Demystifying the Feminine Self

The present paper entitled “Demystifying the feminine self.” attempts to redefine women empowerment by analyzing issues like gender disparity, violence against women, role of NGO?s in empowering women and education as central to the empowerment process. Women empowerment is looked at as a process of which women gain greater control over material assets and intellectual resources, thereby challenging the ideology of patriarchy and gender based discrimination against women in all institutions and structures of society. A reference is made to the feminist movement and feminist critics like Kate Millet, Elaine Showalter and Tillie Olsen who examines the experiences of women from all races and cultures and demands that women?s voices must be heard. The paper also dwells on how feminist critics expose patriarchal premises and re-evaluate literature. An attempt has been made to highlight contemporary concerns of women empowerment where education is central to the process of empowerment which seeks to build a critical consciousness, analytical thinking and the knowledge and skills to act for change. Education can bring about a qualitative change in the life of a woman and empowers her in a real sense by making her economically self-reliant and socially aware of her own dignified existence. The whole process of women empowerment is vested in the cycle of power and control. Men?s tyrannical hegemony is deep rooted in our society and the pervasive concept of ?power? in our society is male dominance. The power mechanism which governs every relation between men and women is established as the root cause of all the problems associated with women. Therefore, measures to deconstruct this notion of power are bought like sensitizing men in our patriarchal society and by creating a separate ?time and space? for women to collectively and critically re-examining their lives. The role of civil society in empowering women is discussed as it is the social structure that compels women to subordination, subservience and dependence on men and they are trapped in the net of relationships. A reference is also made to the protection of women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 which recognizes domestic violence as a punishable offence and is discussed as an important impediment in the empowerment process, highlighting the issues of silent victims. The liberated selfhood of the emerging women of today is discussed with an objective to promote a cultural shift.