The following excerpts from a working paper by Swapna Mukhopadhyay of Institute of Social Studies Trust should be a good starter on this topic
"Kerala, a state of thirty odd million people in the southern tip of India, has been hailed as the epitome of women’s development in a country that does not fare too well in terms of UNDP’s gender development indicator.
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many other states in this country of billion plus people, literacy levels are high among women as well as men in Kerala, and the differences between the two are relatively low, thereby contributing to a high level of recorded GDI in the state. Health indicators are equally impressive, with high levels of life expectancy for women and men, and indeed a fairly strong positive tilt towards women, which is as the case is in all developed countries and ---- given the greater biological vulnerability of the male of the species as compared to the female ---- is what it should be in all relatively gender neutral societies. Even those health indicators that do not enter directly into the GDI calculations, such as maternal mortality rates for instance, are pretty good in Kerala, the estimates being significantly lower than those in many other Indian states. It is little wonder that experts have cited the instance of Kerala as one that can and should be emulated as a case that ensures high levels of gender development and consequently a high status for women.
Buy Status Of Women In India from Flipkart.com
The ‘enigma’
Although initially investigations into the Kerala case was not part of the project design, somewhere during the first phase of the Gender Network, a number of contradictory signals from the state made it imperative that one looked into the Kerala story in some detail. Despite the obvious achievements of the state in terms of the standard indicators of gender development, a little exploration outside these indicators brought up more questions than could be answered. One discovered that Kerala has one of the highest rates of recorded crimes against women, including among the highest incidence of domestic violence. Even if one allowed for considerable reporting bias, the figures were far too high for comfort in a
state that boasts of a high status for women. There is growing evidence of female foeticide in Kerala, which suggests that, like in many other places in India, female babies are less valued than their male counterparts in the Malayalee society.Buy Status Of Women In Islam from Flipkart.com. And if anything, things have been getting worse over the years. Kerala has been one state where historically, sex ratios have not been adverse against women. But things are changing. Infant sex ratio in every single district in Kerala had declined between the Census years 1981 and 1991, something that one discovered in the course of mapping age-wise sex ratios across all districts of India in the early stages of GN research. It is this unexpected discovery that had initially set the alarm bells ringing. Although the trend has been halted in some of the districts in the later decade, this was too disturbing a piece of evidence to set aside without further probing.Soon one became conscious of warning signals from other areas as well. In spite of high female literacy, as per the data provided by the quinquennial surveys carried out by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), the state also has among the lowest female labour force participation rates. Detailed interviews with women from varied socioeconomic backgrounds under different contexts revealed that contrary to popular belief, women do not enjoy the kind of ‘freedom’ that one would expect to go with high levels of human or gender development. The Gender Network research agenda slowly acquired a new
agenda item, namely unravelling the puzzle of the Kerala woman. We needed to understand why, and how, such high levels of standard (or ‘conventional’) gender development indicators could co-exist with these other signals of women’s powerlessness.
