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: Therefore, on the basis of her analysis the entire category called `women’ or the `Other’ is marginalized because of structural and systemic discrimination prevalent in the society. In ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’, Wollstonecraft3 writes against a conception of women and femininity as defined primarily by the ability to arouse male sexual desire. She elucidates that this conceptualization, “deprive us of souls and insinuate that we are beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the sense of man…..” She further argued, “They (women) may be convenient slaves, but slavery will have its constant effect, degrading the master and the abject dependent”. Similarly, in India, Tarabai Shinde in 19th century in her famous published work Stri Purush Tulna explained that women everywhere are oppressed4. Therefore, historically, it may be said that women are oppressed and marginalized in almost every society and more specifically in patriarchal society like India women’s marginalized is being continued till today. 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.