TO STUDY THE VARIOUS COMPONENTS OF WOMEN’S EMPOWERMENT

A woman is as important as a man. From ancient times to the present, woman’s labour and efforts, often unnoticed and always uncalculated, have contributed substantially to the wellbeing of society. A woman is called the first guru of a child. A child is nurtured physically emotionally and spirituality by the mother. Therefore the mother is the key to the quality of the next generation .if the mother is aware of her value, if she is valued and respected by the family and society, if she enjoys her rights and privileges as a mother, wife and daughter, then these elements are transmitted to both her daughter and her sons. If the wife is aware of being an equal partner with equal rights to the wealth and status of her husband, she can contribute her wisdom, her aesthetic sense, her love and spiritual beauty to the marriage and enhance the quality of life of the extended family. if the girl child is received at birth the happiness and love that is the fundamental right Of a newborn, she is a light and a source of joy and contentment in her parent’s home. if she enjoys the level of education that tones her intellect to its optimum potential, she can shine in all the social roles she plays .if a widow enjoys the undiminished prestige, love and support of her family and community, she can retain a sense of dignity to the end of her days and serve through the wisdom of her experience. Women in India are generally viewed as physically weak, morally unreliable, economically a burden and intellectually incompetent .males are taught to assume a dominant position and woman to assume a position of subservience. An empowered woman is proud of her and feels good about the fact that she is a woman .the prevailing cultural attitude, which many women absorb, is to feel ashamed and socialized to believe that she is not physically , emotionally or intellectually capable of doing many rights. She is free to make informed decisions and exercise those rights .if a woman wants to stay at home ,work outside ,or remain single she should be free to make those choices. An empowered woman is conscious of gender biases hidden within language, attitudes and practices. She identifies them and responds intelligently, that is, she demonstrates her ability to make choices based on understanding. The most conspicuous feature of the term empowerment is that it contains the word 'power'. It may be broadly defined as control over material assets, intellectual resources and ideology. The process of challenging existing power relations and of gaining great control over the sources of power may be termed as empowerment. Women constitute more than 50% of the population, undertake most of the work (two thirds) but only receive one tenth of the total income rather than men. The working hours of women are longer than that of men, often 12-16 hours per day. In addition to their domestic responsibilities in child care, women have to be responsible for housework, such as fetching firewood, water and cooking and even hard work as ploughing and raking, planting, transplanting and harvesting. Women have to suffer from continuing under nutrition and two thirds of them are anemic. Rural women lack sex education and have poor health due to frequent pregnancies. The illiterate women especially lack of information on balanced diet, family planning, house cleaning and other information to improve their health and the quality of life. They have lower status and low paid occupations, lower economic positions so they are less conscious and lack self-confidence. They have a few books and a little time to read so they can not appreciate the benefits of reading and have no motivation for reading. The term "empowerment" has become one of the most widely used development terms. Women's groups, non-governmental development organizations, activists, politicians, governments and international agencies refer to empowerment as one of their goals. Yet it is one of the least understood in terms of how it is to be measured or observed. It is used precisely because this word has now been one of the fashionable concepts to include in policies/ programmes/projects that there is a need to clarify and come up with tentative definitions. Empowerment in its simplest form means the manifestation of redistribution of power that challenges patriarchal ideology and the male dominance (Chandra, 1997). It is both a process and the result of the process. Empowerment represents a means for accomplishing community development tasks and can be conceptualized as involving two key elements: giving community members the authority to make decisions and choices and facilitating the development of the knowledge and resources necessary to exercise these choices (Zippy,1995).Robert Adams (1990) defines empowerment as the process by which individuals, groups and or communities become able to take control of their circumstances and achieve their own goals, thereby being able to work towards maximizing the quality of their lives .The term empowerment refers to a range of activities from individual self assertion to collective resistance, protest and mobilization that challenges basic power relations ( Kumud Sharma ,1991-'92).For individuals and groups where class, caste, ethnicity and gender determine their access to resources and power, their empowerment begins when they not only recognize the systematic forces that oppress them, but also act to change existing power relationships. Empowerment commonly means 'becoming powerful: self help may thus be viewed as one form of empowerment. Empowerment may be used to mean simply "enablement" (Robert Adams, 1990).