Fulfilment of the New Woman in India Is a Myth

In August 2016 India sent its largest ever contingent to the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. The country came home with two medals, and both were won by women. Sakshi Malik took bronze in wrestling, defeating her rival after being behind, and P. V. Sindhu won silver in badminton, the first Indian woman to win a silver at the Games. In June of the same year three women were commissioned as fighter pilots in the Indian Air Force. Such achievements illustrate the figure of the new woman, who is educated, ambitious, mobile and independent. The topic claims that her fulfilment in India is a myth, and the claim demands examination of both the image and the reality.

The progress is genuine. Female literacy rose from about 54 per cent in 2001 to about 65 per cent in 2011, and girls now outnumber boys in many university courses. Laws have changed in her favour. The Hindu Succession Act was amended in 2005 to give daughters equal inheritance, the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act of 2005 recognised violence in the home as an offence, and the Maternity Benefit Amendment of 2017 increased paid leave to twenty six weeks. Women serve as chief ministers, ministers and heads of companies, and the Panchayati Raj amendments reserved a third of seats in local bodies for women, and many states raised it to half, bringing over a million women into elected office.

Behind these gains, however, are persistent gaps. The proportion of women in the labour force in India is about a quarter or less by official surveys, one of the lowest among major economies and lower than it was a decade earlier. It has fallen even as women's education has risen. Women in Parliament numbered about 12 per cent after the elections of 2014. In the private sector they are scarce in senior positions. The majority of working women are in agriculture and informal work, often unpaid or poorly paid. The urban professional woman is a small minority of the female population.

The urban professional woman is a small minority of the female population.

For those who do work, there is the double burden. The sociologist Arlie Hochschild described in 1989 the second shift, in which women who work for pay come home to a second round of unpaid labour, in cooking, cleaning and care. Indian surveys show that married women perform the vast majority of household work whether or not they have jobs. The expectation that a woman should be an efficient professional and also a perfect homemaker, a good daughter in law and a devoted mother is a heavy one. The new woman is told she can have it all, and in practice has to do it all.

Safety is another constraint. The gang rape and murder of a young woman in Delhi in December 2012 led to massive protests and to the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 2013, which widened the definition of sexual offences. Yet the National Crime Records Bureau still records more than three lakh crimes against women each year. Many women say they plan their lives around fear, avoiding certain streets, hours and jobs. A woman who cannot travel freely cannot take the job, the course or the evening class that would change her prospects. Fulfilment depends on being able to move without dread.

Work itself offers little cushioning. Many workplaces lack crèches, safe transport and effective procedures against harassment, though the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act of 2013 requires internal committees. Women who leave careers after marriage or childbirth often cannot return, and the career break penalises them for the rest of their working lives.

Social attitudes persist. Surveys show that large numbers of both men and women believe that a husband is justified in beating his wife under some circumstances. The preference for sons is reflected in a child sex ratio of 919 girls per thousand boys in the 2011 census. Girls are pressed to marry early, and about a quarter of women aged twenty to twenty four were married before eighteen, according to the National Family Health Survey. Decisions about marriage, work and mobility are often made by the family, not the woman. The new woman lives within an old structure.

Class and caste also divide women. A Dalit woman or an Adivasi woman faces discrimination on several grounds and has had far less access to the gains that middle class urban women have enjoyed. The domestic worker who cleans the home of the professional woman has often not had the same freedom. Feminism in India has sometimes been criticised for speaking for the privileged, and the experience of the new woman cannot be generalised. Her fulfilment is for some a reality and for others a distant promise.

Calling the new woman's fulfilment a myth, however, can also mislead. A myth is a story that is false, and the changes are not false. A girl from a village in Haryana who becomes a wrestling champion, a woman in Bihar who runs a self help group and a young engineer in Hyderabad who earns her own living have all gone beyond what their grandmothers were able to imagine. The Self Employed Women's Association, the Kudumbashree network in Kerala and the self help movements of Andhra Pradesh have given millions of women income and voice. The picture is of partial progress, in which the ideal exceeds the reality but the reality is moving.

Fulfilment is itself a contested concept. Whose idea of fulfilment is meant? Some women find it in careers, others in family life, many in both. A society that offers only one script, whether the traditional one or the modern one, will leave many unfulfilled. The measure of the new woman's fulfilment is the extent to which she has the freedom to choose and the means to act on her choice. By that test, much of India has some way to go, and perhaps the myth is not the woman but the belief that her fulfilment can be achieved without altering what is asked of men.