Women, Education and Empowerment

India, with its phenomenally long historical traditions has presented several contrasting images of women, praised as a goddess, extolled as the mother of humanity and skyrocketed as the real creator of mankind. In actual practice, however, women are stigmatized as the weaker sex meant to bear all kinds of human oppression and male atrocities. In the post-independent India, especially since 1980s, the empowerment of women has been recognized as a central issue in determining the reality of their status, yet all the provisions of the Constitution and the spate of legislations enacted to empower women have not been adequate to set them free from their traditional bondages, liabilities and restrictions. How could a woman take her rightful place in the socio political system that does in the socio political system that does nothing to build her capacities, nor creates access to information? It is very important that women are empowered and that their capacities are enhanced through a process of imparting literacy and educating them, as it has been rightly believed that education and empowerment of women are genetically linked phenomenon and they can be delinked only at a great peril of vast humanity. This book is based on the selected papers presented in two days University Grants Commission sponsored National Seminar on “Role of Education in Empowering Women in India” held on 2nd and 3rd November 2004, organized by Department of History, at Ginni Devi Modi (PG) College, Modinagar, Ghaziabad (U.P). Based on the multidisciplinary approach, authors expressed their views on the concept and the process of women empowerment and identified the obstacles being faced in the way of empowering women and identified the obstacles being faced in the way of empowering women and identified as well the strategies that could be adopted for their empowerment in reality.