Shattering the glass ceiling !

It is very common to see, especially in articles written by women on successful  women achievers, the expression 'Shattering the glass ceiling'. Whenever I encounter this expression I cannot seem to help myself from the image that my mind conjures up that dates back to Bombay of the 1970s. It makes me question why would they want to shatter it when one can ascend to the top floor in skirts ?

It was a popular rumor in Bangalore among college boys, that a famous smuggler of Bombay who had amassed great wealth, had constructed a palatial building in Bombay where one of the intermediate stories of the building had a clear transparent glass ceiling. This ceiling would form the floor of the storey immediately above (with a one-way view?). He would get to have shapely damsels with skirts and bereft of underclothing moving around on that floor even as he would lay sprawled on his bed below smoking a hookah and enjoying the scene. At that time in the 1970s, as a college student, I had not yet come across the expression 'shattering the glass ceiling' as an expression of thwarted hopes of ambitious women who desired to ascend in the hierarchy. Later on, as strong expressions of feminism picked up and I became adult enough to understand the concern of feminists, I came across this expression. I confess that I can never ever relate to the expression as my mind immediately races to the image of the glass ceiling I had formed when in college. I think of the superfluity in shattering the ceiling as I contrive to imagine how women could easily ascend to the top floor in attractive skirts without their undergarments!  Despite all my efforts to banish the 1970s image of the fortunate smuggler's home in Bombay and substitute it with the concern of feminists, it never seems to work.

It is a telling instance of how a powerful metaphor for one person in a particular context becomes an equally powerful metaphor for another in precisely the opposite way, and all this due to a quirky circumstance over which he seems to have no control. If that Bombay smuggler was not caught and exposed and the rumor about him had not floated around, the expression 'shattering the glass ceiling' would perhaps have had the same effect on me as it has on feminists.

                        xxx