The Hindu : 'Literacy does not improve status of women'

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Sunday, Jan 05, 2003

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'Literacy does not improve status of women'

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI JAN. 4. It was an attempt to examine the facts behind the staggering figure of 13,000 dowry-related deaths recorded in the years 1998-99 in India.

The second day today of the four-day international conference on "Dowry, bride-burning and son preference" at the International Youth Centre on Teen Murti Marg in the Chanakyapuri area here looked at the issue of dowry in the more "literate'' States and found that education leading to better status of women might work as a theory but doesn't translate into practice.

Looking at the issue of dowry in the country's most literate State, Kerala, Anna Lindberg of the University of Pennsylvania, said: "Kerala has a reputation of being a place where the status of women is higher than in other Indian States. It is said that son-preference and dowry-related deaths are absent. During the last 50 years, however, dowry has spread to almost all groups in Kerala — including the lowest castes. Among these, women often work in agriculture, coir or cashew nut factories to provide for their children and themselves.

The spread of dowry has not only occasioned them to prefer sons over daughters, but it has also promulgated a process of effeminisation among these women.''

Highlighting the same point, Marion den Uyl of the Free University at Amsterdam, stated: "The content of education is not to make critical choices. It has only one goal: to be dutiful and to be married. It is about repetition and not to think.

Education doesn't allow the women to think that the anything is possible in the world. Though the communist movement in Kerala has had a liberal labour movement, it has a conservative social movement.''

On a basis of a village study conducted at Salem in Tamil Nadu, Sharada Srinivasan of the Institute of Social Studies at The Hague, argued that the dramatic changes in dowry practices — in the nature of dowries given and demanded as well as in its actual rise — have occurred due to new-found riches on the one hand and mounting economic insecurity on the other.

``Economic vulnerability has led to an intensification of son preference, worsening women's right to inherit or own property and to a growing dependence on dowries as the main vehicle to security.''

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