Women have played an indispensable role in India’s Military Nursing Service (MNS) for over a century. Despite their distinguished service to the nation, they have faced persistent discrimination, prejudice and the steady erosion of their rights. Drawing on parliamentary records, case law, academic commentary and other sources, this article comprehensively analyses the legal status, rights and plight of women MNS officers. It examines the complex legal framework governing the MNS and how the same has been interpreted over time to justify differential treatment. Key areas of discrimination, such as pay, promotions, entitlements, status and working conditions, are analysed in detail. The article highlights the remarkable resolve displayed by women MNS officers who have battled tirelessly through legal recourse to restore their rights and dignity. In conclusion, the article suggests comprehensive reform to give women officers equal status, pay and opportunities they deserve.
The article is based on a qualitative study of 60 women entrepreneurs belonging to the urban middle class in Kolkata, undertaken to explore how their demographic characteristics, social values and agency shape their entrepreneurship initiatives. It examines the relative importance of different factors behind the motivations and challenges of middle-class women engaged in business. The findings suggest that the educated middle-class women entrepreneurs are motivated predominantly by aspirations for self-actualisation, but their initiatives are impeded by institutional inadequacies. Although explicit gendered social barriers are relatively less in their case, there exists an undercurrent of gender stereotyping that exaggerates the institutional barriers. It is suggested that policy measures for entrepreneurial development of educated middle-class women should be distinctly different from those designed for low-skilled, poor women with lower levels of education.
The interaction of gender, poverty and disability has affected the experiences of women with disabilities living in rural municipalities of Nepal. This study examined how the intersecting effect of gender, disability and disaster impacted the basic healthcare needs of disabled women. We conducted seven key informant interviews, three focus group discussions, two workshop meetings with local stakeholders and nine in-depth interviews with women with disabilities in Palungtar Municipality and Marsyangdi Rural Municipality of Nepal, affected by natural calamities (floods, landslides and earthquakes), along with the COVID-19 pandemic. The study found that women with disabilities experienced double discrimination due to gender and disability, which contributed to increased vulnerability and reduced well-being, and that disasters exacerbated the situation. They experienced increased sexual and gender-based violence due to unsafe shelters where they lived during disasters. Providing disability-friendly services, reducing barriers to accessing services and developing competencies among vulnerable groups to empower them are recommended for resilience.
Although women with disabilities constitute a significant proportion of India’s population, their experiences remain marginalised. Notions of women with disabilities are riddled with gendered, ableist stereotypes. As Hindi films are an important reflection of popular perceptions of disability, we analysed six successful films that revolve around women with varied disabilities, which are relatively poorly understood in the country, to assess their portrayals of womanhood and disability. Our main interest was in the points in the films where the women are able to act as agentic selves. We wanted to know the ways in which women express agency as well as the enabling factors and opportunities that they utilise to pursue their objectives. A critical-feminist thematic analysis was used on portrayals to assess their potential to undermine or reinforce prevalent social notions. A comparison of the films showed diverse depictions of the women’s agentic selves, ranging from being fairly self-determined to having little control or choice.
The ‘Great Chastity Case’ of Keri Kolitani created a stir in 19th-century Indian civil society. It raised conflicting issues regarding women’s rights to inherit property and the conditions under which they could forfeit those rights. In the course of its journey from the lowest to the highest colonial courts, the case questioned the status of the customary laws of various indigenous communities that inhabited different regions of the country, Hindu religious laws and Western concepts of jurisprudence. The judgements of the colonial courts sought to balance customary practices, religious laws and the secular law of inheritance and forfeiture, which is significant in light of the fact that some of the orthodox opinions expressed at the time persist in civil society even today.
The article studies the division of household work before and during the complete lockdown period of the COVID-19 pandemic in India. It also examines the influence of individual and household characteristics on the division of work, exploring, in particular, the relationship between family composition and the pattern of sharing household responsibilities during the lockdown. Data was collected from 156 married employed women through an online survey. The analysis shows that, irrespective of the lockdown, the burden on women is higher. The lockdown merely intensified this burden as the services of the domestic help were restricted. The division of household responsibilities is relatively unfair for women in joint families or families with dependents, compared to nuclear families and families without dependents. Traditional gender roles seem to overpower all other factors, including the education and earning capacity of women, to ensure an unfair division of household work, negating the relative resources theory. This could have wide-reaching implications for gender equality and the well-being and productivity of women.
The collective identity formation of transgender people in Assam is a comparatively new process. Organising themselves with a regional gender identity, they are drawing from, and yet differentiating themselves from, the pan-Indian hijra (transgender) subculture. This article, which has evolved out of the author's ethnographic research, contributes to larger debates on the collective identity formation of transgender people and the influence of regional culture. The article also examines the politics of asserting this regional subcultural identity against the backdrop of the updating of the National Register of Citizens, from which many in the transgender community were delisted. It reflects on how Assamese artefacts are being used to regionalise pan-Indian hijra rituals and explores the extensive use of the Assamese language in addressing hijra kinship.
Through a study of five degree programmes, this article endeavours to argue that 'identity' has become crucial to defining women's studies as a teaching, degree-granting field in the Indian context today. It traces how the field's self-definitions have come to focus on its identity-based object of study, whether through the 'women's studies versus gender studies' debates or comparisons with fields like Dalit studies. Linking these developments in women's studies to the changing social composition of students in higher education, the article discusses how identity (focused on caste identity in the programmes under study) becomes the critical axis of academic debates in contemporary women's studies classrooms. This is illustrated through the intense contentions in these classrooms around the object of study, the location of feminist theories, the language of the curriculum and classroom, and their ties to the privilege and marginalisation of those located in women's studies. These debates, in turn, highlight the peculiar dilemmas faced by women's studies due to conflations of the ideas of epistemic and social justice.
