The trouble with young women - IWRAW Asia Pacific

IWRAW Asia Pacific has been a consortium member of the Women Gaining Ground (WGG) project in partnership with CREA and Akili Dada since 2021. WGG is being implemented in collaboration with 16 in-country partners (in Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda), focusing on addressing gender-based violence (GBV) and increasing the leadership of young women and women with disabilities.

Kalpana’s story marks the third installment of WGG’s monthly blog series, edited by Kavitha Devadas, WGG project lead, to share our collective learnings and reflections with the larger feminist and disability movement.

Kalpana Khare, founder of Gramonnati Sansthan, has been working on women’s rights and community development for over three decades in the Bundelkhand region of Uttar Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh is the most populated state in India, and lags behind in some social indicators while often topping the list of states with the highest number of crimes against women, according to the National Crime Records Bureau. The state has been in the news recently for passing controversial anti-conversion laws that are considered by civil society organisations to restrict interreligious relationships and marriages. This comes at a time when anxieties around women trespassing caste lines, or religious and social mores, continue to escalate in ways that have become a matter of public outrage and concern.

As she navigates working with young women in the Women Gaining Ground project, she reflects on the generational change she has experienced in her work in this region and why the mobile phone today has simultaneously become an instrument of many possibilities and freedom for young women but also terror for families.

I have been working on women’s rights for 30 years in Mahoba district of Uttar Pradesh. Mahoba is one of the most socially and economically backward parts of not only Uttar Pradesh but also the country. While there are diverse communities and castes, women continue to be in purdah or ghoonghat¹. We started working on health, but gradually started to work on women’s rights, including addressing violence at home.

When I started work in 1990, people had more time, even if it required a lot of cajoling from our side. It was hard to collectivise women, but when they got together, they were determined. I would observe that when women came to meetings, they would just listen. They were aware of all the issues we spoke about but often felt that this was their fate; nothing could be done about it. What you see in movies was very much in real life – they would say things like, “My husband beats me, but he also loves me, so how could I say anything against him?” Slowly it became acceptable for women to leave their homes and work as ASHA workers,² and Anganwadi³ workers. There were a lot of government schemes as there were NGOs working for women’s health and literacy. Some of the community mobilisation work was considered prestigious because these women were working for the government and brought home some money as well.

Yet it did not stop the taunts when I went to different panchayats⁴ for work. A man once said to me, “Aurat ghar ki Lakshmi hai, hum road pe nahin ghoomate hai” (“A woman is the goddess of her house, we don’t let her roam the roads”). When one man would speak up, other men would join in the taunts.

Kalpana Khare addressing a state-level gathering with WGG stakeholders in Lucknow, Uttar Pradesh

Things changed with time and with television and phones. Your choices in life as a woman were circumscribed by the social structures in your village. Even if you could study, it would be on the grades that were available in the school – whether it was primary school, or higher education. It was unheard of in my times for women to go outside for higher education, much less a job.

We have now started working with young girls and women. Nobody was speaking about young women’s participation or leadership thirty years ago. They were not considered a unique category with specific needs. There were a lot of upper-caste, rich women who would come to villages and encourage women to speak about violence at home, to finish their schooling, to take care of their health. But young women, especially girls, were not mentioned separately unless it was to stop early marriages. It took me some time to understand why young girls and young women need to be considered separately.

Today people have access to a lot of information because they have access to mobile phones. Everyone wants to hold this mobile phone but is terrified of it at the same time. Nothing is more terrifying to some of the families than young women with mobile phones. The young women today want to go outside, want to talk to boys, they are specific about what they are looking for when it comes to relationships and marriages or leaving their villages for better lives in bigger towns or villages. The mobile allowed them to travel outside, especially. Despite all the changes, mobility outside of their houses continues to be a challenge. Privacy is also something many young women do not have.

Our experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic showed that men would be at home as much as women and girls. Many of these men – fathers, brothers, even cousins – would take note of women and girls spending time on the phone. For them, it meant trouble. I don’t think they ever conceived of phones as being informational or recreational, as a way into the world through job vacancies, online classes, coaching. It was a different matter that not many of these girls even owned the phones. They would borrow them for some time from their brothers or parents.

Our WGG work is spread across 15 panchayats, where on a monthly basis groups of young women who are between 18 and 25 gather together to talk about issues that matter to them. In the last general elections of India of 2024, many of these young women voted for the first time. Before this they were not even included in the panchayat register. If there is no proof you existed in government records, who will care about your rights? But change is slow but sure. As more women began to finish schooling and get employment opportunities, families saw the value in women being in the public space. It was easier to bring girls and young women – they would be keen to attend these meetings and would often be quick to finish household chores. However, the anxieties about ‘new troubles’ brought on by the ambition of young women in a fast-changing world continued to overshadow the parental permissions.

Girls and young women gather for a WGG monthly meeting

As part of these WGG monthly gatherings, groups of young women sitting together is even more worrying than one young woman left alone. Village folks would initially ask, what are they giggling about so much? For many people, women and especially young girls should not be idle – if you have free time, you should be working. But conversations among young women are not always about the big things. They are also about being youthful and joyful. There is a lot of gossip, teasing, and laughing. They may have seen a movie, a new fashion trend on social media, a boy at their coaching centre and so on and so forth. During the pandemic, these young women would yearn for private moments and spaces to just talk to their friends.

Many of these young girls in our WGG programme negotiate with their families to attend training sessions in other locations. This is what some people are afraid of – with the taste of even limited freedom comes the desire to see and experience new things and dream of new lives. Our young women are moving from negotiating everyday small allowances to a life lived with more autonomy and agency.

Originally narrated in Hindi, and translated into English.

Footnotes

1
Head covering worn by women to cover their heads and sometimes their faces. While mostly older or married women practise this, it is not uncommon to see young women also cover their heads in the presence of men or elders.
2
ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activists) are trained community health workers selected from village residents.
3
Anganwadi centres are rural childcare centres in India. They form an integral part of the rural healthcare and childcare systems in the country.
4
Politically elected village councils in India, forming part of the rural governance system.