The True Liberation of Women
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The women’s liberation movement has not liberated a woman, says Shrii Shrii Anandamurti. On the contrary, despite her apparent success in working life, a woman is in fact subjugated, even deprived. She has to adapt to male values and patterns of action. It is the job of women to bring about real change in the values of our society by highlighting feminine and human values - their own biological and emotional needs.
Much has been done to liberate women over the last 30 years, but there are still fundamental problems in our society. One of them relates to equality for women in working life. I strongly emphasize that equality in the workplace does not only mean that women receive the same pay as men, but that women, instead of trying to be like men, seek to influence working life in a way that creates more favorable conditions for women: workplace childcare, mother access watching her child during working hours if necessary, the opportunity to take a day off or days during menstruation.
All in all, flexibility should be created in the workplace to suit a woman’s rhythm, rather than following a strict male schedule: expecting a woman to take a pill and pretend to be fully fit during menstruation, even if she is in severe pain and not feeling well. Women should be able to design a workplace for their own needs and not just for men. In the West, society is not favorable to women's lives and women's needs in terms of working life. Working life is based on male competition and power.
Women have entered working life, but they have come there on the terms of the above-mentioned still life. They have been assumed to act like men, and women have set themselves such expectations and internalized them. So women themselves believe in these expectations and admire those women who can meet them and do not admire those who cannot meet them, those who seem to be too emotional, too weak, too volatile because their needs vary according to the days of the month, or they compromise on their careers because they want a child or they have a child to whom they pay too much attention and do not devote enough of their career.
Even women have embraced those masculine values, and so women act according to the masculine standard and do not bring the needs of a woman’s body and motherhood into the workplace. As a result, women fall into two groups: those who have to sacrifice a career for the sake of a family and those who sacrifice their families and emotional needs for a career - a lot of women find themselves in this situation over time. When you talk to them, you will find that they are not happy. Statistics and research have shown that sacrificing children and family for a career does not make the average person happy.
The problem is that the work environment and work ethics are not human, they are guided by capitalist values. They are driven by business greed and are based on masculine competition; a foundation was laid for them at a time when the labor force was predominantly male and the decision-makers were men. Over the last twenty years, the workforce has changed somewhat and more and more women have risen to decision-makers, but women who have hurt there have come from the ranks of the male-dominated business world, and they are the women who have done best in the male values world and the women who have children, love life, family, women who have sacrificed for the sake of the family do not get the status they deserve.
In working life, especially in the corporate world, it also happens that a woman who feels underestimated makes a great effort to be like a successful man, and that’s where the most unscrupulous one who succeeds is admired. This is why smart women adopt masculine attitudes
they can become even more ruthless than men because they have to compensate for being women. These women are more prepared for elbow tactics than the men they imitate because they feel they need to be more qualified than men. They have observed men and adopted their role model, but their actions are not natural to them. It expresses despair, not their feminine qualities.
For women as well as men, personalities, opinions, and potentials vary widely, and identification with femininity can be stronger or weaker. In general, women are gentler, more caring and more able to communicate. But this is not always the case. Women can also be ruthless towards other women in a male-dominated environment where they feel that embracing male patterns of action and gaining male popularity is important to their success. Women as well as men want to succeed in what they do. Women are where men want to be valued, and many women have excellent leadership skills. Women are excellent leaders. Both men and women have equal ability to lead, this fact is not gender dependent.
The problem is that society’s attitude towards men and women is different from what a woman needs to do to succeed in the business world and in working life in general. Even today, there is a big imbalance in how easily a man can get into a profession compared to a woman, even though the situation is much better than before. In some areas, it is easy for women to advance, but in some other areas and access to senior management positions is still difficult. The impact of societal prejudices is still an obstacle to the role of women and how women can express their inner nature in the workplace: women are subjected to stress and pressure to act like men to achieve success and leadership.
