Page 111 - Magazine 22-23 Qty.cdr

English Articles
Prof. Prajakta S. Raut

World- wide Scenario from Ages:
On a glocal platform, in this twenty-first century too, the subjugation of women is getting distinctly visible, though in
varying degrees, across the world, either through false idealization of cultures or through superimposing of rules. The
male gets the 'maharaja' treatment while the female commonly has a 'slave' status. Worse still, women are treated as
possessions, well expressed by an outmoded custom in Kenya viz. When a Kenyan woman loses her husband, whether
she likes it or not, her brother- in- law inherits her as a wife. In many Asian countries, a female is underprivileged at birth.
She comes to be exploited as she grows. If she happens to be the eldest daughter, she is called “the mother's helper", sugar-
coating for an unpaid labourer. Males are fed on the choicest food while the females live on the left- overs. In many
educated families, deplorably such tacitly gender- bias practice is still carried. Boys are encouraged to be tough and
outgoing whereas girls are moulded to be homebound and shy. Even many great writers and philosophers have
considered ideal women to be self- renouncing rather than self- developing. The great Rousseau (1712- 1778), the father
of Naturalism and whose call return to nature stirred romantic imagination, could not extend it to women, despite being
the fact that a story of human life begins with a female and it is she who carried the original human chromosome as she
does to this day. Unfortunately, his Naturalism remained gender specific and he defended the patriarchal family system.
Despite being an avid fan of Plato, he could not share his belief in sexual equality. For him, women are the creatures made
by Nature to gratify man's 'natural' desires:

“Woman is specially made for man's delight. If a man in his turn ought to be pleasing in her eyes, the necessity is urgent,
his virtue is in his strength. I grant you this is not the law of love, but it is the law of nature, which is older than love
itself….If woman is made to please and to be in subjugation to man, she ought to make herself pleasing in his eyes and not
provoke him to anger.” 2 (Rousseau: “Emily" (1762): 322)

For Rousseau, the Athenian model of woman was the ideal one where women confined themselves to the private space of
the home, enjoying the status of a wife, mother and householder:

“When Greek women married, they disappeared from public life. Within the four walls of their home, they devoted
themselves to the care of their household and family. This is the mode of life prescribed for women alike by nature and
reason.”3 (Ibid: 330)

Thus, a totally emancipated woman who is free, equal, rational and an independent being with a mind of her own was
beyond his conception.

Go back to sixteen century, when World famous dramatist William Shakespeare (1564-1616) unabashedly carried
through their literary output the decidedly patriarchal mindsets. His world-famous statements 'frailty thy name is woman'
(Hamlet) or '…a man married to a woman is a man that is marred' are the true products of this andro- centric ideology. The
same male dominated psyche was recapitulated by Nitsche, the German Existentialist in the sense a woman '…is to be
dealt with a whip' or for that matter, Dr. Johnson's logic of a woman's speech, which 'is just like dog's hinder legs, it's not
done well but one feels great to have done it at all', is quite evidential here. The representative prose writer of nineteenth
century Victorian era, John Ruskin, too, deserves a special mention, with reference to his 'Sesame and Lilies' (1865).
Close on the heels of Alfred Tennyson, he, too, re- echoed the same tacitly woman- bias ideology that a woman's role is
to be a good house wife and enjoy the life of domestic bliss. As a result, “… frank, beautiful and kind as the free
heavens…, Speaking the wisdom once they could not think, looking emotions once they feared to feel. And changed to all
which once they dared not to be.”(III, iv,153-158) woman, as visualized by P.B.Shelley in Prometheus Unbound was

99 “Life isn't a matter of milestones, but of moments.” (Rose Kennedy)

HINDUJA HORIZONS 2022 -2023