Plight of the Oppressed

Woefully speaking, it’s not a tragedy of today but for many centuries, women have been subjected to inhumane treatment, suffering from a great deal of pain from those lurking in the guise of human beings. The cruelties and barbaric behaviour with the female gender dates back to ancient civilizations, and is still in progress unabated.

There is no denying that the human being is the best creature of God. However, women in the times of Babylon and ancient Greece, were treated like animals and were considered nothing more than the scum of the Earth. They were deprived of their due rights. It is very heart-wrenching that it was the law of land that if any husband would murder any person, his wife was sentenced to death rather him.

Women in the Roman civilization could not get more rights than those in the Greek. The Roman law deprived them of their civil rights, and their legal status was not acknowledged at all. In those times and even beyond, women were largely perceived as the prime cause of all evils, similar to the Greek view. When the Roman civilization reached its pinnacle, a man was given so much freedom that he could assassinate his wife and go scot-free. Further, nudity was common among them and women were used for prostitution. In addition, if any woman got married, she and her property was passed to her husband. She was not free to hold any public office, was not allowed to be a witness or to perform any other significant role in any legal capacity.

The life of a woman had zero importance in the Persian civilization, while man was held in high-esteem, due to his physical strength. That was because the Persian nation was basically a warrior, so a woman was given no importance, owing to her physical weakness.

In Indian civilization, women had a status equal to that of a born slave. She was literally a property owned by the man who could even lose her in gambling. She was recognized worse than the bad air, a symbol of death, the harbinger of hell, a venomous poison, a hazardous snake and fire, et-cetera. Hence, the law was introduced that a woman could do nothing of her own will. Besides, in Indian civilization, it was obligatory upon the woman to treat her husband like a god, because he was regarded as the representative of the Almighty. Regrettably, a wife was burnt alive with her husband’s corpse if he died before her.

The people of ancient China recognized woman as merely a fool and miserable creature, who had no right to anything, and as soon as she got married they called her ‘Fu' or 'obedient', since she had to obey her husband’s every demand, come hell or high water.

The adherents of Judaism, in the similar vein, paid no respect to women and held her solely responsible for evicting Adam from paradise. They believed the first thing that provoked the human being and ejected him from heaven was a woman.

Furthermore, the woman was supposed to be in the possession of her father before her marriage and he had the right to sell her before she was fully mature if he did not have enough money to look after and provide her a safe place to live. Unfortunately, she was not married but sold out: dowry was given by her father or the brother, then she had to become the property of the husband, being the absolute owner of her life.

The Christianity, in its early era, moved heaven and earth for the betterment of women and rewarded them with prizes so that they could be saved from being defamed. However, they could not be protected from the man’s atrocities. The priests called women the root cause of all evils and Christians considered better being unmarried than married with a woman. Saul said in this connection, “One who gets his daughter married, does a wonderful job, and one who does not get his daughter married, does a far better job”.

If the condition of women in the aforementioned civilizations is compared with those of the current age, there is not an iota of difference one can find. Women are still suffering from the same conditions their sisters and foremothers had to cope with in the distant past. Mothers are dislodged on behalf of wives, sisters are forced to wed against their will and brothers sell them for material gains, while wives are tortured physically and are divorced on petty issues.

It is very unfortunate that, despite being well-educated and aware of women rights enshrined in the Constitution, we are following in the footsteps of our ancestors who disregarded women because of illiteracy. We tend to utilise them to meet our personal and domestic needs but we don’t provide them with the love, kindness and care they need as human beings.

It is an undeniable fact that young girls, middle-aged women and even old women are raped every day. Women find it difficult to acquire education and are not permitted to do any job and those who do, get lower salaries than their male counterparts. We have reduced job opportunities for women both in private and government sectors and have reserved few seats for them in national and provincial assemblies. The Judiciary and other institutions are dominated by men, and those women who succeed in getting jobs are harassed by their male colleagues. Isn't it a rampant injustice with women?

Sexual and physical violence against women is spiking with each passing day. As per the WHO statistics, about one in three (35 percent) of women worldwide have experienced either sexual or physically intimate partner violence or non-partner sexual violence in their lifetime.

We will have to ponder over our evil deeds that we have left no stone unturned in demeaning and degrading women, whereas she has nourished us as a mother, loved us as a sister and served us selflessly as a devoted wife.