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Triveni Journal

1927 | 11,233,916 words

Triveni is a journal dedicated to ancient Indian culture, history, philosophy, art, spirituality, music and all sorts of literature. Triveni was founded at Madras in 1927 and since that time various authors have donated their creativity in the form of articles, covering many aspects of public life....

The Feminine Inveterate Tribulations

Y. V. Ratna

Since ages the major sufferers on this globe are women who got stuck under both biological and psychological conditions.  Thorough analysis of our history, mainly roots out towards great invasions by kings and world wars that have thrown many of the species in the ditch of desolation, poverty etc. The main victims of all those battered are women and children. Perhaps, many cultures and traditions have gone into wreckage as a result of which all ethics got mixed up and few have been washed away. Further, the dominance of religioustic disturbances, racial discriminations, border quarrels, and socio-economic problems, gender-bias got into prominence. As an effect, the present generation which comforts itself with science and technology could not muddle through these situations. Therefore, gender-bias which is a deep-rooted prejudice against women has not been plucked out completely. 

Since childhood young minds are being poisoned with gender bias and dependence syndrome of woman which further treated her as other. woman is reliant either on father or husband or son or community or a religious group / ethnic group who/which does not allow her to take own decisions and set herself free to lead a normal life. Woman is an epitome of endurance and self-confidence, but these capabilities are being misused and browbeaten by the society. Consequently, many are even being driven towards criminal and psychic attitudes. The only warmth which women get is through Motherhood that cannot be compensated with any other relation. She relies on it, bearing in mind as a divine boon. 

The age old myths and traditions which are sacred have constructed women as subordinates to men. Hence, these myths have to be thoroughly interpreted for improvising the condition of women. Many social reformers and women writers have set their foot to struggle against women issues and partially won in transforming the society. Centuries ago they were domestic dummies, child bearers who never thought of the terms “equality or freedom�. Now, after many generations, women learnt to claim their rights and are in search of their self-identity. The implementation of new methods in the judicial proceedings has changed the position of women to some extent but not up to its maxima. It is because if they try to clear one path, then the very next moment there stands another to clear off. Therefore, it has become a never ending process which even after centuries it is doubtful about their progression towards equality.

Even though they are now found in various fields and capable of competing equally with men, the innate feeling of otherness is not totally erased. Sexual harassment at work places, inequality in various fields, and subordination in all aspects are becoming dominant day by day and are not allowing her to progress further. French writer Simone de Beauvior says “The situation of woman is that she is a free and autonomous being like all creatures and nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the other�. Due to the feeling of otherness she lives as an alien in her own land. Hence, to chase away this intention in the rotten minds, many revolutionary movements have been started with the term feminism and further got defined by many authors in various ways.

In simple terms, Feminism is concerned with liberation of women from social, political, economic and gender inequality and oppression of women by men in the social environment. Alice Jardine defines Feminism as a movement from the point of view, of, by and for women. Feminism is derived from the French word “feminisme�. It entered the English language in the end of the 19th century. We can consider its birth when women started to speak, act and write about their own issues and rights. Many talented women who contributed in women related issues and rights have been ignored initially as a result of which the present generation feminists could not relish the fruits of those talented women’s struggles.

In 1792, an English woman Wollstone Craft wrote a treatise- A Vindication of Rights and is considered as first feminist philosophy with which first wave of the feminism had been started. Through her works, she argued that women as well as men are endowed with reason and therefore it was wrong of men to keep women in a state of slavery. In the late 19the century, number of countries organized various movements agitating women’s suffrage and by early 20th century they started struggling for social reforming and equality. After Second World War, the second wave of the feminism had been started. The movements in this period encouraged women to understand aspects of their own personal lives as deeply politicized. Betty Friedan, a psychiatrist wrote a book The Feminine Mystique in which she suggested American women to get well educated and build up their career and not to stick to domestic work. Another writer of this period is Kate Millet who wrote Sexual Politics. She points out that patriarchy subordinates the female to the male or treats the female as an inferior male.  Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and The Guineas, and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex and The Other are some of their famous works.

Later many female writers have flourished all over the world to bring up the problems of women through their powerful writings. They wrote not only about themselves but also other women’s situation to introduce society with the feelings of a woman from various grounds whose views are not common in all. Afro-American writer Audrea Lorde says “Blacks take hope as a living state that propels, open-eyed and fearful, into all the battles of our lives and that some of those battles they do not win�. Alice Walker speaks about her own awareness of and experiences with brutality and violence in the lives of black women and her belief is that Black women are the most oppressed people in the world. Gloria Naylor says in her novel Women of Brewster Place, “Women only had each other in their history around the kitchen table or at the Laundromat, they would go to other women with their problems about children, about men in their lives, about their jobs. And they would share that in places that were unimportant to the outside world, gaining strength from each other in quiet ways� and she depicted in her novels through her characters.  Indian novelist, Shashi Deshpande exhibits her views saying “for me feminism is translating what is used up in endurance into something positive: a real strength.� In this way, many women writers emphasize on the point that every woman should take up writing to exhibit the circumstances of her own in socio-cultural, socio-economic grounds. Hence, writers from different ground, Western and Asian writers should probe into the matters of women in all areas to cease totally inveterate tribulations of women and acquire equality.

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