LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 24:2 February 2024
ISSN 1930-2940

Editors:
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         T. Deivasigamani, Ph.D.
         Pammi Pavan Kumar, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.

Managing Editor & Publisher: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.

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The Designing of Gender: Women and Human Evolution

Dr. S. Sridevi

Abstract

This paper aims at tracing the way the role of women has been designed by society in societies, and how it has begun to change with human evolution. Mary Wollstonecraft has asked very significant questions about women’s lack of freedom in society and has demanded that she is given a life with equal opportunities. Art has defined beauty as something that gives pleasure to the viewer, and it is the woman who possesses this symmetry and beauty till a particular age, mainstream socio-political thought believes so. Science and technology’s intervention with such perceptions, market forces, capitalistic globalization are the new areas that might bring in innovative changes in contemporary thinking, and women might not only be the only one who would be pleasing the viewer, but even men might join this process of pleasing - now as women are operating in politically powerful positions men might be required to please them - perhaps an effort to sustain the human race on earth, competing with the rest of the animals.

Keywords: gender assignment, place of women, human evolution.

Women have been considered a property of man for millennia, perhaps after man began living in groups. In human evolution, all human beings came to be considered to be equal, and hence by default, man came to be recognised as an equal to woman. Therefore, the way woman’s life has been designed, as a product to please and entertain man, is slowly transforming just like other such economic and political constructions like caste hierarchy and marginalisation.

Religions and their modus operandi have controlled the lives of human beings, and new styles of human functioning are recommended by intellectuals after the development of applied sciences. This paper aims at studying human thought at various levels to analyse the way society interpreted the role of women in civilization, and how the trend might change in future.

Periyar from Tamil Nadu was the earliest social reformer who questioned the enslavement of women in family system right from 1940s. Indian society applied the concept of karpu for only women, and men were indirectly permitted to practice polygamy. The woman had to be monogamous and the man is given the social permission to be free.

The religious codes and laws that expect a woman to put up with her husband in spite of him behaving like an animal in the name of karpu (a woman loyal to her husband and chaste always) have to change. The social situation in which a woman is forced to live with her husband without love for him should change. (Periyar 13)

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Dr. S. Sridevi
Professor of English and Principal
Chevalier T. Thomas Elizabeth College for Women
Chennai 600011, Tamil Nadu, India
sridevisaral@gmail.com
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