Women must feel empowered

An excerpt from my thesis:

For any effective liberation to women, women must realize their potential and strength.  They must feel empowered to take and enjoy the fruits of liberty instead of making pleas to male sensibility.  Education and employment will not only empower women but also make them economically independent.  Educated and enlightened women must take the liberty to reorganize their lives through affirmative and positive ways.

Women must shatter the shackles that have confined them so far, and come out openly against forces of oppression.  A liberated woman need not suffer molestation in a social gathering or in public transport at the hands of an unknown co-passenger, or in the Police Station.  Woman has been indoctrinated to be mute and bear uncomplainingly assaults of any kind.  Her voice is normally suppressed.  The new generation women are enlightened women who can no longer be silenced.  As Mary Eagleton points out in Working With Feminist Criticism, “Women are not condemned to silence.  Speech can empower women”(29).

 Silence of women has been often misunderstood as their incapability and lack of feelings.  So, violence of different kinds is unleashed on women.  Domestic violence and wife battering are borne silently and uncomplainingly by Indian women.  Many women who realize the brutality behind the husbands’ attack, get used to it and learn to bear it.  It is man’s beastly craving for physical violence on women that results in crimes not only like wife battering but also rape.  Dispangshu Chakraborty says,

Sexual crimes against women occupy a significant place in the penal status of every country and the most shocking crimes against human conscience and morality, are the sexual crimes against women.  Rape is perhaps the most damaging and heinous crimes and has been recognized as the most serious offence against the dignity of women.  It is one crime which a woman cannot undo to a man.(19)

           As H. L. Kapoor has written in Woman’s Era (February 2004),  “Several studies have been undertaken on rape during the last few years, the latest being in 2001.  It was found that in 88% of rape cases, the rapists were either relatives of the victims or people who had access to them”(124).  He has also recorded,  “The Hon’ble Supreme court has held that rape is a heinous crime, not only against an individual but also against society and that it is the violation of the right of a woman to live with human dignity”(125).

Rape is indeed the worst crime against women but wife battering is a very common crime against women in a nation like India.    Women’s organizations and service agencies should raise their voice against such heinous crimes and create awareness among all sections of society.  Legislations and their effective implementation should be ensured to protect women from such harassment.  Special studies must be made on how different writers belonging to different nations and cultural backgrounds have reacted to crimes against women.  Academic circles should show interest in studying the physical, emotional and psychological impact of these crimes on women.  As a society, all efforts should be taken to prevent such crimes against women.  Such studies will help establish mass movements that will assure dignity to women in the family as well as the society. Building a base of power for women through mass movement is essential.  Consciousness raising and group participation are very important to change women's feelings of isolation and individuality.  Collective actions will win reforms that will objectively improve women's lives. As personal problems are in fact social ones, solutions must also be social ones. Society without any gender discrimination should be attained, where men and women are regarded and treated as human beings.

Our legal systems should censure abuse of female body in the media and check pornography so that women get the respect they deserve.  Any message that is sent by the media as pornography is to be opposed if it humiliates women.  If this is not done, sexual crimes against women will go unabated. 

      Women must move towards new lifestyles within women's culture. Seeing common interest with other women, they must develop awareness of common oppression.  Hating the oppression that binds women, they must express love for other women bound by the same conditions. To reach out to most women their real needs and self-interests must be addressed.  Reaffirmation of human values and ideals of sisterhood will help in identifying the felt needs that would move women to fight for just causes relying on one another as they struggle to gain self respect.

      A manifestation of sexism is the male chauvinistic ideologies that are deep rooted in society.  Even some women are biased and have imbibed male chauvinistic ideas.  Instead of realizing the potentialities of women, they submit themselves to the dictates of men and internally justify whatever be the thought and action of men.  It is bigoted tendency in women that gives an easy access to phallocentric ideologies to oppress women. This makes women to justify verbal, physical, mental and sexual assaults, and silently put up with cruelty of any kind.  Annie Leclerc says in “Woman’s Word”,

Women will not be liberated as long as they do not also want to be liberating, by denouncing and by fighting all oppression, those that come from man, from power, from work, but also those that come from themselves and operate on themselves, on others, and particularly on their children.… As long as we (women) are in complicity with man’s oppression, as long as we perpetuate them on to our children, turning them into vigorous oppressors or into docile victims, we will never, never be free. (Cameron ed. 79)  

Hence it is obligatory that both men and women are aware of the dangers in cherishing male chauvinistic ideologies.   Thinkers, academicians, activists and even curriculum designers have very important roles to play in dispelling such obnoxious ideologies from the society.  Creative writers in the modern era must incorporate feminist themes and struggle against those institutions, social relations and ideas that divide women and keep them powerless, and subservient to men.  They must pave way for women to wrest control of the institutions that now oppress them.  In “Women and Fiction” Virginia Woolf prophesies, “Women in time to come will write better novels; and not novels only, but poetry and criticism and history.  But in this, to be sure, one is looking ahead to that golden, that perhaps fabulous, age when women will have what have so long been denied them – leisure, and money, and a room to themselves”(Cameron ed.40).

If women should fight oppression and injustice, there should be a conscious confidence building exercise for women.  Women should realize that they should not be budging to the dictates of the male dominated society and be ever ready to play a subservient role.  Society should formulate ways by which women who are endowed with capabilities like men are in no way hampered when they exercise their rights and competence.

