CHAPTER | INTRODUCTION | Human life exists upon this earth because of the union between male and female and for a healthy society itis essential that there should be no gender | discrimination between them. In the Vedic period, the position of women in | general was fairly satisfactory’. They had equal opportunities for developing as human beings. In upanayana or initiation and brahmacharya or study of sources of knowledge no discrimination was made between a boy or a girl. No religious or social ceremony could be complete without her. in the famous Vaksukta, the woman seer says, "| am powerful enough to bind or unite my country and make it rich. | tighten the rope of Rudra's bow. " The examples that women did not live within the closed boundary of their houses. | { { | | of Vishavapla's going to battle and Mudgalani's defeating her enemies proves | The deterioration in the position of women began in the post-Vedic | era. According to Mahadevi Verma, her “high status in the vedic days was lost under priestly inflnence.... The code of Manu set the tone against her." | The neglect of education, lowering of the marriage age and the advent of Islamic culture did much damage to the position of women in the country. Gautam Buddha made no distinction between a male and a female in spiritual, educational or social goals. There were many women saints, or | bhikshunies as they were called, in his sangh. The names of Mahapajapati, Gotami, Ambapali and Vishakha are well known. But he considered women to be a hindrance in the development of a man. He tells his disciple Ananda: eeWomen are soon angered, Ananda, Women are full of passion, Ananda, Women are envious, Ananda, women are stupid That is the reason, Ananda, that is the cause, why women have no place in public assemblies, do not carry on business, and do not earn their living by any profession“ Itis also to be remembered at this point that women were given the secondary position in the monestic order. Thus a bhikshuni though of a long standing had to bow before a bhikshu ordained much later than her® The Bhakti movement in medieval india opened new ways of finding out the female identity. They defied social norms like marriage and widowhood. Thus Mira refuses sati, Gauri and Kuruamma refuse to acknowledge that they are widowed when their husbands died, as they thought themselves always to be married to their God." A marked improvement in the condition of women was seen during the colonial rule in our country. The British opened several missionary schools to educate girls and women. Two other movements of the same period - the Social Reform Movement and the Nationalist Movement - left deep impact on the status of women. Social reformers like Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Dayananda Saraswati, and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar effectively raised their voice against such social evils as Sati ill-treatment of widows, iliteracy | of women, child marriage etc. Mahatma Gandhi is remembered for winning freedom for the country but his contribution in raising the status of women in India is no less important. He said that women were far superior to men. According to him, Satyagrah or insistence on truth, through which he got freedom for the country, was an instrument better suited to women. He could succeed because he possessed much womanly power with him. Referring to his contribution, Neen Arora observes ” ailGandhiji vehemently criticized the customs of child marriage, prohibition of widow remarriage, temple prostitution and the customs of Purdah, He had deep faith in women’s inner strength and in his various Satyagrah movements vast numbers of women participated. Inspired and encouraged by men, a host of women also organized themselves under noted personalities like Pandita Ramabai Ranade and Anandibai Joshi for the betterment of their kind and to struggle against the heavy odds.” itis an ironical fact that the British who did not give freedom to their women for considerably a long period of time, proclaimed to be the emancipators of women in India. Their seminal religious text, The Bible, frequently stresses the male superiority over female. The biblical myth establishes man as the master who rules the earth. He names all beasts and fowls and calls his wife Eve. St. Paul says the following about women For a man, indeed ought not to cover his head, for as much as he is the image and glory of God : but the woman is the glory of the man. For the man is not of the woman; but the woman of the man. Neither was the man created for the woman; but the woman for the man.* We have several references which implicity or explicity show that women were treated to be secondary in relation to man. The famous mathematician Pythagorous exhibited this socio-political concept even in such objective things as the numerical system. He observes ‘The number one was the number of Godhead and of malenes’ two was the number of divisiveness and femaleness. One, God, man, were the number associated with light, order, good, right, rights and the right hand. Two, divisiveness are chaos, woman, were associated with darkness, evil, magic and the sinister, the left hand. To this day, the buttons on men's shirts are on the right, on women's on the left ; to this day, members of a wedding party arrange themselves in a place of worship in accord with these associations groom's party on the right, bride's party on the left.?The intellectuals of different ages have painstakingly emphasised that the inferior position of women is willed in heaven to be fruitful upon this earth. For example, here is the damaging statement of Jean Jacques Rousseau about women : Women have, are ought to