.

Single mothers, like my mum, are subjected to an even more complicated version of the narrative. In public conversations, they are celebrated as heroic figures who managed to raise children despite the odds.

On Women’s Day, stories of single mothers appear as examples of sacrifice and courage. This imagination, however, often obscures the realities they live with: social judgment, financial duress, and pressure to always prove they are coping well.

The result is a strange contradiction. Society praises these women for their strength, but offers very little room for them to admit when they are struggling.

Looking back, what strikes me most is how the same narrative managed to place my mother and me on opposite sides of the same story.

The ‘strong woman’ label followed me everywhere—in conversations with relatives, in casual praise from friends, even in the quiet expectations people placed on how I should handle whatever came next.

But strength, once assigned, becomes something you feel compelled to perform.

I remember consciously hiding my lows at work, my heartbreak, my grief, because by then I had absorbed the role everyone had written for me. The strong one doesn’t collapse. The strong one copes.

My mother, meanwhile, was quietly retreating further into herself. The woman who had once taught me how to use an ATM when I was a child slowly lost the confidence to go to one by herself. The world interpreted this as fragility. But living with her grief every day required a kind of resilience that rarely gets recognised in the language of ‘strong women’.

That, perhaps, is the real flaw in the narrative.

This Women’s Day, the tributes to “strong women” will appear again across social media and advertising campaigns. They will celebrate endurance, sacrifice, and resilience.

But if there is anything my mother and I have taught each other over the years, it is that strength is not always visible, and it certainly does not look the same for every woman.

Sometimes, the most radical thing we can do is allow women the space to not be strong at all.