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Women in the workforce (1980s - 2000s, India)
Women in the workforce (1980s - 2000s, India)
The percentage of Indian women employed in the labor force has dropped dramatically, from 34.44 percent in 1911, to 31.53 percent in 1961, to 17.35 percent in 1971, according to the 1975 report of the National Committee on the Status of Women. Obviously, fewer employers are giving jobs to women. During the decade 1961-71, the male and female populations rose 24 to 25 percent. Though the number of men workers rose by 15.2 percent, the number of women workers actually declined by 41.4 percent.
An illustration depicting women's work in India, both in and out of the home. (Sally Deng for The New Yorker)
This decline could be due to the fact that the women were abused and mistreated at work. A quote from the India Today claims, "They are unsafe on the streets and discriminated against at work. At home, they are often worse off: reduced to slavish drudges, they are maltreated in a hundred different ways. Constantly degraded, frequently bullied, sometimes assaulted and occasionally burnt to death."
"Indian women in any avatar remain victims. They are the primary underdogs of an exploitative society where the law of the jungle persists: the more powerful thrive at the expense of the less powerful. That law, since time immemorial, has put men before women."
National Women's Conferences in India (1980s-2000s)
National Women's Conferences in India (1980s-2000s)
The first National Conference on Women’s Studies in India was held at SNDT University in 1981 and helped define Women’s Studies for the Indian context. A quote directly from the meeting, "by Women’s Studies we do not mean merely focusing on women’s experiences, problems, needs, perceptions etc. in the context of development and social change with a view to integrating this neglected area within the scope of higher education, but viewing it as a critical instrument to improve our knowledge about society which at present remains partial, biased, projecting only a view of social reality derived from a male perspective."(SNDT, 1981).
A photo included in the "Women's Studies Quarterly 9:2 (Summer 1981)", a peer-reviewed biannual academic journal about women's studies. The photo is a part of the section called "International News: First National Conference on Women's Studies in India" by Florence Howe, it can be found on page 22. (City University of New York/CUNY Academic Works)
Women’s Studies in the Indian context is a study of women. Does this mean that women have not existed or been studied before? What is different here is that it is demarcated as a scientific inquiry and this inquiry has an approach that has been much different from all preceding ones because its purpose is different. This purpose has emerged from a particular conjunction of events that pushed women’s concerns into public attention (Maithreyi KRISHNARAJ, 1988).
Following the recommendations of the First National Conference on Women’s Studies, held in Bombay in 1981 and the UNESCO workshop in 1982, the Secretary of the University Grants Commission had sent a circular letter to the Vice Chancellors of the various Universities to suggest the starting of a program of Women’s Studies and incorporating them in the curricula of Social Sciences for teaching and research. Many conferences, workshops, and discussion groups took place to formulate clear guidelines, in order to help universities, faculties, colleges and other institutions of higher learning to start such units as well as reinvigorate the existing units and centers on Women’s Studies.
Today there are 163 Centers of Women’s Studies spread across the country. The UGC has recognized the interventionist role played by these Centers by initiating gender perspectives in many domains, in the generation of knowledge, in the field of policy design and practice. These Centers were designed to act as catalysts for promoting and strengthening women’s studies through teaching, research, action, field work and extension. It recognized the role of these centers in contributing to the visibility of women’s issues, tried to combine erudite knowledge with socially relevant theories and succeeded in opening up a dialogue in multidisciplinary collaborations (PANDE, 2013, p. 6).
Learn more about women's studies in India by watching this video by The Feminist Archive, Feminism in India.
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