have, but ttle liberty, they are apt to indulge themselves excessively in what is allowed them. Addicted in everything to extremes, they are even more transported at their diversions than boys." In ancient India, the position of women was comparatively better. The ancient Hindu law - giver, Manu, whose philosophy possesses a significant place in Indian culture, expresses some good sentiments about women. For example, he says: Yatra naryastu pujyante ramante tratra devatah, yatraita na tu puiyante, serva tatraphala Kriyah. ("Where women are honoured, the deities are pleased there ; where they are dishonoured, all religious acts become fruitless there"). But such sentiments showing the nobility and significance of women are rare, whereas the inferiority of women is stressed at several places. For example, he says that women must be always dependent on men: In childhood must a female be dependent on her father; In youth, on her husband; her lord being dead, on her sons; if she has no sons, on the near kinsmen of her husband; if she be left no kinsmen, on those of her father; if she has no paternal kinsmen, on the sovereign; a woman must never seek independence." According to the Manusmriti, a wife must always be devoted to her husband. Even if he is a man of bad character seeking pleasure elsewhere, she must treat him as her God. Indian society was divided into four Varnas -'Brahmans',“Kshatriyas’, 'Vaishyas’ and ‘Shudras’, and women were grouped with the Shudras. In Sanskrit plays all characters speak Sanskrit but women and Shudras utter Prakrit, which suggests their inferior position “Such fallen status of women made them raise their voice against oppression and inequality and in the twentieth century it gave birth to several movements winning freedom for women. In the West, the first significant voice was raised by Mary Wollstonecraft who demanded equal opportunities for women in education, economics and politics. She demanded human treatment for women Dismissing, then, those pretty feminine phrases, which the man condescendingly use to soften our slavish dependence, and despising that weak elegancy of mind, exquisite sensibility, and sweet docilty of manners supposed to be the sexual characteristics of the weaker vessel, | wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of landable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex, and that secondary views should be brought to this simple touchstone. "* The contiribution of men like William Blackstone (Commentaries on the English Constitution, 1758), John Stuart Mill (The Subjection of Women, 1869), Fredrich Engles (The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, 1884) should also be remembered in this context, The energance of Simone de Beauvoir made a significant impact on the women's liberation movement. Her book, The Second Sex (Written in 1949 and translated into English in 1953) makes a detailed study of the gender inequality and suggests the ways to come out of the masculine trap. When a woman tries to define herself, she starts by saying ‘I am a woman’ No man would do so. This fact reveals the basic asymmetry between the terms "masculine" and "feminine". Man defines the human, "not woman"‘One is not born, but rather becomes a woman. No biological, psychological, or economic fate determines, the figure that human female presents in society; itis civilization as a whole that produces this creature intermediate between male and eunuch, which is described as feminine. Only the intervention of someone else can establish an individual as an other. The reason for this is that in western society and culture a male is regarded as the norm, the central and neutral position from which the female is a departure .As Simone de Beauvoir observes: the “feminine world” is contrasted with the masculine universe, but we must insist again that women have never constituted a closed and independent society ; they form an integral part of group, which is governed by males and in which they have a subordinate place."* Reffering to the gap between the connotations of the terms ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’, she says The terms masculine and feminine are used symmetrically only as a matter of form, as on legal papers. In actuality the relation of the two sexes is not quite like that of two electrical poles, for man represents both the posit and the neutral, as is indicated by the common use of man to designate human beings in general; whereas woman represents only the negative, defined by limiting criteria, without reciprocity....A man is right in being a man; it is the woman who is in the wrong, It amounts to this : just as for the e ancients there was an absolute vertical with reference to which the oblique was defined, so there is the absolute human type, the masculine. * The break this image of the inferior “other — defined only in relation to man — she lived with Jean Paul Sartre without marrying him till death. The publication of Betty Friedon's The Feminine Mystique (1963) brought much change in the outlook of American society. Based on the interviews of many women she shows the strange gap between the reality ofwomen's lives and the image to which they had been compelled to conform. Friedan is of the view that “for women, as for man, the need for self - fulfillment —autonony, self-actualization —is as important as the sexual need, with as serious consequences, when it is thwarted. Women's sexual problems are, in this sense, by - products of the suppression of her basic need to grow and fulfil her potentialities as a human being, potentialities which the mystique of feminine fulfillment ignores.""