Women empowerment refers to the process of increasing women’s power through unearthing of their inner strengths. It can be achieved through various ways such as education, literary awareness, entrepreneurship etc. Being an independent woman requires at first for a woman to be financially independent. One of the ways to become an independent woman is to initiate and operate an enterprise. Entrepreneurship has no age limits and no gender bounds. In this generation, we, the women – especially, the teenagers should discover their own skills and explore their personalities. With these powerful skills, we can achieve our goals and look towards a brighter future. The attitude that women should only engage in household chores is a wrong and biased mindset. We need to shed this outlook otherwise it can only debase women and prop up a male dominant society, which in turn would degrade our potential, patience, creativity and values as individuals. Nobody should discriminate anybody’s career or aspirations on the basis of gender. One of the most valuable resources in a society is human resource. Both men and women must share and explore their given resources to bring development in our society together. If women are made to live in a situation of dependence on men, then, a male dominated society will continue to persist and will result in the perpetual structural subjugation of women.
Meanwhile, a cliched challenge thrown to a man in our society is: “Are you eloping with a woman? Can you meet every need for hers?” Inquiries and statements like these presumes that men should take every risk and responsibility for caring and catering to the need of women, presuming also that women are incapable of taking care of themselves. However, in my opinion, women are not born to depend on others. Some parents may feel proud when their daughters marry an employed man. Rather than this, the approach should be to expect women to develop their own independent resources in order to raise children without having to depend of the charity of men. For such an attitude to internalise, the way the family looks at the female child in family decision making is important. Women should not be expected to abandon their professions because of marriage. They should be encouraged to further continue and upgrade their skills and the family should support them.
I would like to tell all peoples, especially all women to free their inner selves and let out their inner voices. Even today, we hear of many real stories of domestic violence, other atrocities faced by women in a married household, including the end of life sometimes; we see these happening in economically backward families. We must open our eyes and ears to these atrocities. That is why we must try to first be economically sound to empower ourselves, to be able to take our own life decisions. Since the government cannot provide us all jobs, we must get creative and help one another. We can choose a trade of our liking and focus our energies on becoming an entrepreneur and then we would become self-reliant and independent. This is how we can empower ourselves as women through entrepreneurship.
The voice of women empowerment should be used if they are confined in the room with four walls. Even though we live in a patriarchal society, we should not suppress our desires even while the patriarchal system lasts before it is finally and permanently put to rest. Lastly, women should take fruitful decisions and smartly too so that the family, the society and even the country can witness a well woven, holistically developed world.
While we are confined at our home in these painful times of COVID-19 rampage, these thoughts crossed my mind and I decided to write this piece and communicate to the society so that we all can begin the debate on this important issue and take our society towards a progressive direction beneficial to all of us, male and female.
The writer is an entrepreneur and owner of Bright Enterprises
