Column

A quick glance around most offices in a city today would show a good proportion of working women. In cities like Mumbai, the visibility is high — girls and women of all shapes, sizes and social demographics walking, commuting, driving, eating, drinking and so on. There is no doubt that the old, old Virginia Slims line is still appropriate — you’ve come a long way, baby. Women have come a long way, in urban India at least. Many younger women are sanguine in their freedoms, which they take for granted. That is how it should be. The huge urban response to the attack on women’s freedoms by the Sri Ram Sene in Mangalore in February is an indicator of how women are unwilling to give up any ground.

Yet, there are still a few battles to be won and a number of male bastions which are yet to crumble. The fight against attitude – patriarchal, patronising, demeaning, humiliating, — is an ongoing one; as long as a nation’s laws are just, society’s ills get their deserved answers. But with social movement must come political growth and for political growth you need acknowledgement. The Charter of the United Nations, signed in San Francisco in 1945, was the “first international agreement to proclaim gender equality as a fundamental human right” declares a UN website. Forget the fact that it is amazing that 50 per cent of human race was not given its due before that. The question should be, what now?

In India, for instance, gender equality is a vital part of our Constitution and the granting of universal adult franchise gave women voting rights much before much of the industrialised West.

But the 2004 Lok Sabha was only about 9 per cent female — nothing shows the extent of male domination more than this. Although India has had a woman prime minister, women chief ministers and central ministers, the number of women getting elected is still not representative of society. This lack of political voice underlines the distance left to be travelled. Worldwide, as well, there is appreciation that conservative Saudi Arabia has one woman minister and a sprinkling of women as heads of state here and there.

Many years ago, political leader Sharad Yadav made an infamous speech in Parliament against the women’s representation bill saying that he could not countenance a legislature overrun by “short-haired women”, code word for the modern, urban female. It is just, at least, that Uttar Pradesh is run by Mayawati and that Sharad Yadav is a nonentity today. But that’s a token victory. The idea that women “must know and keep their place in society” is not yet assumed to be a matter of shame. That is, a belief still prevails that women get their positions from the beneficence of men. A common way to keep women in their “right” place is to bring up the bogey of home and family. Once a sure way to pile on the guilt and reduce women to domestic entities, the argument, happily, gets less traction with each passing year. Women’s emancipation has led to men’s enlightenment, you might say.

According to the International Women’s Day (IWD) statistics, women own only 1 per cent of the world’s land and over 500,000 women die in childbirth or pregnancy every year and of the world’s 1.2 billion people living in poverty, 80 per cent are women. These are dire figures, to which you can add several more of your own. Female foeticide in urban Indian centres remains one of our own horrific truths.

What then does one more IWD mean? Is March 8 to be filled only with tokenism, where men pat you on the head for being a good girl? Or is it for women to congratulate themselves on what they’ve managed since the day was first celebrated in the early 1900s? Maybe it’s a good chance for all humankind to look at our record of justice and fair play and understand that choice lies at the foundation of equality.