Zipped Lips: Why Women Stay Silent

Zipped Lips: Why Women Stay Silent

In convent school, the nuns delivered their favourite saying with quiet authority: “Girls should be seen and not heard.” They never shouted it. They never needed to. Repetition did the work. It became instinct. Over time, I began to understand why women stay silent and how deeply that silence is taught. Zipped Lips explores what that instinct costs, and what reclaiming your voice, even a decade late, can still recover. It became us.

Why Women Stay Silent: Where It Begins

Nobody imposes silence on girls forcefully. Instead, families, institutions, and women we trusted gently encourage it. Everyone tells us to adjust, to stay polite, to avoid confrontation. Whoever speaks up earns the label of difficult or disrespectful. Over time, we filter expression before we even form it. By adulthood, we no longer choose silence consciously. We respond to years of subtle conditioning.

When Silence Follows Us Home

I know this reflex intimately. For ten years, I stayed quiet about what was rightfully mine, my husband’s share of the family business. Not because I lacked knowledge. Not because I lacked feeling. The conditioning ran so deep that speaking felt like transgression. Every quiet year cost me something. Then one day, I decided enough was enough. Slowly, calmly, persistently, I began asking. Not with outrage. With measured words. Ten long years of asking. Eventually, I received a small property. Not what I deserved. But proof that the voice works, even when it arrives late.

That lesson stayed with me. Silence does not preserve peace. It preserves someone else’s advantage.

The Loose Tongue They Warned You About

When I later spoke up for my children’s rightful share in a family matter, my mother-in-law delivered her swift verdict. I had a loose tongue and talked rubbish. She intended every word of that remark as a warning, a dismissal, a door shut firmly in my face. This is what greets women when they finally speak. The system does not applaud courage. It attacks character.

A loose tongue. As if asking for what is fair is somehow indecent.

When Silence Enters the Workplace

On paper, things seem to be improving. POSH complaints have risen sharply over the years, especially in sectors like technology and finance. Yet nearly half of Indian women still report harassment or microaggressions at work. The gap between what happens and what gets reported tells its own story. The personal rarely stays separate from the professional.

That gap becomes impossible to ignore in cases like the 2024 RG Kar Medical College incident in Kolkata. An assailant attacked and killed a trainee doctor, and investigators found the Internal Complaints Committee improperly constituted, packed with management and their relatives, directly violating POSH guidelines. Women had been walking into that environment every single day, holding their breath.

Harassers typically occupy positions of authority. When someone controls your salary, your promotion, or your recommendations, you cannot easily complain. This is not a weakness. It is a calculation, the same calculation I made for ten years at a family dining table.

The Cost of Being Nice

People routinely mistake silence for peacekeeping. A woman ignores an inappropriate remark to avoid escalation. She absorbs repeated discomfort to protect the room’s harmony. Neither decision is simple. Both are strategic. Moreover, the long-term cost stays invisible until it compounds. Constant self-censorship breeds self-doubt. It erodes trust in your own instincts. Gradually, dismissing discomfort feels easier than naming it.

Why Speaking Up Is Not Simple

Anyone can ask why women do not speak sooner. The harder question is what makes speaking feel so dangerous. Many women do not even recognise what they experience as harassment. They assume it is simply how things work or part of doing the job. Social perception plays a role. So does institutional response. Furthermore, when authorities ignore or minimise early complaints, that message travels, not just to one woman but to every woman watching. Silence, in such cases, is not passive. Experience shapes it.

What Begins to Change

The silence is breaking, yet formal reporting still attracts only a small number of female employees. However, awareness shifts things quietly. More women now recognise patterns that once felt entirely normal. The internal dialogue begins to change. Instead of immediately dismissing discomfort, something pauses. Something recognises. Sometimes, that pause is where everything begins.

A Personal Unlearning

The nuns meant well, I think. Or perhaps they simply passed on what others had passed to them. Either way, “seen and not heard” was never advice. It was architecture, built to contain us. Unlearning it did not mean becoming loud or combative. Rather, it meant becoming honest with myself first. Choosing silence and being shaped by it are two very different things. For ten years, I lived inside that difference before I finally found the door.

Closing Thought

People have long presented silence as a woman’s grace. But grace that costs you a decade, a property, and your children’s rights is not grace at all.

It is loss, dressed up as good manners..Not every moment demands a voice. But not every moment deserves your quiet either.

Z is for Zipped Lips, and for the women who are slowly, finally, learning to unzip them.

This post is part of Blogchatter’s A2Z Challenge.

The Theme of my A2Z series is The Second Half

Find all my A2Z Blogs Below

1. Aging Well Versus Looking Young
2. Being Needed Less: The adjustment no one talks about
3. Clutter of The Heart
4. Doing Less Without Feeling Guilty
5. Evolving Friendships in the Second Half
6. Feeding Your Own Soul
7. Growing Old as a Woman in India
8. Humour That Saved Me
9. Women’s Intuition: My 7th Sense
10. Judgement: What I stopped carrying
11. Kitchen Hacks: 25 Tried & Tested
12. Lifelong Learning: From Letters to AI Prompts
13. Matka Magic
14. Neighbours and the quiet joy
15. Old Photo Albums Versus Digital Photos
16. Pickle Jars & Indian Achar
17. Questioning Social Beliefs
18. Relationships
19. Social Rules Nobody warned you about
20. Travel After 50
21. Unseen Work of Women
22. Villains Ive outgrown
23. What Virgin River Taught Me
24. X Factor. You either have it or earn it
25. Y is for Yapper