The passage of four separate parliamentary acts between 1955 and 1956 sought to give women formal legal rights. Tradition has made the full realization of these rights slow and even nonexistent in some parts of India, even into the twenty-first century.
Indian society historically has been patriarchal. Males enjoyed prerogatives and prestige generally denied girls and women, although a few regions in India preserved some important matriarchal traditions. In some places, property and the family name passed from mother to daughter, but these were isolated exceptions to the rule. The Manu smirti
Indian prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru.
Marriages were arranged, so women had little to say about the choice of a mate. Marriages often took place while the partners were still infants or toddlers. Although these couples did not live together as husband and wife until they attained puberty, child brides were subject to all the constraints of married women. Most dramatically, if their child husbands happened to die, girls were classified as widows.
Among upper-caste Indians, widow remarriage was forbidden. Child widows were doomed to miserable lives as little more than slaves in the homes of their in-laws or as burdens for their parents and brothers. Even if widowhood came while she was an adult, a woman faced a bleak future if she did not have sons willing to support her. For that reason, especially in higher castes, widows were encouraged to become satis. A sati is literally a virtuous woman, but in this instance it meant that a new widow should volunteer to be immolated on her deceased husband’s funeral pyre, a practice called suttee
Beginning in the eleventh century
In the early nineteenth century, many Indian and British social reformers took up women’s issues such as marriage, divorce, and education. Ram Mohan Ray
In the twentieth century, women took a very active role in the freedom struggle. Mahatma Gandhi’s wife, Kasturbai,
In the Hindu Code, women were guaranteed several legal rights. In the event that a husband took a second wife, the first was entitled to sue for divorce. Several other grounds on which wives could divorce their husbands were also laid down. The Marriage Act was further amended in 1976 to allow for “no fault” divorce. The Succession Act gave widows rights to real property. It also abolished the joint family system, which favored male heirs over females. Instead of small cash settlements or nothing at all, women now had the opportunity to hold agricultural land as well as houses in their own name.
Taken by themselves, each of the four acts of the Hindu Code is an impressive piece of legislation that appears to give women a considerable number of legal rights. Many obstacles, however, existed to the full implementation of those laws. In the early twenty-first century, the great majority of women still live as they traditionally had in the countryside in villages. The numbers of women in school increased impressively in the years after 1947, but the rate of literacy among women remained far below that of men. In this situation, women often did not know what legal prerogatives they had.
In the restricted world of the villages, women had few opportunities to learn about the law and fewer still to consult with a lawyer. The law of inheritance supposedly eliminated the economic restrictions imposed on women by the joint family system, but in the countryside females had few chances to acquire the necessary cash to hire a lawyer. Males remained in control of most of a family’s wealth. Marriages were still arranged, and women had very little say about when they married or whom they would marry. The society still disapproved of divorce. A divorced woman was often thought to be unlucky, so her chances of remarriage were slight. Only in the best-educated and wealthiest circles was divorce or remarriage tolerated. Even there, the incidence of divorce was very low when compared to Europe or the United States.
A new crime, bride burning, appeared in the 1980’s, indicating that in India the physical abuse, including murder, of women was still tolerated. The crime was most common among middle-class families in the cities of North India. It involved a husband demanding gifts, such as motorbikes, televisions, or videocassette recorders, from his wife’s parents or brothers. If these “presents” were not forthcoming, the bride met with a horrible death. For example, because cooking was often done on kerosene stoves, even in middle-class homes, husbands found it fairly easy to fake an accidental death by throwing the flammable liquid over their wives, setting the liquid on fire, and then claiming that the stove exploded. A bride’s death freed her husband to seek another wife and, perhaps, repeat the crime. At first, police were reluctant to pursue criminal investigations of such deaths, but an outcry from women’s groups led to a number of arrests and convictions, so the incidence of the crime diminished.
Women’s rights to property became the most hotly contested of the reforms made by the Hindu Code. Many court suits have been filed by family members seeking to reduce or eliminate a woman’s share of her husband’s estate. The courts often ruled against women. Even when a woman succeeded in maintaining her inheritance rights, the financial and time costs of a lawsuit left her financially and emotionally exhausted.
In the 1980’s, an increasingly vocal feminist movement began making headway, especially among women in the cities. Women’s groups devoted themselves to the educational and economic welfare of their poorer, less-privileged sisters. In the future, the true test of the rights guaranteed by the Hindu Code will be their extension to women in the countryside and among the poorer segments of the populace.
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Desai, Neera, and Maithreyi Khrishnaraj. Women and Society in India. Delhi, India: Ajanta, 1987. An introductory textbook written from an interdisciplinary feminist perspective. Provides a considerable amount of anecdotal evidence about the lives of women in modern India. -
De Souza, Eunice, ed. Purdah: An Anthology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Comprehensive, 552-page collection of writings on the custom of purdah in India. Includes first-person accounts and literary accounts of purdah. -
Dhruvarajan, Vanaja. Hindu Women and the Power of Ideology. Granby, Mass.: Bergin and Garvey, 1989. Study of women’s lives in a South Indian village. The author treats such important issues as work, health, and education. Provides some sense of how women’s lives have and have not changed in the contemporary countryside. -
Khrishnamurty, J., ed. Women in Colonial India. New Delhi, India: Oxford University Press, 1989. Considers many different aspects of women’s lives in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Several articles are detailed studies of women’s economic activities, while other articles deal with women’s legal rights and wrongs as well as with general cultural attitudes toward women. -
The Laws of Manu. Translated by Georg Buhler. New York: Dover, 1969. The Laws of Manu, an Indian legal text dating from the fourth century, emphasizes that women are weaker and less intelligent by nature than males. It also stresses that women’s chastity must be closely protected because, left on their own, women quickly will go astray. -
Mandelbaum, David G. Women’s Seclusion and Men’s Honor. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1988. A brief study of several areas of the Indian subcontinent where purdah, the seclusion of women, is practiced. Highlights the ambiguity of the place of women in such systems. -
Preston, Laurence V. The Devs of Cincvad: A Lineage and the State in Maharashtra. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. A detailed historical study of the material base of a particular lineage of holy men from the first half of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth. By indicating how important women were within the kin group and how powerful they could become through their control of adoptions, the book provides a somewhat different perspective on women in “traditional India.” -
Ramu, G. N. Women, Work, and Marriage in Urban India. Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1989. A sociological study that deals with some of the new problems that arise for women in modern cities. Studies women who work outside the home as well as those who do not.
Australians Elect First Women to Parliament
France Grants Suffrage to Women
Japanese Constitution Grants New Rights to Women
United Nations Adopts the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
United Nations Convention on the Political Rights of Women Is Approved
Canadian Bill of Rights Prohibits Sex Discrimination
Gandhi Serves as India’s First Female Prime Minister
United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Is Adopted
United Nations Issues a Declaration on Equality for Women
British Parliament Passes the Equal Pay Act of 1970