"We grow up being told that we can be anything, do anything. We get a good degree and get ourself into our chosen career. By our mid-20s we are on a six-figure salary, forging a path in a male dominated world. We own our own flat, our own car, we look great and we feel great, we sleep with men – experimenting physically and emotionally – before finding the right one. We hit 30. By 35 – because we can’t spare the time now – we will decide that we want babies. We’ll move to our downtown apartment, be a fabulous mother, while running a couple of businesses or heading a corporate. Oh, and we will write a novel. An autobiography. "

Whether it happens to you or not, the truth – that you are free to live your life this way – is telling. Sixty years back, your sisters asked for laws and rights to be on equal footing with men. Forty years back, they made tentative forays into the world of work with little help from husbands and a lot of support from mothers, sisters and sometimes mothers’-in- laws. Your “new feminist” sisters during ‘80s and ‘90s focused on dowry deaths, rapes and uniform Civil codes. In the new millennium, you have assimilated all the battles that liberated you to assert your personal choice.

Statistics show that young women are taking charge of sexual choices, including the freedom of delaying sex and to say “NO” and be “more like men” in terms of sexual experiences and multiple partners. A sex survey by a top notch consulting organization captures this attitudinal change. If in 1978, premarital sex was unacceptable to 75% unmarried women in the metros, in the new millennium one- quarter confess to regular sex, one-third read erotic literature and half go on dates. In 2003, over 50% asked for equal pleasure in bed, 42% knew their G-spots well and to 57% orgasms were important. By 2005, 69% wanted as much sex as men, 66% fantasised about different positions in bed and 42% thought nothing of having premarital sex. In a long march from the 70s, over 66% approved of extramarital sex in 2005.

But sexual liberation hasn’t arrived in a vacuum. Changes in personal lives have glanced off from changes in public lives. Careers are now blooming. In 1950, there were 14 women pursuing higher studies per 100 males in India. The ration now is 68:100 (Report by the Consultative Committee of Parliament, 2006). For every five men, there is one woman in an income generating activity in urban India. Women account for 25-30% of the workforce in the software sector. In Pharma, they comprise a fourth of the workforce. In IT-enabled services, the ratio stands at 1:1. The number in banks has gone up by over 40% since 2002. Of 2, 00,000 service sector vacancies filled via job portal naukri.com in 2005, seventy thousand were women; a quarter of three million resumes on monster.com belong to women.

But the battles are not over yet. In many ways, the options presented to women are really, new demands. Professionally, many operate as if they were men. At home, they do most of the housework. Does having it all mean doing it all? Not really. “I think it’s a very significant shift”, says Urvashi Butalia, publisher of Zubaan Books, which promotes women’s writing. “It testifies women’s desire to be able to interact on an equal footing both in public and private spheres”.

It is nearly sixty years since Simone De Beauvoir wrote that one is not born a woman, but becomes one. In that time, the nation has taught some of its women that they choose to become women however and whenever they want. 

We can each arrive at our own definition of what a woman is, even if that definition is purely personal.

Courtesy: IT-Volume XXXII 12/2007