Powering Families Empower Women

Since time immemorial, we have been taught Mata, Pitha, Guru, Deivam. Placing the mother in front of everyone including God is because of her importance in shaping the family and in turn the whole nation. But what happens when some feel that the career is more important than family. Of course, every woman has a right to pursue a career of her own and make a mark in life but what happens when they conflict with one's family. The following is an excerpt from an article of Gurumurthy in the Indian Express. He beautifully brings out with statistics, the effect of women who place their career on a higher level than their family. Though, the topic is highly debatable, it is worth considering these statistics. Here it goes....

In the Russian Federation, 65 percent of the marriages end in divorce. The divorce-to-marriage rate in the Ukraine is 63 percent, Czech 61 percent, the UK 51 percent, the US 49 percent, and Germany 41 percent. Swedish women are the most ‘liberated’ and ‘empowered’ with half and more of Swedish parliamentarians and civil servants being women. Is it just a coincidence — or consequence — that 65 percent or more of Swedish women and men live together without marriage, any one with anyone for any length of time? In the end, over two-thirds of Swedish elders are bereft of family support. This has forced the Swedish government to pass a law to provide caretakers, at its cost, for assisting the aged who are orphaned.

Look at the USA, which many look towards. The traditional arrangement where men go to work and women look after the house has fallen from 53 percent of married couples in 1972 to 21 percent in 1998. The divorce rate in the US has doubled between 1960 and 1998. Don’t dismiss it as merely a cultural fall. It is economic as well. The state had to step in to fill the void in families. So the social security cost, that is the cost of caring for the aged and the infirm, unemployed and others, has skyrocketed. Many in the West are frightened of this time bomb ticking under their economies. Some of the best minds in the US fear that the emerging ‘Fatherless America’, as one writer put it, will bankrupt the country.

In contrast, the entire social security cost is privatised in India through the traditional family mechanism. But for such traditional families the Indian state would have gone broke long ago. Now the West is realising the criticality of women who put home above career. A study made in 2003, covering over 100,000 families in the UK and the US, found all this: wherever men and women have competed and claimed arithmetical equality, families broke up; the happiness of families and their overall economic status stood eroded; wherever women had the full support of husbands and had been mothers taking care of the family, happiness in the family was complete; separation forcing women to remarry or remain single caused a drastic reduction in their overall happiness.

A study made in 2003, covering over 100,000 families in the UK and the US, found all this: wherever men and women have competed and claimed arithmetical equality, families broke up; the happiness of families and their overall economic status stood eroded; wherever women had the full support of husbands and had been mothers taking care of the family, happiness in the family was complete; separation forcing women to remarry or remain single caused a drastic reduction in their overall happiness....... We need to exercise caution against idolising the career-bound abd trivialising the family-bound.....

For complete article refer to the Source: http://gurumurthy.net/