I’m talking about the struggle a woman has to go through to find her femininity in a society that emphasizes competition and success in the corporate world, a society where to be something a man has to step out of his home and create a position defying a woman’s role as a mother and family caregiver. There is an internal contradictory dynamic in this society. It is at the heart of the disintegration of the extended family and the nuclear family. The fact that women have left their homes to gain prestige and success has greatly damaged social structures. Society is not based on home; people have been pushed into big-capital factories as vending machines. Valuing money at the expense of children, nursing and home has created this situation. We are vaeshyain the period of decay, the stage of exploitative capitalism, not the stage of women's liberation. This is a state of confusion in our society and for women.
Women want intellectual challenges and work, and they should have them. But why do they need to get them this way? Why do they need to leave their home, sacrifice the happiness of the family, the well-being of their children and all who rely on her? Going out of the home in a way that is unnatural for them, working for 8-12 hours a day. Many women feel that they have to choose between the happiness and success that comes from relationships and the success and fulfillment that comes from a career. This is a cruel choice.
Most men and women want to feel successful and make the most of their physical, and mental resources. But why should a woman, in order to succeed in life, give up having children if she wants them, or if she has children, sacrifice the well-being of her children for her career demands? Why must she leave her children in the care of others and sacrifice her home, family and personal love in order to be able to give her work the attention it requires?
Society operates on the terms of business, on the terms of the production and consumption of money and goods, not on the terms of the well-being of family members, children, the elderly and the sick. It has alienated family members and given people an identity through a successful career.
Not that women should not have a career and a profession, but that the way in which and the conditions under which a career is created and maintained should be changed. Can a woman raise children and write books, give lectures, act as a speaker and do different things at different stages of her life, set aside time for her children, set aside a few days a month for lighter work? If there were a different standard in society, it would not be a problem.
The same goes for men; should they be working 40-70 hours a week? Wouldn’t they also like to be with their families and children? Why can't work be related to home and community rather than be a cold workplace that he comes home from a few hours a day and then goes back to?
The whole system supports professional success in the job, not the family, not the emotional needs of the people, but the expansion of production, more goods and more consumption. If people spent more time with family, friends and relatives there might be more support for each other. Then the need to consume more goods would be less as they could get their well-being from emotional relationships.
The communication and the emotional nature of women is the seat of all their power, but society is not set up to honor those values. Society is set up so that one should consume this and that and get one's happiness from being a consumer. If one buys more and more and spends one's time shopping and purchasing more more things, the emphasis on life become about accruing more material objects rather than on depending on interpersonal relationships. Then one must spend their time working, working, working to make more money with which to go shopping in one's free time. You work and produce the goods and when you have a little free time you shop and buy them.
This state of affairs is not based on a woman’s strength. This reduces the status of a woman and the power of women. And while women can succeed and be noticed in this business paradigm, they lose their power and become emotionally deficient.
It is the power of women, their emotional nature, their capacity in communication, and their emphasis upon human relationships that need to be brought back into society. What is needed is to re-establish connections of family and community and put into the society the value of personal relationships rather than the value of consumption. In this, women can do a great service to humanity.
Today, women are confused about their identity. They find themselves in a position of naturally wanting appreciation and success. They want to be heard and listened to. Who doesn't want these things? Yet to find these things they must sacrifice relationships for a career. More and more women are finding that this is not as fulfilling as they hoped it would be. Younger women have seen that it hasn't worked for older women.
And then there’s the super-mom, a woman who tries to maintain a career while raising her children, who tries to have a career while raising children. She meets expectations of the corporate world in which she is not to have a noticeable period, and not to have any needs related to her children during work time. She is totally dedicated to her job and at the same time comes home and attempts to be there for her children. This woman is torn and ripped apart by these high demands. She cannot possibly fulfill both positions successfully because they are in conflict with each other.
- One modern phenomenon is also that women postpone having children until they are so old that it is no longer possible.
This is a big drawback for many women when they find that they have postponed having children a little too far. On the other hand, it has the advantage of a woman having her child at a more advanced age. But too late is too late.
