A Wide Generation Gap in Rural Women

From American racial civil war to South African apartheid, every time there has been injustice in history, the victims have overturned status-quo through social uprisings. This is true in most cases in human history. Then why did this phenomenon of social resistance by victim groups not apply in the case of rural Indian women, who for decades have been lacking opportunity for growth due to male dominance?

Rural India, being predominantly dependent on agriculture for livelihood, found field work for men and household work for women to be a very effective form of work distribution. This distribution remained effective only until other less labor intensive alternatives of employment became available. However, the advent of alternative employment opportunities did not consider the social mindset deep rooted in the rural community. Due to centuries long agricultural environment, household women became a norm and accepted by all factions of the society, including women. Women seldom considered lack of freedom to work as an oppression; on the contrary, they supported the practice while grooming their next generations.

Older matriarchs of the society who grew up in an agricultural environment supported the notion of confinement of women to household work for reasons like moral family building, women’s safety, prevention of adultery amongst other similar reasons. It is only after rural communities were exposed to higher education in the recent decades that women dared to venture outside of conventional household work. However, rural women failed to show a united front since the older and younger generations of rural women did not share a same sense of victim-hood with regards to employment barriers.

However, the picture is not all that grim. In the recent years, rural most communities have been exposed to urban life due to commercialization of agriculture industry. This has narrowed the gap between urban and rural way of lives and inspired women to pursue education. There has been a growing change in mindset of rural adults about financial inclusion of women. In order to uniformly and expeditiously grow rural societies, there is a need for a strong initiative which can make in-roads facilitate financial independence of women while changing social mindset towards it.

Related posts:

I think the questionnaires I completed gave me a better view of what good traits I have and what traits I need to improve on. Some of the questionnaires included getting answers from other people and…

When we create a RDS in AWS and then try to connect RDS from local machine, you will find it not works. Even you selected “Public accessibility”, here public accessibility means we can connect to the…

The glass slipped in slow motion and shattered on the marble floor of the kitchen. “Fuuuuuccckkkk” curdled out of Kemi’s throat as she frantically pushed the falling pots and plates back onto the…