From Beauvoir And Woolf’s Critique And Analysis Of “Women As Property” To The Evolution Of The Hindu Succession Law: How Far Have We Come In Achieving Equality In Women’s Property Rights In India?
Sanjana Arun, O.P. Jindal Global Law School
INTRODUCTION
“Why are Women Poor?” asks Virginia Woolf in her book A Room of One’s Own. The reason for women, who make nearly half of the human population in the world to be posited on lower ground as compared to the men is because of how easily and actively women have been marginalised and alienated as the "Other". The otherization of the woman not only makes her a sub-standard, second-class citizen but also degrades and diminishes her existence in terms of legal rights as well as domestic and political needs and desires. Simone de Beauvoir opines that the idea of classifying an entity as the "Other" is as natural as consciousness itself, furthermore what justifies it is the inept disability to describe one without consequently creating the "Other" that stands in opposition to the One. She draws upon Hegel when she claims that the reason otherization is problematic is simply because, a world built on the binaries of One and Other, Male and Female has not been able to subsist devoid of power imbalances in the tipping of the scale to one side. An essential antagonism exists between the two, in that when one asserts itself as indispensable, as the subject, it instinctively sets the other as inconsequential or dispensable, as the object1. The cause of women's oppression is rooted deep within human consciousness by confounding "The Woman" as the "Other" and therefore justifying her relegation to a mere object, or rather, "property" as Beauvoir puts it. Concerning women and Property, Virginia Woolf states that women have always been subjugated and in a vulnerable situation, the primordial reasons for these, she cites, are the patriarchal institutions of marriage and the State- one making it impossible for them to earn money and the other is the law, by denying them the right of possession and inheritance of wealth2. Woolf's theory of ownership of property bears the heavyweight of the question- How did the convention of marriage affect a woman's position and her property rights within the husband's family? And whether it further diminished the scope of women’s rights and inheritance within the Hindu Joint Family?