However, at the same time, teenage pregnancies have become more common. When some women wait too long, others have children too early, due to the family’s lack of emotional support. The emotional needs of these very young women are not met, so they seek out boyfriends and children. Their needs are not met in the home because their parents are out working all day. No one is there in the house. These girls are all alone with the T.V. and their boyfriends if they have them. they are daughters of the corporate world wandering around the house all day. Are they not lonely? They want connectiveness, they want a family but if they take that road, they must pay a high price, for they become outcasts. They are mothers. They are supposed to be recognized for this but they are too young. They have grasped for emotional connectedness through having a child, when they are not our of their own childhood, due to loneliness and lack of supervision.
So those women have already sacrificed their self-esteem to get an emotional sense of closeness. This is the contradiction of being a woman in a man's world. If they want a sense of self-worth and emotional connection with family, how can they achieve both? “Business world daughters” who wander in an empty home many hours a day, aren’t they lonely? Don't they want intimacy, to be around their family, but they pay a high price for it because they are casteless; they are mothers and they should be mothers only as a parent… .he have lost their ability to make money - the most important thing is to be a good consumer.
The position of women is not good in these times, even though they have been successful in their professions and are better accepted in the workplace. So what is that sacrifice? As women have achieved their independence, the family structure has been increasingly destroyed. You may be thinking, "That's good, the woman has been tied to her family, now she's liberated and independent." Yes, she is liberated and independent, but is she happy?
Most of the time not at all. And men are not happy either, they also want the security of a family. And surely the children who wander in an empty home are not particularly happy, there is no uncle or aunt, nor any other who would consider them good and be with them; they have to be with guests all day, then come home and in their couple of hours when the parents are at home with them, the parents are too in a hurry to even chat with them because the mandatory housework takes up all the time. And the elderly are sent to a nursing home because they don’t have enough time, and may the sky be guarded, if someone gets seriously ill, it will bring the situation to a rupture point
The women’s liberation movement has not liberated a woman, says Shrii Shrii Anandamurti. On the contrary, despite her apparent success in working life, a woman is in fact subjugated, even deprived. She has to adapt to male values and patterns of action. It is the job of women to bring about real change in the values of our society by highlighting feminine and human values - their own biological and emotional needs.
Much has been done to liberate women over the last 30 years, but there are still fundamental problems in our society. One of them relates to equality for women in working life. I strongly emphasize that equality in the workplace does not only mean that women receive the same pay as men, but that women, instead of trying to be like men, seek to influence working life in a way that creates more favorable conditions for women: workplace childcare, mother access watching her child during working hours if necessary, the opportunity to take a day off or days during menstruation.
All in all, flexibility should be created in the workplace to suit a woman’s rhythm, rather than following a strict male schedule: expecting a woman to take a pill and pretend to be fully fit during menstruation, even if she is in severe pain and not feeling well. Women should be able to design a workplace for their own needs and not just for men. In the West, society is not favorable to women's lives and women's needs in terms of working life. Working life is based on male competition and power.
Women have entered working life, but they have come there on the terms of the above-mentioned still life. They have been assumed to act like men, and women have set themselves such expectations and internalized them. So women themselves believe in these expectations and admire those women who can meet them and do not admire those who cannot meet them, those who seem to be too emotional, too weak, too volatile because their needs vary according to the days of the month, or they compromise on their careers because they want a child or they have a child to whom they pay too much attention and do not devote enough of their career.
Even women have embraced those masculine values, and so women act according to the masculine standard and do not bring the needs of a woman’s body and motherhood into the workplace. As a result, women fall into two groups: those who have to sacrifice a career for the sake of a family and those who sacrifice their families and emotional needs for a career - a lot of women find themselves in this situation over time. When you talk to them, you will find that they are not happy. Statistics and research have shown that sacrificing children and family for a career does not make the average person happy.
