Combat of the Maker against Society
Combat of the Maker against Society
Combat of the Maker against Society
There are very few texts specifically dealing with the role of women; an important exception is the stri Dharma Paddhati of Tryambakayajvan, an official at Thanjavur around c.1730. The text compiles strictures on women behaviour dating back to the Apastamba sutra (c. 4th c. BCE). The opening verse goes:
Mukhyo DharmaH Smrti Shu Vihito Bhartr Shushru ShANam hi: the primary duty of women is enjoined to be service to one's husband.
The status of women in India has been subject to many great changes over the past few millennia. From equal status with men in ancient times through the low points of the medieval period, to the promotion of equal rights by many reformers, the history of women in India has been eventful. In modern India, women have adorned high offices in India including that of the President, Prime minister, Speaker of the Lok Sabha, Leader of Opposition, etc. The incumbent President of India is a woman.
Review of the Literature
A number of studies have been undertaken on women empowerment at the Global level and in India. Some studies dealt on methodological issues and some on empirical analysis. Moser (1993) focused on the interrelationship between gender and development, the formulation of gender policy and the implementation of gender planning and practices. The work of Shields (1995) provided an exploratory framework to understand and develop the concept of empowerment both from a theoretical and practical perspective with a particular focus on women's perception of the meaning of empowerment in their lives. Anand and Sen (1995) tried to develop a measure of gender inequality. Malhotra et al (2002) in their paper prepared for the World Bank highlighted methodological issues of measurement and analysis of women empowerment. Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2001) in their paper used a policy of political reservation for women adopted in India to study the impact of women's leadership on policy decision. They found that women were more likely to participate in policy making process if the leader of the village community was happened to be women. Mahanta (2002) sought to explain the question of women's access to or deprivation of basic human rights as the right to health, education and work, legal rights, rights of working women's, besides issues like domestic violence, all the while keeping the Peculiar socio-cultural situation of the North East in mind. A workshop organized in 2003 by the Institute of Social Sciences and South Asia Partnership, Canada addressed the issues like "Proxy Women" who after being elected to Panchayat bodies were merely puppets in the hands of their husbands, relatives and other male Panchayat members; and emphasized on training programme for their capacity building. Assam Human Development Report (Govt. of Assam, 2003) threw some light on inequality in the achievement between men and women of Assam in different spheres of life. The report viewed that poverty, violence and lack of political participation were the main issues of concern for South Asian Women, and Assam was no exception. The study of Kishor and Gupta (2004) revealed that average women in India were disempowered relative to men, and there had been little change in her empowerment over time. Parashar (2004) examined how mother's empowerment in India is linked with child nutrition and immunization and suggested women to be empowered simultaneously along several different dimensions if they and their children were to benefit across the whole spectrum of their health and survival needs. Sridevi (2005) in her paper provided a scientific method to measure empowerment. Study of Cote de Ivoire revealed that increased female share in household income leads to increased spending on human development enhancing items (as quoted by Ranis and Stewart, 2005). Blumberg (2005) viewed that economic empowerment of women was the key to gender equality and well being of a nation. This would not only enhance women's capacity of decision making but also lead to reduction in corruption, armed conflict and violence against females in the long run. Karat (2005) in her works discussed the issues of violence against women, their survival, political participation and emancipation. Panda and Agarwal (2005) focused on the factor like women's property status in the context of her risk of marital violence and opined that if development means expansion of human capabilities, then freedom from domestic violence should be an integral part of any exercise for evaluating developmental progress. Desai and Thakkar (2007) in their work discussed women's political participation, legal rights and education as tools for their empowerment. Deepa Narayan (2007) made an attempt to measure women empowerment for different countries and regions by using self assessed points on a ten steps ladder of power and rights, where at the bottom of the ladder stood people who were completely powerless and without rights and on the top stood those who had a lot of power and rights.
Figueras (2008) in her work studied the effect of female political representation in State legislature on public goods, policy and expenditure in the context of India and opined that politician's gender and social position matters for policy.
