Woman’s Place: Options and Limits in Professional Career

"Indian woman today finds herself in a strange situation. The great gulf separating her roles within family and in different professions throws up terrible contradictions both in her life and the social fabric. Woman in profession often finds herself face to face with problems that stem form the typically gender-oriented mind-set still stuck up in the conservative mould whose demands and expectations drag her back into the fold of home and hearth, and the unfamiliar challenges she meets in the profession. She has to decide priorities and also to find out ways and means to adjust with conflicting demands. Sex linked boundaries and gender attitudes have not disappeared. Although females have been encouraged to enter the professions, they frequently find themselves on the fringe of their profession. Profession being a resource, its rapid politicization makes it a sensitive instrument for controlling people’s gratification and deprivation and consequently it performs a dual role as an agency of modernization and change. Women in professional structure become organically involved with the trends of stability and change in the broad social system at large. Study of this process can provide clues to basic factors of change in our society. Women’s movements demanding social justice reflect the fact that the basis of the institutionalized mode of interaction has gone amiss and calls for rethinking and reorientation. This book studies in depth options and limits in women’s professional career. It covers several dimensions with regard to lady professionals engaged in the professions of teaching, medicine and law. A study of this kind is important to rationalize the structure and function of the professions to make it conducive to the participation of fair sex."