The problem is that the work environment and work ethics are not human, they are guided by capitalist values. They are driven by business greed and are based on masculine competition; a foundation was laid for them at a time when the labor force was predominantly male and the decision-makers were men. Over the last twenty years, the workforce has changed somewhat and more and more women have risen to decision-makers, but women who have hurt there have come from the ranks of the male-dominated business world, and they are the women who have done best in the male values world and the women who have children, love life, family, women who have sacrificed for the sake of the family do not get the status they deserve.
In working life, especially in the corporate world, it also happens that a woman who feels underestimated makes a great effort to be like a successful man, and that’s where the most unscrupulous one who succeeds is admired. This is why smart women adopt masculine attitudes
they can become even more ruthless than men because they have to compensate for being women. These women are more prepared for elbow tactics than the men they imitate because they feel they need to be more qualified than men. They have observed men and adopted their role model, but their actions are not natural to them. It expresses despair, not their feminine qualities.
For women as well as men, personalities, opinions, and potentials vary widely, and identification with femininity can be stronger or weaker. In general, women are gentler, more caring and more able to communicate. But this is not always the case. Women can also be ruthless towards other women in a male-dominated environment where they feel that embracing male patterns of action and gaining male popularity is important to their success. Women as well as men want to succeed in what they do. Women are where men want to be valued, and many women have excellent leadership skills. Women are excellent leaders. Both men and women have equal ability to lead, this fact is not gender dependent.
The problem is that society’s attitude towards men and women is different from what a woman needs to do to succeed in the business world and in working life in general. Even today, there is a big imbalance in how easily a man can get into a profession compared to a woman, even though the situation is much better than before. In some areas, it is easy for women to advance, but in some other areas and access to senior management positions is still difficult. The impact of societal prejudices is still an obstacle to the role of women and how women can express their inner nature in the workplace: women are subjected to stress and pressure to act like men to achieve success and leadership.
I’m talking about the struggle a woman has to go through to find her femininity in a society that emphasizes competition and success in the corporate world, a society where to be something a man has to step out of his home and create a position defying a woman’s role as a mother and family caregiver. There is an internal contradictory dynamic in this society. It is at the heart of the disintegration of the extended family and the nuclear family. The fact that women have left their homes to gain prestige and success has greatly damaged social structures. Society is not based on home; people have been pushed into big-capital factories as vending machines. Valuing money at the expense of children, nursing and home has created this situation. We are vaeshyain the period of decay, the stage of exploitative capitalism, not the stage of women's liberation. This is a state of confusion in our society and for women.
Women want intellectual challenges and work, and they should have them. But why do they need to get them this way? Why do they need to leave their home, sacrifice the happiness of the family, the well-being of their children and all who rely on her? Going out of the home in a way that is unnatural for them, working for 8-12 hours a day. Many women feel that they have to choose between the happiness and success that comes from relationships and the success and fulfillment that comes from a career. This is a cruel choice.
Most men and women want to feel successful and make the most of their physical, and mental resources. But why should a woman, in order to succeed in life, give up having children if she wants them, or if she has children, sacrifice the well-being of her children for her career demands? Why must she leave her children in the care of others and sacrifice her home, family and personal love in order to be able to give her work the attention it requires?
Society operates on the terms of business, on the terms of the production and consumption of money and goods, not on the terms of the well-being of family members, children, the elderly and the sick. It has alienated family members and given people an identity through a successful career.
Not that women should not have a career and a profession, but that the way in which and the conditions under which a career is created and maintained should be changed. Can a woman raise children and write books, give lectures, act as a speaker and do different things at different stages of her life, set aside time for her children, set aside a few days a month for lighter work? If there were a different standard in society, it would not be a problem.
The same goes for men; should they be working 40-70 hours a week? Wouldn’t they also like to be with their families and children? Why can't work be related to home and community rather than be a cold workplace that he comes home from a few hours a day and then goes back to?