Decision Making Power
Decision making power of women in households is one of the important indicators of women empowerment. It is found that only 37 per cent of currently married women participate in making decisions either alone or jointly with their husband on their health care, large household purchases, purchases for daily household needs and on visiting their family members and relatives. Forty three percent participate in some but not all decisions and 21 per cent do not participate in any of the decision. As high as in 32.4 per cent cases the decision regarding the purchase of daily household needs is taken mainly by the respondents whereas the decisions like visit to her relatives are in most cases taken alone by husbands or jointly. Decision like major household purchases is taken jointly in most of the cases. A very less number of women alone take this type of decision. About 27 per cent of total respondents take their own health care decision alone.
Women's participation rate on household decision making not only varies from rural to urban areas but also gets affected by their background characteristics like age, educational status, husband's education, employment status etc. Urban married women are observed to be more empowered than that of the rural women.
Empowerment of women increases with the increase in their age. Women who are more educated and employed are relatively more empowered. About 46 per cent of total women in the age group 40-49 years participate in all the four decisions compared to 15 per cent belonging to the age group 15-19 years. With higher spousal educational status women's participation in decision making increases. About 21 per cent of women with no spousal education do not take part in any decision making at all as compared to 17 per cent of women with spousal education of 12 years or more. Employment also provides an advantage to women regarding their ability to decision making power. Employed women are more likely to participate in all decision makings. In urban setting and in nuclear type of family, women have more autonomy in household decision making. Women's access to education which is one of the important sources of empowerment can be measured by gender gap in literacy rates and enrolment in different stages of school education. The literacy gap between men and women was as high as 21.7 per cent in 2001. Though the gap was fluctuating from 18.3 per cent in 1951 to 23.9 per cent in 1971, it has been showing a marginal declining trend since 1981.It is clear that participation of girls at all stages of education has been steadily increasing over time. However, the overall performance of participation has not been satisfactory as it had been below 50 per cent at all stages of education Access to Employment. It also reveals that gender inequality exist in the arena of employment. As compared to 51% women employed for cash only, the corresponding figure for that of the males is as high as 72.5%. Similarly a very few males are employed for kind only (3.4%) as compared to females engaged for kind (11.6%). Twenty four per cent women are not paid at all for their work whereas this proportion is as low as 5% for men. For women earning cash is not likely to be a sufficient condition for financial empowerment. Employment and cash earnings are more likely to empower women if women make decisions about their own earnings alone or jointly with their husband rather than their husband alone and if these earnings are perceived by both wives and husbands to be significant relative to those of the husbands. The women's control over earnings on the basis of background characteristics like age, education, place of residence, household structure etc. It is seen that women's control over cash earnings increases with age. In the age group 15 -19 years only 17.7 per cent women alone take decision about the use of their cash earnings as compared to 28.3 per cent in the age group 40-49 years. Similarly husband mainly takes such decision in case of 20 per cent women in the age group 15-19 years in comparison to 12.7 per cent in the age group 40-49 years. Influence of other person in making such decision decreases with the increase in age of respondents. It varies from 18.6 per cent in the age group 15-19 years to as low as 0.4 per cent in 40-49 age groups. Generally women in urban areas have more control over their earnings than that in rural areas. About thirty three per cent take decision alone about the use of their own earnings in urban areas as compared to 21 per cent in rural areas. Education is one of the important factors that affects greatly in women's control over earnings. About 23 per cent women with no education have more control over their earnings whereas it is 28.6 per cent in case of women completed 12 or more years of education. Other persons' influence on the decision about the use of earnings reduces significantly with education. It is as high as 8.3 percent in the case of 14 respondents with no education as compared to 4.9 per cent respondent with secondary level education. Household structure has an important role to play in affecting women's financial empowerment. In non nuclear family structure, influence of others is more in making such decision. In case of 6.4 per cent women in non nuclear family, the decision about the use of their own cash earnings are taken by others as compared to 0.6 per cent women in nuclear family.
Exposure to Media
The present data on women's exposure to media reveals that percentage of women not exposed to media is more than double that of men. About 71 per cent of women are exposed to media as compared to 88 per cent in case of men. Twenty nine per cent of women do not have access to media regularly. Since it is an important source of empowerment, greater proportion of women without having access to media reflects the relatively disadvantageous position of women in relation to men with regards to empowerment.