Buy Status Of Women In India from Flipkart.com
Economic and Political Weekly dated October 21, 2006 carried an article by J DEVIKA and MINI SUKUMAR that states
"These are times in which the marginality of women to public life in Kerala is increasingly coming under critical scrutiny. The issue, it appears, is not really the invisibility of women in public arenas. Indeed, the vast expansion of the media
since the early 1990s has assured that the “sites of enunciation” have increased phenomenally as far as gender issues are concerned: we have now, an ever-increasing number of talk shows, discussions and special slots for gender issues on TV. The attention that the mainstream media pays to such issues is also not negligible. In
the discourse of development, a dominant presence in the Malayalee cultural sphere since the mid-20th century, “women” have always been a significant presence, especially as a way to represent Kerala as the utopia of social development. This continues with telling variations in the present era of “gender mainstreaming”. However,we question glib readings that interpret the greater visibility of
women as evidence for the widening of their access to the public. The decade of the 1990s also saw the firming of the feminist presence in the arena of politics in Kerala. The implementation of the 33 per cent reservation of seats for women in local bodies has brought a considerable number of women into these bodies. “Gender
mainstreaming” has also proceeded apace, and now “gender training” is an eminently familiar, technical and mostly nonthreatening term. The Kerala government’s “women-oriented poverty mission” has been lauded as a successful innovation in
women’s empowerment. Yet, the extent to which these initiatives have been successful in politicising women is still doubtful; the possibilities they offer, too, appear mixed. It is also important to remember that the government’s efforts to mainstream gender took place precisely in a period of accentuated confrontation between the feminist movement in Kerala and almost all sections of entrenched political society, which was certainly a major way in which feminists grabbed the attention of the mainstream media. In these struggles, the feminist movement relied heavily upon the judiciary and the media, which did bring certain gains.However,
the fatal flaws in this strategy were all too evident in the wake of adverse legal judgments, particularly, the recent high court judgment in the infamous Suryanelli serial rape case. Indeed, this reminds us that the media visibility women have gained, and the new possibilities opened up by gender mainstreaming cannot in
any way replace feminist activism or intellectual work in the public. Yet the 1990s and after have also opened up unmistakable possibilities. The twists and turns of feminist politics in this period have alerted us to the need for greater reflection on the challenges of building genuinely pluralist politics.2 These critical insights
offer hope for complex and incisive forms of feminist social critique and activism. Secondly, the 1990s and after have also seen a greater number of Malayalee women migrating to universities and research institutions in the national metropolises
and abroad, attaining higher levels of competence in the social sciences and humanities. Today, the possibility of extending the scope, sophistication and sensitivity of feminist social critique in Kerala seems to have grown in unprecedented ways. Within Kerala’s own university system, critical spaces – such as in the women’s studies units and centres – are being slowly cleared.3 This reflects in the relative rise of scholarly writings by women and in the number of active women participants in public debates in the 1990s and after. Thirdly, though women are still in the lower rungs of the media in Kerala, more women now work in the media than ever before. Lastly, though an explicitly feminist position in literary writing – ‘pennezhuthu’ in Malayalam – has faced considerable hostile criticism both from masculinist critics and women authors to whom it appeared to be yet another form of labelling or ghettoisation, women writers continue to produce powerful critiques of everyday patriarchy in Kerala......"
In a Paper titled Discrimination against Women in Kerala: Engaging Indicators and Processes of Well Being: Dr. Praveena Kodoth & Dr.Mridul Eapen says
"Admittedly, in order to engage with gender based discrimination it is necessary to go beyond the conventional indicators of well being – education, health and employment – to hitherto less examined sites such as mental health, crime against women, political participation or property rights (Sonpar and Kapur 2001, Mukhopadyay and Sudarshan ed. 2003). It is equally imperative however to re-engage the conventional indicators by raising new questions about them, both separately about each indicator and about the ways they combine to reflect extant gendered priorities. This is particularly relevant in the context of Kerala, known for reasonably impressive levels of human development, conventionally measured, across genders. Indeed GDI estimated at the regional level by several scholars’ places Kerala at the top. In respect of GEM too, which attempts to measure empowerment or autonomy in terms of the extent to which women are able to use their basic capabilities to acquire decision making powers, both economically and politically, Kerala is at or near the top (Mehta 1996, EPW 1996). Yet it is significant that on more direct measures of autonomy, including household decision-making, mobility and access to/control over money, Kerala trailed Gujarat, which had much lower levels of literacy (Visaria 1994, Rajan et al 1994). Indeed, the second National Family Health Survey, 1998-99, which incorporated similar measures of autonomy for ever-married women for the first time for 25 states, also revealed that Kerala trailed Gujarat and a number of other states (including Tamil Nadu, Goa and the North-eastern states) (Table 1). Over time, findings of this nature brought into question the much glorified, straightforward relation between literacy and women's autonomy. In this light, the need to locate women's educational attainment and access to other resources within the extant patriarchal social structures, specifically the family, was emphatically advocated (Jeffrey and Basu 1994, Heward and Bunwaree 1999).