The whole system supports professional success in the job, not the family, not the emotional needs of the people, but the expansion of production, more goods and more consumption. If people spent more time with family, friends and relatives there might be more support for each other. Then the need to consume more goods would be less as they could get their well-being from emotional relationships.
The communication and the emotional nature of women is the seat of all their power, but society is not set up to honor those values. Society is set up so that one should consume this and that and get one's happiness from being a consumer. If one buys more and more and spends one's time shopping and purchasing more more things, the emphasis on life become about accruing more material objects rather than on depending on interpersonal relationships. Then one must spend their time working, working, working to make more money with which to go shopping in one's free time. You work and produce the goods and when you have a little free time you shop and buy them.
This state of affairs is not based on a woman’s strength. This reduces the status of a woman and the power of women. And while women can succeed and be noticed in this business paradigm, they lose their power and become emotionally deficient.
It is the power of women, their emotional nature, their capacity in communication, and their emphasis upon human relationships that need to be brought back into society. What is needed is to re-establish connections of family and community and put into the society the value of personal relationships rather than the value of consumption. In this, women can do a great service to humanity.
Today, women are confused about their identity. They find themselves in a position of naturally wanting appreciation and success. They want to be heard and listened to. Who doesn't want these things? Yet to find these things they must sacrifice relationships for a career. More and more women are finding that this is not as fulfilling as they hoped it would be. Younger women have seen that it hasn't worked for older women.
And then there’s the super-mom, a woman who tries to maintain a career while raising her children, who tries to have a career while raising children. She meets expectations of the corporate world in which she is not to have a noticeable period, and not to have any needs related to her children during work time. She is totally dedicated to her job and at the same time comes home and attempts to be there for her children. This woman is torn and ripped apart by these high demands. She cannot possibly fulfill both positions successfully because they are in conflict with each other.
- One modern phenomenon is also that women postpone having children until they are so old that it is no longer possible.
This is a big drawback for many women when they find that they have postponed having children a little too far. On the other hand, it has the advantage of a woman having her child at a more advanced age. But too late is too late.
However, at the same time, teenage pregnancies have become more common. When some women wait too long, others have children too early, due to the family’s lack of emotional support. The emotional needs of these very young women are not met, so they seek out boyfriends and children. Their needs are not met in the home because their parents are out working all day. No one is there in the house. These girls are all alone with the T.V. and their boyfriends if they have them. they are daughters of the corporate world wandering around the house all day. Are they not lonely? They want connectiveness, they want a family but if they take that road, they must pay a high price, for they become outcasts. They are mothers. They are supposed to be recognized for this but they are too young. They have grasped for emotional connectedness through having a child, when they are not our of their own childhood, due to loneliness and lack of supervision.
So those women have already sacrificed their self-esteem to get an emotional sense of closeness. This is the contradiction of being a woman in a man's world. If they want a sense of self-worth and emotional connection with family, how can they achieve both? “Business world daughters” who wander in an empty home many hours a day, aren’t they lonely? Don't they want intimacy, to be around their family, but they pay a high price for it because they are casteless; they are mothers and they should be mothers only as a parent… .he have lost their ability to make money - the most important thing is to be a good consumer.
The position of women is not good in these times, even though they have been successful in their professions and are better accepted in the workplace. So what is that sacrifice? As women have achieved their independence, the family structure has been increasingly destroyed. You may be thinking, "That's good, the woman has been tied to her family, now she's liberated and independent." Yes, she is liberated and independent, but is she happy?
Most of the time not at all. And men are not happy either, they also want the security of a family. And surely the children who wander in an empty home are not particularly happy, there is no uncle or aunt, nor any other who would consider them good and be with them; they have to be with guests all day, then come home and in their couple of hours when the parents are at home with them, the parents are too in a hurry to even chat with them because the mandatory housework takes up all the time. And the elderly are sent to a nursing home because they don’t have enough time, and may the sky be guarded, if someone gets seriously ill, it will bring the situation to a rupture point
In our society, safety nets are strained to the point of breaking. Today, there is often no father at home, just a mother alone with her child trying to keep her job outside the home, feeding the child and surviving without anyone’s help. So many women think, "I sacrifice my heart and love and bear the pain of not being able to have a child and have the love it brings, so at least I don't have to suffer that way."
