New freedoms for young women in India

As more young women in India join the workforce and move out of their family’s homes, they are gaining an independence and confronting issues that their mothers could never have imagined. There was an interesting article about this topic recently in the International Herald Tribune.

Not long ago, an Indian woman, even a working Indian woman, would almost always have moved from her parents’ house to her husband’s. Perhaps her only freedom would be during college, when she might live on campus or take a room for a year or two at what is known here as the working women’s hostel.

That trajectory has begun to loosen as a surging economy creates new jobs, prompts young professionals to leave home and live on their own, and slowly, perhaps unwittingly, nudges a traditional society to accept new freedoms for women…

The changes are sharpest in the lives of women who have found a footing in the new economy and who are for the most part middle-class, college-educated professionals exploring jobs that did not exist a generation ago.

High-technology workers and fashion designers, aerobics instructors and radio DJs, these women in their 20s are living independently, far from their families. Many are deferring marriage for a year or two, maybe more, while they make money and live lives that most of their mothers could not have dreamed of…

“I think it’s a very significant shift,” said Urvashi Butalia, publisher of Zubaan Books, based in New Delhi, which promotes women’s writing. “It signals a kind of change and acceptability. It testifies to women’s desire and wish to be economically independent, to be able to interact in public space and be in the same world as men.” Equally important, she said, is the attitude adjustment among elders. “For families to accept that women will remain single, that they will live on their own, that they will work and defer marriage, is a very, very significant shift,” she said. “Even if it’s very small, it’s beginning to happen in a society where before, if you wanted to do that, you’d be out on a limb.”

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