            Modern feminists want to ensure that marriage does not degenerate into an oppressive institution.  Women should not only have the freedom to choose but also the right to leave when life becomes cruel, suffocating and impossible.  Our social systems, religious laws and legal structures have all along worked against women, making separation, divorce and single life difficult for them.  Hence legislations and facilities should be there for women to come out of wedlock if one finds wedded life humiliating and strangulating. In many cases, women have no real choice but marriage for survival, self-respect and security or love. There should be the possibility for women to discover what their real alternatives are and in what their happiness is, and thereby live the rest of their lives with dignity and purpose.

Different societies have different attitudes to sex but all have a double standard. Many societies are capable of seeing sexuality only from male point of view.  Woman does not have a say or choice, and is looked at more as an object than a human being.  Inside marriage, sex is an obligation and woman’s feelings and views are seldom respected.  Modern world should witness a paradigm shift in the society’s attitude to female sexuality.  As Kate Millet makes it clear in Sexual Politics, sex shouldn’t be a tool to oppress women. Moreover, instead of considering sex as a taboo subject, female sexuality should be celebrated.   Cora Kaplan says,

When women are freed from constant reproduction, when they are educated equally with men in childhood, when they join the labour force at his side, when wealth gives them leisure, when they are necessary and instrumental in effecting profound social change through revolution – at these points women will protest and break down the taboo.(63) 

In a society like India remarriage should be encouraged, and a reexamination must be made of laws and mores governing marriage and divorce. 

       In their endeavour to get empowered women go for education and eventually get economic independence through employment.  But very often instead of enjoying liberation, career women double their burden.  They are constrained to take up their jobs and domestic chores simultaneously.   Whatever they do to earn, has no bearing on their responsibility at home, and they are expected to take care of their dull routine of domestic responsibilities.  In many a culture, motherhood is glorified, and this leads to exploitation of mothers.  Mothers are expected to perform tireless work and selfless sacrifices for the family.  This indirectly bears a negative impact on women.  Women are overburdened and their health is spoiled in various ways.  With double responsibility on their shoulders, working women have no time for recreation.  Education and employment should not become another cause for oppression.  An answer to this problem is true partnership between the sexes, an equitable sharing of the responsibilities of home and children and of the economic burdens.  Proper recognition should be given to the economic and social value of home making and childcare.  It should be ensured that education and consequent employment which are essential for equality should not be made to counter human dignity and self respecting partnership with men.   

       An SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) Statement of December 1965 is one of the earliest documents in America to use the term “women’s liberation”.  It points out that women, because of their colonial relationship to men, have to fight for their independence.  Only the independent women can be truly effective in the larger revolutionary struggle.  Suggestions given by these women are creation of childcare centres, sharing of work at home, and exercising the right of women to choose when they will have children. 

In India, there exist deep-rooted prejudices against women. Cultural practices such as the payment of dowry serve to subordinate women. The traditional roles of women in Indian society also result in a low level of participation in political and public life and a low socio economic status. Indian government must work to remove traditional practices that subordinate women. The endeavours of women's grassroots organisations and non-governmental organisations are vital to improve the quality of life of women in India, and to put an end to female infanticide and violence against women. Those responsible for crimes against women including rape should be brought to justice, and women must be treated with respect during legal proceedings. Women who are victims of crime should be fully compensated for the trauma that they have suffered. In the case of abuses committed against women by law-enforcing authorities, it is vital that the government ensures that these abuses are promptly investigated, and that anyone found guilty of molestation, rape or any other crime against women is promptly brought to justice in accordance with existing laws.

Phallocentric society uses sexist language to reinforce a patriarchal outlook. Adrienne Rich says in “On Lies, Secrets and Silence”: “As long as our language is inadequate, our vision remains formless, our thinking and feeling are still running in old cycles, our process may be ‘revolutionary’ but not transformative”(247-48).  Hence many feminists are in search of a new idiom that is nonsexist and emancipatory.  A new language that does not smack of male chauvinism opposes any stereotypical gender reference. Feminist thinkers and ideologists should make deliberate use of a language that is not misogynistic.  Scholars should evince very special interest in writings free of sexism, so that attempts to reinforce male chauvinist tendencies through literature – be it character portrayal, theme or language – can be curbed. 

       As Sarah Gamble suggests, psychoanalysis and feminism should “be used in a politics that would fight to see the end of the patriarchal phallocentricism that produces sexism and misogyny”(178). This indeed is essential to establish gender justice and ensure dignity and self-respect to which women are entitled.  No doubt, such attempts will go a long way in upholding the nobility and dignity of women.

References:

Cameron, Deborah ed. Feminist Critique of Language. A Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

Chakraborty, Dipangshu.  Atrocities on Indian Women.  New Delhi: A.D.H Publishing Corporation, 1999. Print.

Eagleton, Mary. Working With Feminist Criticism. UK, Oxford: Blackwell Pubishers Ltd., 1996. Print.

Gamble, Sarah ed. The Routledge Companion to Feminism and Postfeminism. London and New York: Routledge Companions, 2001. Print.

Kaplan, Cora. “Language and gender.” Feminist Critique of Language. A Reader. Ed. Deborah Cameron. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. 57-69. Print.

Kapoor, H.L. “Will the Death Penalty Reduce Incidence of Rape?” Woman’s Era February (First) Vol. 31, Issue No. 724 (2004): 124-127. Print.

Millet, Kate. Sexual Politics. New York: Equinox Books, 1970. Print.

Rich, Adrienne. “On Lies, Secrets and Silence.” Virago, 1980, 247 – 248.  Print.