Revisiting Women Empowerment in Modern Era

Abstract

IntroductionWomen empowerment is a new phrase in the vocabulary of gender literature. The phrase is used in two broad senses i.e. general and specific. In a general sense, it refers to empowering women to be self-dependent by providing them access to all those freedoms and opportunities, which they were denied in the past only because of their being a 'women'. In a specific sense, women empowerment refers to enhancing their position in the power structure of the society. The word women empowerment essentially means that the women have the power or capacity to regulate their day-to-day lives in the social, political and economic terms -a power which enables them to move from the periphery to the centre. In 21 st Century women are recognized as important stakeholders of social development. They primarily bear the responsibility to achieve goals of quality education, healthy nutrition and to raise the levels of family income. Their actions warrant an end to hunger and poverty. However at the same time one can still find institutionalized inequality not only in working of the political institutions but also in more elementary fields of social and economic life of the women such as poor health care, malnutrition or under-nutrition, over-work, unorganized and unskilled workforce, maltreatment and powerlessness. Such pathetic state of affairs is prevailing at the time when the entire human civilization feels smug about its achievements especially in the fields of science and technology in a democratic setup. Democracy as a matter of fact has been projected as an important tool to talk and gain favours about the empowerment of women. Also because of peculiar placement of women in the social, economic and political settings of society, they experience poverty, hunger and unemployment differently as compared to men.