Title: From The Margins: Revisiting The Concept Of `Marginalized Women’ By Shalu Nigam
Headings: 
From The Margins: Revisiting The Concept Of `Marginalized Women’
By Shalu Nigam
03 September, 2014
Countercurrents.org
Relooking at the Term `Marginalized’
Women are `Marginalized’ in the World Dominated by Men
The Social Complexities that further Accentuate Inequalities
Inequalities that are Relegating Women to Margins
State’s Perception of Marginality
Marginality as a Space for Contestation, Resistance, Negotiation and Struggle
Conclusions
Comment (1)

Content: This may be observed from the analysis of facts, figures and the data available reflected in the Human Development Index, crime against women or otherwise available, on the basis of which it may be generalized that social and political structures constrain women’s choices and limit their ability to participate in decision making, thus socially exclude them at both micro and macro level. Omvedt5 noted that, “When political independence came to nations in Africa and Asia, the ruling elite became the managers of the system of surplus accumulation and attempted to utilise it for development in their own societies. The main mechanisms for surplus extraction were by this time prices (low prices both for crops grown by peasant producers and for natural resources) and increasing state claims to ownership of common property which had once been under the control of village communities”. She further explained that exploitation was masked by the ideology of development and industrialization and in the process poor, small and marginal farmers, peasants and women were marginalized. The Report on the Committee on the Status of Women in India6 in 1974, a document solely devoted the `question of women’ in independent India, observed that the `large masses’ of women were yet to realize their rights on the ground though the Constitution of India proclaimed when it guarantees the right to equality on the basis of sex. The report observed that the promise of gender equality remained on paper and failed to reach a large number of women. It further held that though many women contributed to the freedom movement but that notion quickly evaporated and in the independent India the `women’s question’ remains ignored7. The committee further noted, “All indicators of participation, attitudes and impact come up with the same result…though women do not numerically constitute a minority, they are beginning to acquire the features of minority community by the three recognized dimensions ….economic situation…social position and political power. If this trend is allowed to continue the large masses of women in India may well emerge as the only surviving minority continuously exposed to injustice”8. And this became a reality today where a large majority of women, are being denied the basic social, economic and political rights and those who got it are struggling to maintain their acquired positions.