Girl Child Day

A woman is to a man what a slave is to a master
                                                            - Plato

It may be that Plato articulated the master-slave relationship as he saw it. It may be that Plato believed it, for that was the norm. Centuries have passed. Woman is seen in realtion to man. Slavery is abolished. Or is it? Woman is the Second Sex.

 “...what particularly signifies the situation of woman is that she – a free and autonomous being like all human creatures – nevertheless finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other.” (Simone De Beauvoir, The Second Sex).

The conditioning of the Second Sex, the other, the female, takes place soon after birth. She may grow up without feeling the distinctions of her sex or her power to explore the world like the male child of her age, but as she becomes bolder, assertive, articulate, she falls trap of the gender conditioning. She then grows away from the realization of what she was when she started out. The memory of her A-Sexual being is long forgotten. She begins to align her life into the nuances of the masculine world.

The XX Chromo

A woman's world is fractured from the time of conception. It starts from the very stage when rapid cell division takes place. When the mutation of chromosomes begins, sex determination sets forth. The survival game begins. In the world of the XY, the chance of the XX surviving is bleak.

Gender inequality takes covert ways to bring about a masculine order. The dichotomy between the Male and female to survive kicks in – and mostly, even if the female foetus is far more resilient, the chances of survival in a patriarchal world is bleak. The female foetus, it is scientifically proved, has lesser chance of miscarriage then male foetus. But once born, survival becomes a wild game. Nutrition and health care is always given far lesser priority. The male child is fed better and more frequently. The girl child may not survive her third birthday.

Step into a rural village in India. Female infanticide – a systematic killing of the girl child at or soon after birth is prevalent. Even if a child survives the pangs of coming to birth, she may not survive her fifth birthday, as she has every chance of dying of malnutrition. Her brother gets all the attention and the nutrients to allow him to survive. It makes economical sense for the family to protect, nurture the male child – he will grow strong to be able to earn and provide for the family.

Missing Women – Gender Fixing

Over 100 million women are "missing" worldwide and it is argued that over 50 million women are missing in India alone. This gender fixing continues unabated. Dr Amartya Sen’s study of the missing women in a British Medical Journal in 1992 paved the way for a thorough examination on gender discrimination.

The female ratio in Karnataka is below 930 (per 1000 men) in places like Bijapur, Gulbarga, Bagalkot, Bidar, Belgaum, and Bangalore Rural. I make mention of this because I have seen this trend far closer in the areas of Bagalkot (Badami)when working on the flood relief activities.

Child marriage, unequal education opportunities, discrimination in employment, victimization due to caste and creed, persistent domestic violence, lack of property rights all adds up to the early exit of the woman. They perish also from lack of health care.

A New World Order

A woman can only be an agency of change for her own sex. Women who have arrived at the scene of change need to be the harbinger of more change. Independence to a woman is got through her purse. This can only be true, if education is made available to every girl child. Educate a woman, her entire family is educated. This broadens the horizon of the house she lives in. Thus the change peculates to the neighbourhood, to the village and then to the world.

Woman needs to be the agent of her own change.

To the girl child erased from the face of the earth...
To the woman who knows her then, and realizes her now...
To the woman of change...
To the woman who remains a child in her heart...

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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