Seats for women
Source: By Bharat Jhunjhunwala: The Statesman
The Women’s Reservation Bill has lapsed once again with the end of the tenure of the present Lok Sabha. This gives us a welcome breather to reflect on the entire issue. The underlying issue is that of equality between men and women. An athlete and a musician cannot be equal in running or in singing. They can, however, become equal if both are awarded the Padma Bhushan. Similar is the case of men and women. Men cannot equal women in providing emotional support to children, while women cannot equal men in some areas. The equality between them has to be secured by providing equal respect to their different roles.
The straight-jacketed division of roles between men and women of yesteryear is no longer relevant. The responsibility of homemaking was onerous and exhausting in the past. Women had to carry water, collect firewood and wash clothes. Piped water, cooking gas, stoves and washing machines have minimised the daily drudgery of house-keeping.. Contraceptives are a precaution against ‘forced’ child-bearing. She has more time to spare. The physical limitation has also been overcome. Women are plying buses and piloting aircraft. It is imperative to use this new-found freedom for self-development of the woman.
At the same time, the emotional needs of homemaking have increased. In their book, The Imperial Animal, anthropologists Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox have pointed out that among primates, man alone divided the labour of earning bread between males and females. The complexities of society required a long period of learning. Human beings developed a system of “non-genetic mode of transferring information from one generation to another. There was a premium on an animal which could learn a lot and learn it quickly and which did not depend too heavily on direct instructions from the genes for each item of behaviour.” The mother was the crucial actor in this non-genetic learning. She taught the child. Animal experiments have shown that the softness and texture of the mother ~ even her smells ~ are more important to the child than breast-feeding. This period of breast-feeding allows the child’s brain to grow deeper and imparts an ability to deal with more complex issues, say Tiger and Fox.
Deprived of this mother-care, children become misfits in society ~ “Anyone who has seen the grief, the listlessness, the obvious and heart-rending despair of infant monkeys deprived in an experiment ~ of maternal care, will echo the sentiments of the man who performed the experiment. Thank God we only have to do it once to prove the point.”
Motherhood, they say, is not merely the physical role of providing milk. Equally, it is about teaching the future generations of the species about behaviour that they have to adopt in order to survive. This teacher-role of the woman will get more pronounced with the increasing stress that children are being subjected to and the increasing complexity of society.
Why should the male dominate politics all over the earth, so regularly and so predictably? ask Tiger and Fox. They dismiss the theory that men have conspired to keep women in subservience ~ “We are talking here about so many different cultures, with so many different kinds of religion, economy, ecology, political structure, tradition, ways of raising children, that it would be statistically inevitable that a fair number of these different systems would throw up a genuinely female-dominated political system... if men all over the world have always been able to keep women sub-dominant and under all conditions ~ perhaps they are politically superior to women.” Note the stress on ‘political’ superiority. The term need not translate into general superiority of the male; just as the athlete’s superior ability in running does not make him a ‘superior’ person than the musician. Men and women are superior in different fields. Given the natural responsibility of homemaking cast upon the woman by Mother Nature, it must follow that man is superior in the task of breadwinning and politics.
The upshot is that male-female societal differences have a deep biological and social purpose. Moreover, the superiority of the human species rests, in part at least, on precisely this division of labour. If human beings have to further evolve, then these differences will further increase rather than decrease. The human species also gives the greatest attention to homemaking. A yet more developed human society would, it seems, see yet more attention being given by the woman to the child. We have seen how women have taken over the responsibility of getting the children to do homework. The emotional stress in post-modern society may be much greater. Women’s empowerment, therefore, would have to be ensured in a way that allows them to give greater attention to childbearing. It would have to be built on the celebration of the different roles of men and women rather than their equalization.
Western society has tried to liberate women from their natural responsibility of homemaking by inventing the concept of ‘quality time.’ The idea was that women can earn and engage in politics, and the reduced time given to children can be made up by ‘quality time’ ~ that is focused attention given to children for a short time. This is not working out successfully and this becomes evident from the incidents of shooting innocent school children by juveniles in the United States. Rabbi Shmuley dismissed the idea of “quality time”. Referring to the Oprah Winfrey programme, he says children do not benefit from, nor do they desire to spend “quality time” with their parents, which he says averages around 5.5 minutes per day in the United States. Children who are neglected by their parents grow up to feel insignificant, insecure, unloved and ~ more than anything else ~ angry. To make children feel important, loved and safe, parents should be physically and emotionally available to their children for a few hours every day.
We are caught between two opposing forces. On the one hand, women have been liberated from the drudgery of homemaking. On the other, the emotional demands of homemaking have increased. The solution is to provide greater respect to the emotional homemaking role of the mother. At the same time, the special needs of women must be reflected in the political discourse. We must consider carving out separate constituencies for men and women. Instead of forced election of women; we must consider election by women. Let women choose either a man or woman to present their case in the political dialogue.
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