* Friedan still believed in the institution of marriage, which was later rejected by aggressive feminists. Kate Millet's Sexual Politics (1969) and Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch (1970) are about the militant versions of feminism. Greer even said that "Women ought not to enter into socially sanctioned relationship like marriage" if they want to improve their condition some other notable texts in this connection are Ellen Moer's Literary Women (1976), Elaine Showalter's A Literature of Their Own (1977), SandraGilbirt and Susan Gubar's The Mad Woman in theAttic (1979) Belty Friedan's The Second Stage (1981) and Terry Threadgold's Feminist Poetics : Poiesis, Performance, Histories (1997) All these texts are about various shades of gender inequality in which woman is ata loss. Thus feminism originates in the idea that there is something wrong with society's treatment of women. It attempts to analyse the causes of women's oppression, so that they could be liberated. Liberation too is defined in several ways. To some, it means social equality with men, while to others this definition seems to reflect the class bias of what is known differently as bourgeois feminism, career feminism, mainstream feminism or liberal feminism. One can see several ideologies within feminism, but all of them originate from one fact - that justice requires freedom and equality for women But they differ on the philosophic questions about the nature of freedom and equality., the functions of the state, and the notion of what makes humanespecially female nature. If we take into account several feminist ideologies, we come to the point that questions associated with them cannot be solved in isolation and they need special contexts in which these issues can be raised and some sort of solution can be achieved. Speaking of ‘feminism’, Sushila Singh writes in the following manner; Feminism, as a philosophy of life, seeks to discover and change the more subtle and deep - seated causes of women's oppression. These are to be found, for example, in the legal system, such as unequal labour, marriage and divorce laws. More pervasive are the wide - spread attitudes about women's proper or natural duties between the sexes. Feminism is a ‘raising of the consciousness’ of an entire culture. From childhood on, beliefs and attitudes help perpetuate women’s inferior status. Some of these are sex - role stereotyping in textbooks, unequal pay for equal work, and the traditional division of labour within the family, Other attitudes are more subtle: for example, hoping that a couple's first child will be a boy, thinking of a wife's salary as meant to buy ‘extras’ rather than as supporting the family... Feminism as 2 philosophy of reform envisages profound changes in traditional social structures such as the family, in the economic role and the power of women, and finally in fundamental attitudes and personal relationships, leading to a just social order."” Many facets of western feminism are not relevant in the Indian context. Ourproblems are not the same as those of women in the west. Hence, a judicious and careful application is necessary while applying them in the Indian context Susie Tharu and K. Lalita raise this question in a significant way We believe that there are powerful alliances feminists of all classes the world over can make, and equally powerful alliances feminists can make with other oppressed groups if we accept the challenges held out to us. But since the kind of feminist criticism that naturalise the experience and issues of western feminism in this way is $0 easily co-opted by the academy and so widely circulated among third-world scholars (while the more his torically9 ‘aware work done by feminist scholars ismarginalised), we must explain in more detail why we find the subsuming of a critical method into a celebration of female nature so disturbing. We must also explore why it is that if we simply apply the theories of woman's writing that have been developed over the last decade or so to woman's writing in India, we will not merely reproduce its confusions, but compound them. In the same book Tharu and Lalita make the perinent comment in the context of the eighteenth century Telugu woman poet Muddupalam - the comment about contexts, politics and structures : questions about the contexts, structures and restructure by changing ideologies of class, gender, empire in which they were read; questions about politics, sexual and critical, that determined the reception and impact of their work; questions about the resistances, that characterised the subtlest and most radical of woman's writting."* If these contextual questions are overlooked, the result would be devastating. Noted Hindi novelist Mridula Garg rightly observes about the disparity coming into existerce because of a careless and hasty acceptance and application of such theories : Motherhood has not only several dimensions but each dimension is associated with several prejudices. Most of these prejudices glorify motherhood. They have been doing so since ages. But in twentieth centruy, redical feminism was born which proclaimed motherhood as the chain in women's feet and gave birth to the opposite prejudice. It went to the extent of making the right to abortion the synonym of female freedom. See the irony, the stuggle began in the west and the right to abortion was given to Indian woman. Neither power nor economic affluence, nor the power or culture of taking decisions, but, if pregnant, she has the right to abort. * This has resluted in the killing of unborn female child, thus creating a disparity between male-female ratio. Rules have continuously been made to stop this. and all these are being carelessly broken and overlooked.