GONE ARE the days, when women were confined to the four walls of the house and they were busy with daily chores. Today’s women are at par with the men in every domain, whether it is technology, agriculture, pharmacy, etc. Sarojini Naidu, Vijaylaxmi Pandit , Sushmita Sen, etc. are the few names, who have shown the other aspect of the women.
But, the exemplary paradigm of the capabilities of today’s Mother India is the Women's Reservation Bill, passed on 9 March, 2010. Women's Reservation Bill has given a vast scope to Indian women to display their proficiency in the arena of politics. Now, it seems that after scaling heights of success in every field, women have come forward to contribute to the politics to help the county grow.
However, according to a study by International Labour Organisation "Women represent 50 percent of the world adult population and a third of the official labour force; they perform nearly two-third of all working hours, receive a tenth of world income and own less than one percent of world property."
Thus, women reservation is not a reward but an honest acknowledgement of their contribution towards the development of society. The turning point in the history of India for women, the long-awaited Women's Reservation Bill was finally passed on Tuesday in the Rajya Sabha with 186 votes in the favor and only one against it.
Bravo! Let see what will happen in the times to come.
The other side of the coin should not be ignored….
We may remember that for some time women have voiced a concern that their work is not being fully recognized. Not only is their contribution to the economy going largely unnoticed, but there appear to be many obstacles which hinder farmwomen from working more effectively. Now a day’s literate woman are harvesting the fruits of development while the poor illiterate farm women (which constitute 50% population) are far –far behind the race of development as researched by a broad project in the country. Rather they had not on line of development. They are burdened with drudgery laden work throughout the day without any time for leisure.
Women spend at least two hours a day preparing food for themselves and their families. At farm, farmwomen see weeding as their hardest and most time-consuming task, it was found most tiring and tedious job because it required, bending and concentration in order to do the job properly and thus caused backache. Again weeding took up more days in the field, then any other farm operation. Minimum estimate of the days spent weeding were 60, this figure increased as much as120 because of the areas of two cropping seasons. For some crops weeding was found as never-ending task, in cotton, particularly, one might have to go through the fields as many as four times. In animal husbandry domain bringing fodder was found their hardest job. Farmwomen have to walk a considerable distance to collect weeds/grass for fodder from the fields, which steals their lot of time and energy.
While working conditions for women may have improved with provision of electric gadgets like churner, flourmill, electric chaff cutter, etc. there is a lack of appreciation for the notion that work for most women doesn't end at the door of a factory or office. As mechanical power replaces human power and increases the returns to labour, the responsibility for many agricultural activities has devolved to men, as despite a significant increase in the use of farm machines farming become mechanized and benefited farm men more then farmwomen. While women still shoulder several gendered farm work like weeding, cotton picking, harvesting in small land holdings, fodder collecting, bringing and collection of fuel contained drudgery. As mentioned above farmwomen work 13-18 hours a day, while eight hours are necessary for every human being for biological needs (sleeping, eating, personal necessities etc.). It means not any free/leisure time for recreation and entertainment which is a necessary spice of good life.
The research discovered the truth, but what is the value of a soulless truth? I personally feel that work profile of farmwomen through the life cycle remains, to a substantial degree; “women’s work”, “the work without leisure” “and that woman bear significant adverse costs on their health for doing it. The question is….”So what? Why would one want to study a sick child except to make him well? Who is supposed to do anything about the situation? What can reasonably be done?”
Many women don't know they have
problem. If your grandmother got up and put a pebble in her shoe every day, and your mother did the same thing, you're going to put the pebble in your shoe too, and not think about complaining.
Leisuring Out of Leisure Activities Among Farmwomen In Haryana
Leisure being a necessary part of life in every human being- as it provides a chance to relax and
recover from the stress and fatigue of everyday life. It also provides a creative outlet and an important opportunity to establish and maintain social networks. Leisure among rural farmwomen in Haryana is
virtually an unexplored field of study. An understanding of these women's experience of leisure will enhance our understanding of leisure in general, and gender and leisure specifically.
I argue that despite the scarce means, hard work, and everyday struggle involved in a subsistence-oriented life style, rural farmwomen of Haryana have their own ways of enjoying leisure and recreation. They have an amazing capacity to turn some of their routine work into avenues ofrecreation, and thereby, transform some of the most mundane and dry work into rewarding leisure experience.
Being my concern with rural Haryana it is my personal experience that leisure experience for Haryana rural farmwomen is gendered and culturally situated. Reason behind it is that women's activities are mostly obligatory and regulated by persistent institutions of culture, religion, and customs where their freedom of action and choice is very limited. Again they have spatial and physical restrictions on movements and their activities are primarily confined within their ghar (home), nohra (cattle shed), bada( aplaceto make cow-dung-cakes)and khet (farm).
Women have developed the skill to carve out pleasure from their meetings during everyday work, chatting with friends and relatives during their social visits and festivals, visit to market after sale of
crops, their food preparation and their handicrafts. Farmwomen do seven leisure activities: Embriodry, knitting, sewing, crocheting, kitchen gardening which again are productive activities,where they use their skills, while chatting and marketing are their non productive activities.