Kerala has been considered relatively free from the conventional inhibitions against women’s education and employment, or women owning property. This has been associated with matrilineal forms of family, which placed fewer restraints against women's inheritance rights on the one hand and early twentieth century social reforms which widened access to education across genders on the other. However social and legal reforms were instrumental in sanctioning a new form of marriage, grounded in modern patriarchal relations. An important part of this process was the abolition of matriliny and strengthening of patriarchy among patrilineal social groups. Today this is reflected in a generalized social commitment to women’s domesticity in the state. For women its implications are evident in their poor occupational profile despite impressive levels of education, decline in property rights and the rise in dowry and other crimes against women.
At the level of an index, high scores on education and health among 15 states of India (ranking Kerala first) have masked women's poor employment profile. The state ranked 10 or 15 according to different measures of income shares based on gender work participation rates and wage rates (Seeta Prabhu et al 1996). High rates of literacy and impressive levels of female education did not translate into rapid growth of paid employment for women nor into upward occupational mobility. On the other hand the state was witnessing downtrends in women’s property rights, growing levels of gender based violence, particularly domestic violence, and rapid growth and spread of dowry and related crime even while the levels of education continued to rise. We argue that in fact the non conventional indicators are closely related to the conventional: (a) Women’s exposure to education, extremely high levels of female unemployment and tremendous emphasis on women to be married contribute to increased family tension and domestic conflict. This has been observed particularly in situations when educated women marry less educated men with good jobs, which are on the increase in Kerala (Rajan et al 1994). The most common cause of psychological stress among women who are educated is the lack of employment and the roles they are expected to assume after marriage (Halliburton, 1998). Are these simply an indication that patriarchal codes are being resisted? There are definitive signs that women are less willing or less able to comply with male expectations -- disobedience being a frequently cited reason for wife beating. At the social level, the emphasis on getting girls married and the widespread resort to dowry indicate a strengthening of patriarchal norms. b) Low participation in paid employment and decline in inheritance rights restricts access to earned and inherited resources thereby reducing women’s ability to own and control property. Women’s lack of control over property is associated with dowry-related crime and domestic violence against women...."
"Kerala, a state of thirty odd million people in the southern tip of India, has been hailed as the epitome of women’s development in a country that does not fare too well in terms of UNDP’s gender development indicator.
Buy Nayar Women Today: Disintegration Of Matrilineal System And The Status Of Nayar Women In Kerala from Flipkart.com
2 Unlike
Click to read our updates on Kerala PSC possible questions
many other states in this country of billion plus people, literacy levels are high among women as well as men in Kerala, and the differences between the two are relatively low, thereby contributing to a high level of recorded GDI in the state. Health indicators are equally impressive, with high levels of life expectancy for women and men, and indeed a fairly strong positive tilt towards women, which is as the case is in all developed countries and ---- given the greater biological vulnerability of the male of the species as compared to the female ---- is what it should be in all relatively gender neutral societies. Even those health indicators that do not enter directly into the GDI calculations, such as maternal mortality rates for instance, are pretty good in Kerala, the estimates being significantly lower than those in many other Indian states. It is little wonder that experts have cited the instance of Kerala as one that can and should be emulated as a case that ensures high levels of gender development and consequently a high status for women.
The ‘enigma’
Although initially investigations into the Kerala case was not part of the project design, somewhere during the first phase of the Gender Network, a number of contradictory signals from the state made it imperative that one looked into the Kerala story in some detail. Despite the obvious achievements of the state in terms of the standard indicators of gender development, a little exploration outside these indicators brought up more questions than could be answered. One discovered that Kerala has one of the highest rates of recorded crimes against women, including among the highest incidence of domestic violence. Even if one allowed for considerable reporting bias, the figures were far too high for comfort in a
state that boasts of a high status for women. There is growing evidence of female foeticide in Kerala, which suggests that, like in many other places in India, female babies are less valued than their male counterparts in the Malayalee society.Buy Status Of Women In Islam from Flipkart.com. And if anything, things have been getting worse over the years. Kerala has been one state where historically, sex ratios have not been adverse against women. But things are changing. Infant sex ratio in every single district in Kerala had declined between the Census years 1981 and 1991, something that one discovered in the course of mapping age-wise sex ratios across all districts of India in the early stages of GN research. It is this unexpected discovery that had initially set the alarm bells ringing. Although the trend has been halted in some of the districts in the later decade, this was too disturbing a piece of evidence to set aside without further probing.Soon one became conscious of warning signals from other areas as well. In spite of high female literacy, as per the data provided by the quinquennial surveys carried out by the National Sample Survey Organization (NSSO), the state also has among the lowest female labour force participation rates. Detailed interviews with women from varied socioeconomic backgrounds under different contexts revealed that contrary to popular belief, women do not enjoy the kind of ‘freedom’ that one would expect to go with high levels of human or gender development. The Gender Network research agenda slowly acquired a new
agenda item, namely unravelling the puzzle of the Kerala woman. We needed to understand why, and how, such high levels of standard (or ‘conventional’) gender development indicators could co-exist with these other signals of women’s powerlessness.
