Women Empowerment in National Development

WOMEN EMPOWERMENT IN

NATIONAL DEVELOPMENT

IRP by Muhammad Asif 10th PPG

Introduction

        The position of women in human society from the creation of mankind has not been very appreciative. Starting from the myth of Adam and Eve, it was the Eve who tempted Adam to taste the forbidden fruit and resultantly they were thrown out of paradise. The wife of Noah was also not on the right path and was not saved in the Arc. Except for a few exceptions in history, women have never been a significant claimant of authority, either politically or socially. Rather women had been considered property with propriety rights vesting in their male custodians. Incest and inheriting women were a part of daily life in dark ages. Concept of slavery, selling and purchasing women of choice had been a significant social activity in ancient times. Even the Socrates and their infamous philosopher; Aristotle could not agree on expansion of rights of women beyond households. Socrates believed that any additional social and political role assigned to women would alter the total complexion of any state. Aristotle was against women slavery but didn’t trust their role especially matters relating in labor. After marriage, a wife, according to the law and customs was supposed to obey her husband. This was such a universally acceptable norm that inmost Jewish and Christian wedding, this practice continued till the late twentieth century. The wife was considered to be the property of the husband along with his working animals.^[1] 

It was the introduction of Islam which provided for some written and statutory rights for women in issues regarding property, inheritance, marriage, work, education and livelihood and above all the right of existence. Islam laid down clear roles for the individuals and society, gave the rights and set the limitations but history clearly documents that women still did not have any significant role in development, furthermore in any development at any national level. However, the concept of national development was nowhere near the current concept of development nor the preaching of Islam were practiced their true essence, women in either society; European or Arabian, Indian or Latin were no exception to this rule. Women’s impact on society was minimal due to these factors. The psychological traumas inflicted upon women due to these restrains combined with their nonexistent social standing deprived them of impacting any real change in society. The issue along with other dimensions had the most significant side, as to what should be the utility of the women who are educated and doing nothing and the possibility if they are brought to the mainstream, the pace of development and progress could be doubled than what only the men were doing single handedly. Although the concept was lucrative on the mathematical basis that 1+1 was supposed to be 2, but somewhere someone forgot that giving multiple role to the women at the cost of their century’s old settled natural role could have repercussions, which soon manifested. The moment women entered mainstream workforce, their own static role in household started looking irrelevant and blurry to the extent that it lost its total significance. This participation created an imbalance in the society in different ways. The difference in status of liberated working or effective women and that of women of household was so abnormally large that it gave substance to the idea that something was really wrong in the social and cultural tiers. Without going for or against any such idea, I have reasons to believe that the majority of men did like the idea of the women participation in the mainstream for the apparent reasons that it could reduce the responsibility of   work (convertible into social responsibilities) from their shoulders and shift a major chunk to the women.  As I have stated that due to this social incidence which created an imbalance in the social status, approach and outlook of the women, the movement of equal rights and empowerment of women started growing.

This was not the only social upheaval caused by the improving educational and social system, with the broadening of mind new horizons, especially for the convenience of human comfort, started taking place. New ingenious devices were invented, originally for individual comfort but ultimately to the collective convenience. The demand for social and cultural changes at mass level was so huge and immense that it radically altered the meaning of development. It changed from construction of forts and city protection walls to the construction of infrastructure including school, hospitals, roads and chain of other structures for provision of such facilities.  The traits considered personal to the masses have to be brought on collective social footing. The public impliedly became involved either in the ownership of these newly established institutions or had a recognized right of sharing in them.  This totally changed the complexion of the meanings of development in vogue since ages. This concept has kept its shapes and forms changing which originally started from the movements of equal sharing of rights for women, gender equalization have strangely reached the concept of women empowerment. And this is, at the moment a joint issue of all the nations in the world.

Significance and scope (of research)

The issue in the past 50 years has become a universally acceptable core issue of the whole of the mankind. The emphasis of the issue has reaches a point where all the countries in the world has met many times together and tried to resolve the issue by agreeing on certain common goals to be achieved in this regard. The United Nations has created a subsidiary to cater the issue and repeated world conferences of the status and empowerment of women have been held. The 4th one held in Beijing in which representatives of 189 Governments, 17000 participants and 30,000 activists assembled. This shows the magnitude of the issue. Subsequently at the start of new millennium, the nations of the world gathered again to streamline the wellbeing of the human race and the goals they agreed upon (The MDGs) included the women empowerment with a high level of significance. This shows that the issue has issue has involved so serious proportions that nobody in the whole world is in a position to ignore this vital issue. While agreeing on the idea of women empowerment almost all of the nations in the world has agreed to the fields in which they feel the necessity of such empowerment. So it’s definitely a requirement to see if how effective, necessary this idea is and up to what extent it’s practicable.