The ever rising spate of crimes against women has not only given way to countrywide discussions on how to provide safety and security for girls and women but raised some sort of fear in the womenfolk as well. In most cases this fear might be in the back of their mind but in some it is conscious enough to find expression. In her article “Why I dread giving birth to a baby girl?” (merinews.com, 10 January) Samishta talks of such fear. It is not that the writer is semi-literate or narrow-minded. She is a self-confessed well-educated and well-placed lady and loves to lead a quality life.
Hers is a complain of girls being treated as ‘second hand citizens’. She avers: “A girl in India has to live a tough life…. She is a second hand citizen in her own country and second rated in her own home. Knowing that, I dread bringing into this world another second rated being.” This is not her experience but her keen perception of what she observes in society.
What is a matter of concern here is her thought about her yet-to-be-born daughter. She writes: “What kind of values would I instil in her during her growing up years…That she would never be able to live life freely…That she would always need to abide by rules in order to survive, let go of her dreams and ambitions many times in her life only to satisfy ego of the men.”
Such fear is the natural corollary of free society. In the post Industrial Revolution era, in their bid to have more work force as well as unbridled pleasure, the protagonists of western civilization brought women out of homes that used to provide protection and dignity for women. They put them to service in factories as cheap labours, in hotels as waitresses, in hospitals as nurses, in aeroplanes as hostesses, in offices as co-workers, in shops as salesgirls, and in nightclubs to work for and please men. All this was done in the name of gullible slogans of women’s lib and social equality at the cost of moral decadence.
But now the society is realising the hollowness of these slogans. Samistha however is one of the few expectant mothers today who think of inculcating ‘values’ in kids especially daughters. We hope that in a morally diminishing society, totally shorn of values and all that stands for morality and propriety, this sane voice would not be treated as a cry in wilderness. The Samisthas as well as social scientists should know for certain that there is a system of life which guarantees respect and dignity to the womenfolk, where the mind of women is without fear, where equal opportunity of getting education and running a business is ensured, where girls are not treated as ‘second hand’ or ‘second rated’ beings, where the area of work for men and women is clearly defined, where sound moral values form the fibre of society, where behaving with girls is reckoned as source of getting place in Paradise that in fact lies beneath the feet of mothers, and above all where women are not required ‘to satisfy the ego of men’. They can find this system in the books or sites on Islam.