Domestic Violence
The percentage of women who have experienced different forms and combinations of physical and sexual violence according to selected background characteristics. It is observed that extent of violence is not lessened by age. In the age group of 15-19 years, 22.5 per cent women experienced physical or sexual violence in India as compared to 39 per cent in the age group 40-49 years. Both types of violence are higher for ever married women than for never married women. Almost 40 per cent ever married women experienced physical or sexual violence as against 16.9 per cent never married women. Extent of domestic violence is higher in rural areas as compared to urban areas. About thirty eight per cent women in rural area faced either physical or sexual violence as compared to about 29 percent women in urban areas.
Political Participation
Women's political participation is one of the important issues in the context of empowerment. In conventional analysis it means activities related to electoral politics like voting, campaigning, holding party office and contesting election. But in broader sense it encompasses all voluntary actions intended to influence the making of public policies, the administration of public affairs and the choice of political leaders at all levels of government. Political interventions by women of India today range from movement for peace and good governance to protest against dowry, rape, domestic violence, food adulteration, price rise etc. [Desai et at, 2007]. However in this section we discuss participation of women in formal politics by analyzing the indicators like women voters and women elected members in the first twelve general elections in India. The voting percentage of men and women in the first twelve elections of independent India. In the very first election the percentage of women voter was significantly low (37%). Many women were left out as their names were not properly registered. The gender gap in voting though has been narrowing gradually significant gap between male and female voters still exists. Elected Women Members Many factors are responsible and decisive in the election of women candidates such as literacy, financial position, liberal family background, support of other members of the family, strong personality etc. Since most of the women lack access to these, few women get tickets and even fewer get elected from this handful of women candidates. The elected women Members in Lok Sabha. percentage of women members to the total members has been consistently less than 10 per cent in each Lok Sabha starting from 1st to 12th one. This shows poor participation of women in political field. Thus it can be concluded with information provided by NFHS - III and others that women of India are disempowered relative to men in respect of decision making power, freedom of movement, education, employment, exposure to media, political participation etc and face domestic violence to a considerable degree and occupy the subordinate status both at home and in the society even in the 21st century.
Constraints to Women Empowerment
There are several constraints that check the process of women empowerment in India. Social norms and family structures in developing countries like India, manifests and perpetuate the subordinate status of women. One of such norms is the continuing preference for a son over the birth of a girl child, which is present in almost all societies and communities. The hold of this preference has strengthened rather than weakened and its most glaring evidence is in the falling sex ratio (Seth, 2004). The society is more biased in favor of male child in respect of education, nutrition and other opportunities. The root cause of this type of attitude lies in the belief that male child inherits the clan in India with an exception in Meghalaya. Women often internalize the traditional concept of their role as natural, thus inflicting an injustice upon them. Poverty is the reality of life for the vast majority of women in India. It is another factor that poses challenge in realizing women's empowerment. In a poor family, girls are the main victims; they are malnourished and are denied the opportunity of better education and other facilities. But if they are financially independent or they have greater control over the resources then they exhibit greater autonomy both in the household and in public sphere and are no longer victims of poverty. Lack of awareness about legal and constitutional provisions and failure in realizing it, is another factor that hinders the process of empowerment. Most of the women are not aware of their legal rights. Even women who are aware lack the courage to take the legal step. The legislation which affects women most is their situation in marriage and inheritance. As far as the rights of inheritance are concerned, women generally do not try to inherit land left by their parents if brothers are alive (Seth, 2005). The traditional belief that land should not go outside the patriarchal family operates. The provision of Act like (1) Child Marriage Resistance Act, 1930, (2) The Suppression of Immoral Trafficking of Women Act, 1987 and (3) The Indecent Exposure of Women Act, have not led to the suppression of practice indicated in them. Of these three, the first one is by and large successful in restraining child marriage. The legislation almost failed in case of immoral trafficking and indecent exposure to women. There are numerous incidence of indecent exposure of women in all forms of media with hardly any prosecution. Although the legal rights are in place to create an enabling atmosphere these have not been very successful in realizing women's empowerment.
Conclusion
Women were weak in ancient and mid period of the history. Now they are becoming powerful and setting their milestones in front economical and modern technical society. Now they are getting back those respects which they got in starting of era. Increasing the involvement in society, refers that Women never were weak, are weak and will weak. Maker can never weak. They compromise with the problems due to retain their precious art.
References
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