Buy Status Of Women In India from Flipkart.com
Economic and Political Weekly dated October 21, 2006 carried an article by J DEVIKA and MINI SUKUMAR that states
"These are times in which the marginality of women to public life in Kerala is increasingly coming under critical scrutiny. The issue, it appears, is not really the invisibility of women in public arenas. Indeed, the vast expansion of the media
since the early 1990s has assured that the “sites of enunciation” have increased phenomenally as far as gender issues are concerned: we have now, an ever-increasing number of talk shows, discussions and special slots for gender issues on TV. The attention that the mainstream media pays to such issues is also not negligible. In
the discourse of development, a dominant presence in the Malayalee cultural sphere since the mid-20th century, “women” have always been a significant presence, especially as a way to represent Kerala as the utopia of social development. This continues with telling variations in the present era of “gender mainstreaming”. However,we question glib readings that interpret the greater visibility of
women as evidence for the widening of their access to the public. The decade of the 1990s also saw the firming of the feminist presence in the arena of politics in Kerala. The implementation of the 33 per cent reservation of seats for women in local bodies has brought a considerable number of women into these bodies. “Gender
mainstreaming” has also proceeded apace, and now “gender training” is an eminently familiar, technical and mostly nonthreatening term. The Kerala government’s “women-oriented poverty mission” has been lauded as a successful innovation in
women’s empowerment. Yet, the extent to which these initiatives have been successful in politicising women is still doubtful; the possibilities they offer, too, appear mixed. It is also important to remember that the government’s efforts to mainstream gender took place precisely in a period of accentuated confrontation between the feminist movement in Kerala and almost all sections of entrenched political society, which was certainly a major way in which feminists grabbed the attention of the mainstream media. In these struggles, the feminist movement relied heavily upon the judiciary and the media, which did bring certain gains.However,
the fatal flaws in this strategy were all too evident in the wake of adverse legal judgments, particularly, the recent high court judgment in the infamous Suryanelli serial rape case. Indeed, this reminds us that the media visibility women have gained, and the new possibilities opened up by gender mainstreaming cannot in
any way replace feminist activism or intellectual work in the public. Yet the 1990s and after have also opened up unmistakable possibilities. The twists and turns of feminist politics in this period have alerted us to the need for greater reflection on the challenges of building genuinely pluralist politics.2 These critical insights
offer hope for complex and incisive forms of feminist social critique and activism. Secondly, the 1990s and after have also seen a greater number of Malayalee women migrating to universities and research institutions in the national metropolises
and abroad, attaining higher levels of competence in the social sciences and humanities. Today, the possibility of extending the scope, sophistication and sensitivity of feminist social critique in Kerala seems to have grown in unprecedented ways. Within Kerala’s own university system, critical spaces – such as in the women’s studies units and centres – are being slowly cleared.3 This reflects in the relative rise of scholarly writings by women and in the number of active women participants in public debates in the 1990s and after. Thirdly, though women are still in the lower rungs of the media in Kerala, more women now work in the media than ever before. Lastly, though an explicitly feminist position in literary writing – ‘pennezhuthu’ in Malayalam – has faced considerable hostile criticism both from masculinist critics and women authors to whom it appeared to be yet another form of labelling or ghettoisation, women writers continue to produce powerful critiques of everyday patriarchy in Kerala......"
