What Daughters Carry

By Mahak Sharma

As India begins, slowly and unevenly, to talk about the invisible labour of care, as young women name burnout not as a phase but as a way of life, and as digital surveillance quietly settles into our most intimate spaces, a familiar question returns with new urgency: who is still carrying the weight of everything that cannot be measured?

There are things daughters carry that never enter a suitcase. They carry them in the spine, in the way their shoulders lift at raised voices, in the reflex to apologise before they even know what they’re apologising for. They carry inherited silences, habits they never consciously chose, and fears that feel older than their own age. Some of what they carry is love. Some of it is fear. Some of it is a legacy they never consented to inherit.

Today, daughters also carry phones that never sleep. Live locations. Emergency alerts. Work notifications at midnight. The pressure to be visible, productive, emotionally aware, endlessly resilient. The language of freedom has grown louder. The vocabulary of burden has only learned to speak more politely. The weight itself feels unchanged.

Much of what daughters inherit is never said out loud. It moves through pauses, through warnings disguised as care, through what is never encouraged. Many grow up inside unsentences—desires that were never allowed to become language, anger that learned to soften itself into silence, love that survived by becoming small. Often, the mother’s life becomes a coded text the daughter deciphers slowly: what to expect less from, what to fear quietly, what to endure with a straight face.

When I was a teenager, I once asked my mother why she never travelled alone. She paused for a moment, smiled faintly, and said, “There was no need.” I remember accepting that answer back then. It took me years to hear what was folded inside that pause—fear, negotiation, adjustment. That unfinished sentence still sits with me. It is also something daughters carry.

In the digital age, silence has not vanished. It has simply changed shape. Families may look more “modern,” conversations may be more open on the surface, and daughters may be more outspoken online. And yet, deeper emotional truths remain difficult to hold in public. Trauma still travels quietly—from generation to generation, through what is avoided, what is normalised, what is dismissed as oversensitivity. Daughters still learn restraint fluently. They simply begin younger now.

The lesson of being “good” arrives early. Good means adjusting before asking and understanding before expressing, and forgiving before being asked to. Earlier, this training stayed mostly inside homes. Today, it spills everywhere—into offices, friendships, relationships, and digital spaces. A daughter must be ambitious but not threatening, hardworking but not exhausted, outspoken but not excessive. Even vulnerability must arrive neatly packaged, caption-ready.

This is where burnout culture and patriarchy subtly meet. Women—especially daughters—are expected to care, earn, manage their emotions, manage everyone else’s emotions, and still appear well. Emotional labour has gone online. Performance has become constant.

Fear remains one of the most intimate things daughters inherit. Not as a thought, but as instinct. In keys clenched between fingers. In shared live locations. Phone batteries are guarded like lifelines. In late-night texts that simply say, Reached. Smart cities, CCTV cameras, ride apps, and SOS buttons have not removed fear. They have just made it more organised. The body still learns vigilance before it learns rest.

Surveillance, too, is now wrapped in the language of care. Tracking is framed as protection. But protection that depends on constant visibility is still a form of control.

Daughters are also trained, often without anyone ever naming it, to become containers. They hold what others spill—the father’s anger, the mother’s exhaustion, entitlement of other men in the family, the family’s reputation. In modern India, they also shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid care work. According to the 2019 Time Use Survey, Indian women spend eight times more hours a day than men on unpaid domestic and care labour, compared to less than two hours for men. Much of this labour is quietly performed by daughters—before marriage, after marriage, and often alongside full-time jobs.

We now speak openly about mental health. But emotional labour remains stubbornly gendered. Daughters are still the ones who smooth conversations, absorb conflict, and become the emotional shock absorbers of families. Strength, here, becomes expectation.

The daughter’s body, too, remains a public project. It is watched, assessed, compared, and corrected. There are rules about how much space it may take, how much softness is allowed, and how loudly desire may speak. The body becomes something to manage, curate, and brand. Shame has not disappeared. It has simply learned to speak in algorithms.

Even now, as an adult—financially independent, mobile, self-aware—I catch my body doing quiet calculations before rest, before joy, before ease. The world calls this being careful. But when carefulness becomes lifelong and gendered, it begins to feel like living under permanent self-surveillance.

And yet, daughters have never only been carriers of burden. Literature reminds us of this again and again. From Ismat Chughtai’s stubborn girls to Mahasweta Devi’s survivors, from Jhumpa Lahiri’s conflicted daughters to today’s women in contemporary fiction—daughters are where memory meets reinvention. They inherit, yes. But they also interrupt.

What daughters carry today is full of contradiction. Alongside fear, they carry ambition without apology. Alongside silence, they carry language. Alongside obedience, they carry choice. They build friendships that become shelter. They attempt relationships shaped by consent rather than duty. They hold anger without immediately dissolving it into guilt. They dream without explaining why.

Some break cycles quietly—by choosing differently, speaking more honestly, resting without guilt. Some break them loudly—by leaving, confronting, or refusing. Many stand in between, holding inheritance and resistance at once.

Modernity has given daughters access to education, income, language, and mobility. But access has not meant release. Many live suspended between gratitude and exhaustion: thankful for freedoms their mothers were denied, yet burdened by new expectations of perfection, balance and constant self-improvement. They are asked to transform family histories without appearing ungrateful to them.

There is also a quiet grief many daughters carry: grief for the selves that were edited out along the way. The girl before caution. The woman who learned to soften her edges to remain lovable. Even with awareness, this grief often remains private. There are a few rituals for the lives we were almost allowed to live.

What daughters carry is not only a burden. It is memory. It is tenderness hardened into endurance. It is emotional intelligence sharpened by constraint. It is survival braided with defiance.

And perhaps, in these surveilled, overstimulated, burnt-out times, the most radical choice a daughter can make is to decide—carefully, consciously—what she will keep, and what ends with her.

Inheritance is powerful. But so is interruption.

And daughters, quietly and relentlessly, carry both.

Life continues around them while they remain rooted, holding things in place.