Are women really empowered?

                                                                            

-Divyansha Sharma

Today, women don’t need to put their feet down and challenge men’s hegemony. They don’t have to fight for their ostensible and outlandish rights like joining combat forces and fight alongside men in the battlefield. It’s education that empowers a woman. But when an academically empowered woman longs to have a male child and curses herself for giving birth to a female child, is she mentally, socially and psychologically empowered? When she has to wear a veil, doesn’t she resent it deep down?

Does she feel truly empowered?

No, its not because of men and their much maligned patriarchal attitude that we see the lopsided male female ratio in the northern states and more or less all over the country. Women are also equally to be blamed. I have an aunt, also a columnist, who talks-nay shrieks-about women’s right and equality but she had to give up after her third daughter. She failed to have a son to perpetuate the family.

Empowerment comes from within. It’s not a stray thought.it a collective mind set. Toppling a man and becoming the CEO of an organisation is not empowerment. To be empowered is to be emancipated. It is freedom from all societal pressures and ingrained doubts. When a woman talks about her fundamental rights, she must herself follow them. Charity begins at home.

Why do highly educated and advanced women still use their husbands’ surname that have been imposed upon them? Why does an empowered dark skinned woman in India still buy fairness cream to look fair? Has she been able to internalise the idea and spirit of empowerment and emancipation?

When the women of north India observe karva chauth even if their husbands exercise any height of domestic violence on them, do they follow and understand the purport of empowerment in its totality? When working women still expect and demand reservation quotas, reserved seats in buses and trains,

are they empowered?

We all demand equality. Is reservation for women, in its true sense, equality?  Doesn’t this reservation only indicate that we, women are still feeble, weak, and above all, inadequate? Why demand your right when you can command it! We all want humanity, men in particular, to be sensible, rational and sensitive towards us. Does starving oneself on Karwa Chauth for longevity of another makes sense? Is accepting all such customs and following them rational? This is not ‘Treta Yug’. To be an ideal wife, you don’t have to put on the blindfolds(Gandhari in Mahabharata). Remember, you are treated the way you want to get treated!

One needs to change one’s whole attitude to accept and promulgate changes. Wake up women. Every women who is silent is with a voice unheard. To let that voice reach the world ,women themselves need to channelize and encourage it first .We will never live just for the sake of living as mere survivors but as real winners of the world. If you want something you never had, do something you have never done. Don’t go the way society takes you; take society the way you go. Remember you are not living because you are born; you are born to live and make lives. After all, you’re not just ‘a woman’, but ‘the woman’!