“Leisure is .... joy-a (sense of) happiness you feel deep down your heart by doing something or by making someone happy. I make daris with the help of my daughters, buy clothes from the market for them . . . I feel good to see them smiling. Freetime? No . . . I am always busy (but) when I go to well to fetch water, fodder and fuelwood, I meet neighbors and talk with sahelis (friends).” No dought they had favourable peception on why they need leisure. They believe that they are entitled to it because leisure takes away the boredom for work, it is good for one,s health.
As noted, farmwomen did not show any particular interest in formal leisure institutions (e.g., cinema
or theatre) and did not express any significant sense of deprivation. Women generally consider these institutions as "places of men's recreation". They create their own symbolic worlds of recreation by
modifying and conditioning some of their routine work. When engaged in this work, they experience the key elements of leisure-the "feelings of relaxation, enjoyment, and rejuvenation.
The sense of joy or satisfaction they experience from family care activities or from meeting friends also give women the gratifying and comforting feelings that they have really "achieved something," their work is "of worth and use to the family," and that there are "other persons who share their ideas" of good and bad. In addition to the moments of leisure carved out of necessary labor such as fuelwood gathering and farm work, farmwomen pursued leisure by engaging themselves in productive activities like handicrafts, and in social visits, chatting with friends and relatives, marketing and preparing special food items.
Farm women, from the neighborhood meet together while collecting fuel (leaves, barks, shrubs, twigs), fodder, and wild-food like cholaai, kondra, teent, peal (wild fruit), from the nearby waste lands and, fields and during bringing water (there is provision of water supply in their houses or in nearby streets in Haryana, but due to taste they bring water from drinking from locally available sources of water). On these occasions, women meet together and discuss personal, family, and village affairs as they go about the work of fuel collection or fetching water.During such discussions, women share their ideas with one another which not only create opportunities for self-expression (they also discuss misbehaviour conducted to them by older member of their families ), but also symbolize
some degree of group solidarity. Women, especially housewives, almost universally cherish the experience of visiting houses of close kin. For a young, newly married housewife, for example, the greatest recreation can be a piihar-a short, periodic visit to her parents from her husband's home. During such visits, women generally take a break from the burden of daily work and pass the time by meeting kin and friends.
The majority of women in the study area were engaged in some form of handicraft, especially embroidery, sewing, and knitting, work. Although handicraft is mainly an economic activity performed for the financial welfare of the family, observations revealed that such activity also provided farmwomen with an opportunity for recreation, relaxation, and some degree of freedom to test their ideas and innovations. They seem to enjoy the work, and, on an average, they spend about two hours engaged in handicraft work daily. It was also observed that women admired each other's work. Preparation of special food even in the face of harder work schedule, the farmwomen has a capacity to enjoy themselves within their limited means. The most common forms of recreations are preparing food items, gond/khoya laddu, or panjiri, especially in the winter season.
Leisure time can be defined as time that is not obligated, and leisure activities can be defined as activities that are non-obligatory .... When . . . obligations (towards work and family) is met, a man ( woman?) has "free time" in which his behaviour is dictated by his own will and preferences, and it is here that leisure is found.
Many of the recreational activities of the poor rural farmwomen in Haryana do not fall within the strict meaning of the above definition. Observations indicated that leisure experience is gendered and culturally situated. First, women's activities are mostly obligatory and regulated by persistent institutions of culture, religion, and customs where their freedom of action and choice is very limited. Second, they have spatial and physical restrictions on movements and their activities are primarily confined within the homestead. Thus, the emphasis of analysis, especially in the case of rural farmwomen's leisure experience, needs to be on the rather reclusive interaction of recreation and pleasure with daily routine rather than on the visible and quantitative dimensions of leisure such as time, activity, or space. One obvious reason is that the unpaid, overlapping, domesticized, and invisible nature of women's work in rural Haryana makes it difficult to make clear distinctions between free time activity and obligatory activity or between leisure and work. This is, however, certainly not to undermine the importance and usefulness of focusing on time and activity in some situations. However, by narrowing the definition of leisure to free time or activity, we run the risk of failing to see the deeper manifestations of leisure and recreation among the poor farming families which are not always so easily recognizable.
This paper has attempted to show that women of the farm families of Haryana, (imagine their number, India is still 70 percent rural) enjoy recreation and leisure in their own unique way. It is significant to note that they found some ways of stealing away from the mental sense of obligation and pressure generated by their cumbersome daily work performed in a largely hostile and disadvantageous environment, and of creating their own mental worlds of joy within their daily struggle.
By being aware with all the above facts, can anybody with soul and brain dare to.. explain…to the poor farmwomen the meaning of Women’s Reservation Bill.
Muscular pain during working in farm
Harynvi women's drudgery ...fetching water from far away from their dwellings.......
dancing wearing Traditional Harynvi dress and balancing vessels while performing Haryanvi dance....
