"Give Women Their Due"
March is the designated National Women’s History Month in the United States. This public celebration began in 1978 as “Women’s History Week” in Sonoma County, California with March 8 proclaimed as the International Women’s Day. Soon after, in 1981, Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Rep. Barbara Mikulski (D-Md.) co-sponsored a joint Congressional resolution proclaiming a national Women’s History Week. Six years later, the Congress in 1987 passed a resolution making Women’s History Week a national holiday.
Since then the popularity of women’s history celebrations continues to spread as more people are becoming aware of the impact women are having and their amazing accomplishments in every conceivable sphere – whether it is arts, media, science, technology and politics – all over the word, especially India.
When India gained freedom, India’s first Prime Minister, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, commented, “You can tell the condition of a nation by looking at the status of its women.” At the time he made this comment, India had freed itself from British shackles and the role of women in India’s freedom fight was widely acknowledged by one and all.
But it all went downhill under the leadership of none other than Mr. Nehru’s daughter, Indira Gandhi, who ruled India with an iron fist for nearly two decades. Violence against women, sexual harassment, dowry deaths, murders and unequal wage rates were rampant with little or nothing done to stop these atrocities.
In the years under Mrs. Gandhi’s rule and for some afterwards awareness about Indian women was limited. They were perceived as home makers with a girl child thought of as nothing more than a burden to be palmed off in marriage after reaching maturity. In turn, India was perceived as a backward nation where women were treated as third-class citizens. But gradually there was shift in the mental attitude of Indians towards a girl child who had always been relegated to the background because of her gender. And in the last 15 years or so there has been a dramatic change.
Indian women are now in the forefront of everything despite the fact that there is still a lot of poverty, unemployment, illiteracy, malnutrition, lack of good health care and discrimination against the members of the fairer sex. And it is a matter of great pride that a large section of Indian women, especially among the middle-class, have made a mark in the corporate world, in the media, in literature, sports, arts and science and in the rapidly- expanding IT sector.
And it has been largely in thanks to globalization which has let an educated, middle class Indian woman excel in areas that were previously thought of as male domains – astronauts Kalpana Chawla and Sunita Williams; filmmakers Mira Nair and Gurinder Chadha; Pepsico’s Indira Nooyi; Kiran Mazumdar Shaw of Biocon, a biotech firm worth over $1.1 billion; Vidya Mohan Chhabria, chairperson of the $2 billion Jumbo Group; Naina Lal Kidwai, vice chairperson and managing director of HSBC Securities and Capital markets; Sulajja Firodia Motwani; Mallika Srinivasan, director of the Rs 2500 crore Amalgamations Group Tafe.; and Indian tennis player Sania Mirza – to name a few.
However, there are some issues that we as Indians need to address, especially in India’s rural areas. These include high rates of child malnutrition in girls; increasing equal opportunities for women; giving health care on par with males; equal education since girls receive less education than boys due both to social norms and fears of violence; making giving or taking dowry a crime; eradicating female infanticide and sex selective abortions especially prevalent in Punjab; eradicating loopholes in the law that deny a woman’s inheritance rights; and access and freedom to use family planning services.
Sadly, discrimination against Indian women begins at, or even before, birth and follows them to their grave.
- Editor
More from Editors Desk..