In a Paper titled Discrimination against Women in Kerala: Engaging Indicators and Processes of Well Being: Dr. Praveena Kodoth & Dr.Mridul Eapen says
"Admittedly, in order to engage with gender based discrimination it is necessary to go beyond the conventional indicators of well being – education, health and employment – to hitherto less examined sites such as mental health, crime against women, political participation or property rights (Sonpar and Kapur 2001, Mukhopadyay and Sudarshan ed. 2003). It is equally imperative however to re-engage the conventional indicators by raising new questions about them, both separately about each indicator and about the ways they combine to reflect extant gendered priorities. This is particularly relevant in the context of Kerala, known for reasonably impressive levels of human development, conventionally measured, across genders. Indeed GDI estimated at the regional level by several scholars’ places Kerala at the top. In respect of GEM too, which attempts to measure empowerment or autonomy in terms of the extent to which women are able to use their basic capabilities to acquire decision making powers, both economically and politically, Kerala is at or near the top (Mehta 1996, EPW 1996). Yet it is significant that on more direct measures of autonomy, including household decision-making, mobility and access to/control over money, Kerala trailed Gujarat, which had much lower levels of literacy (Visaria 1994, Rajan et al 1994). Indeed, the second National Family Health Survey, 1998-99, which incorporated similar measures of autonomy for ever-married women for the first time for 25 states, also revealed that Kerala trailed Gujarat and a number of other states (including Tamil Nadu, Goa and the North-eastern states) (Table 1). Over time, findings of this nature brought into question the much glorified, straightforward relation between literacy and women's autonomy. In this light, the need to locate women's educational attainment and access to other resources within the extant patriarchal social structures, specifically the family, was emphatically advocated (Jeffrey and Basu 1994, Heward and Bunwaree 1999).
Kerala has been considered relatively free from the conventional inhibitions against women’s education and employment, or women owning property. This has been associated with matrilineal forms of family, which placed fewer restraints against women's inheritance rights on the one hand and early twentieth century social reforms which widened access to education across genders on the other. However social and legal reforms were instrumental in sanctioning a new form of marriage, grounded in modern patriarchal relations. An important part of this process was the abolition of matriliny and strengthening of patriarchy among patrilineal social groups. Today this is reflected in a generalized social commitment to women’s domesticity in the state. For women its implications are evident in their poor occupational profile despite impressive levels of education, decline in property rights and the rise in dowry and other crimes against women.
At the level of an index, high scores on education and health among 15 states of India (ranking Kerala first) have masked women's poor employment profile. The state ranked 10 or 15 according to different measures of income shares based on gender work participation rates and wage rates (Seeta Prabhu et al 1996). High rates of literacy and impressive levels of female education did not translate into rapid growth of paid employment for women nor into upward occupational mobility. On the other hand the state was witnessing downtrends in women’s property rights, growing levels of gender based violence, particularly domestic violence, and rapid growth and spread of dowry and related crime even while the levels of education continued to rise. We argue that in fact the non conventional indicators are closely related to the conventional: (a) Women’s exposure to education, extremely high levels of female unemployment and tremendous emphasis on women to be married contribute to increased family tension and domestic conflict. This has been observed particularly in situations when educated women marry less educated men with good jobs, which are on the increase in Kerala (Rajan et al 1994). The most common cause of psychological stress among women who are educated is the lack of employment and the roles they are expected to assume after marriage (Halliburton, 1998). Are these simply an indication that patriarchal codes are being resisted? There are definitive signs that women are less willing or less able to comply with male expectations -- disobedience being a frequently cited reason for wife beating. At the social level, the emphasis on getting girls married and the widespread resort to dowry indicate a strengthening of patriarchal norms. b) Low participation in paid employment and decline in inheritance rights restricts access to earned and inherited resources thereby reducing women’s ability to own and control property. Women’s lack of control over property is associated with dowry-related crime and domestic violence against women...."
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