WOMEN OF INDIA.

Auckland Star, Volume LXV, Issue 68, 21 March 1934, Page 10

WOMEN OF INDIA.

FREEDOM OR BONDAGE?

The very last opportunity for the British Parliament and people to exercise any effective influence on the position of women in India will occur during the next few Months, says an English paper. . , The urgent need for a drastic change in their present position is clearly shown in the two volumes on the Census of India in 1931, which have just appeared. During the last ten years the population has increased by 10 per cent, but the men outnumber the women by 10,750,000, owing chiefly to <the deaths of' young girls and women in childbirth, and the greater mortality, especially among purdah women, from tuberculosis. Startling figures with regard to cliild-marriage show that the Child Marriage Restraint Act, passed m 1920, is, in practice, virtually a dead lcttci. The number of child wives under 15 in 1921 was 8,500,000, in 1931 12,250,000, a 44 per cent increase as compared with, the 10 per cent increase in population. Problem of Literacy. The history of literacy tells the same talc. Kor every 1000 persons over the age of five, 15(i males and 29 females alone arc literate, and among these women, out of every 100 who go to school only about ten stay long enough to become permanently literate. _ . The very meagre opportunities tor girls' education, the customs of Hinduism which prevent women from owning any property or widows from reniairiage, the terrible conditions under which, in the majority of cases, childbirth takes place owing to the dearth of well-trained women doctors and nudwives, the fact that since the Indiana themselves have been responsible for health and education, there has been an increasing disproportion in the sums expended on boys and girls, all point to the urgent duty of seeing that women should have a sufficient voting strength to compel the new Provincial Legislatures ami Federal Assembly to consider their needs. . Every Indian commission and conference appointed during the last ten years has stressed this point. Whilst the rapidly expanding numbers and strength of the Indian women's organisations, and their magnificent battle for better education and health conditions, for the abolition of such evils as childmarriage and the glaring inequalities in their rights of property and maniagc which 150 years of British rule have scarcely touched, strengthens theii picsent claims. Mothers in Bondage. Organised women in England and all over India will think the Government has betraved its trust, and handed over the mothers of the Indian race into bondage unless much more courageous proposals are made in the final diaft of the new Constitution to increase the proportion of women voters to at least one in five, and give them the weapon they need. The special qualification most acceptable to Indian women is that of literacy, proposed by the Lothian franchise Committee, "but omitted, except in the case of Madras, in the present Government proposals —both for the Provincial Councils and Federal Assembly. This would enfranchise many women already educated at home, but possessing no school certificate, and enable all women interested in politics and social reform to make themselves voters in a comparatively short time. The proposal to increase their numbers by making the wives of present property voters eligible is one method of meeting the difficulty that Hindu property is hold on behalf of the family by the men alone. But if personal application tor women alone is insisted upon—this will so greatly reduce their numbers that the ratio of women to men voters will probably remain about 1 to 20 as at present." and their political influence be negligible. It is to be hoped that the Government will not miss so great an opportunity of enlisting the support, rather than the antagonism, of all Indian women towards the new Constitution.