In its current state, our society is on the verge of social chaos and disintegration, and it will soon reach a breaking point as fundamental human values, structures, and networks have disintegrated. Can a society survive if it is totally based on an emphasis on individual success and individualism? What happens to the poor when he gets sick or gets old? What about the needs of children, the emotional needs of people? These issues are not taken care of. Even human health care is not properly taken care of, even though funds can be found in society.
Society has lost its balance. In order to regain balance, it requires women to rise, not only to positions of authority, but to their own personal power as people to be aware of their basic needs and say, my aunt and uncle, I want my family back. ” Women should do this, women should say, “I can lead, I can be a leader, I can be a mother, I can be with a family, and I can be a source of strength.” Women should say, "I will no longer tolerate this mandatory choice at the expense of love and relationships." One person cannot accomplish very much with his speech, but a hundred thousand, a million will change the world. And the world is going to change, that’s for sure;the pendulum swings in one direction and then turns in the other direction.
Women should tie the world together and create a network of love, relationships and friendship with today’s world. This is the job of women. They are to be leaders, they must be powerful and they will say: "The power does not mean that I am a firm pääirtisanojana and paiskin work 15 hours a day, sacrificing all personal relationship." Not so that women wouldn’t be able to do that. Maybe they can, but they should realize what real power is and they should take that power. Why is a job outside the home more valuable than raising children? Just because it earns more, and if you have more money, you have more purchasing power, and because society emphasizes purchasing power, is it more valuable.
Women must take the situation into their own hands. Through change in the social and economic system, political power and change, they can change the situation. Let more and more women become politicians and fight for human values. I don’t believe in the right or the left, I believe in humanity. And I believe that women will rise as a force and change the way society works - not to bring back the past, but to create a healthy social structure that meets people’s needs. This is missing from today’s Western cultures.
In its current state, our society is on the verge of social chaos and disintegration, and it will soon reach a breaking point as fundamental human values, structures, and networks have disintegrated. Can a society survive if it is totally based on an emphasis on individual success and individualism? What happens to the poor when he gets sick or gets old? What about the needs of children, the emotional needs of people? These issues are not taken care of. Even human health care is not properly taken care of, even though funds can be found in society.
Society has lost its balance. In order to regain balance, it requires women to rise, not only to positions of authority, but to their own personal power as people to be aware of their basic needs and say, my aunt and uncle, I want my family back. ” Women should do this, women should say, “I can lead, I can be a leader, I can be a mother, I can be with a family, and I can be a source of strength.” Women should say, "I will no longer tolerate this mandatory choice at the expense of love and relationships." One person cannot accomplish very much with his speech, but a hundred thousand, a million will change the world. And the world is going to change, that’s for sure;the pendulum swings in one direction and then turns in the other direction.
Women should tie the world together and create a network of love, relationships and friendship with today’s world. This is the job of women. They are to be leaders, they must be powerful and they will say: "The power does not mean that I am a firm pääirtisanojana and paiskin work 15 hours a day, sacrificing all personal relationship." Not so that women wouldn’t be able to do that. Maybe they can, but they should realize what real power is and they should take that power. Why is a job outside the home more valuable than raising children? Just because it earns more, and if you have more money, you have more purchasing power, and because society emphasizes purchasing power, is it more valuable.
Women must take the situation into their own hands. Through change in the social and economic system, political power and change, they can change the situation. Let more and more women become politicians and fight for human values. I don’t believe in the right or the left, I believe in humanity. And I believe that women will rise as a force and change the way society works - not to bring back the past, but to create a healthy social structure that meets people’s needs. This is missing from today’s Western cultures.
