ISSN (Print) - 0012-9976 | ISSN (Online) - 2349-8846

Articles by Maithreyi Krishna RajSubscribe to Maithreyi Krishna Raj

Perspectives for Women's Studies

I AM grateful to S Sarath for his comments (June 11, p 1190) on my piece on women's studies (April 30). I must plead guilty for the terseness of my presentation and for the inadequate explanations at many places. Some of Sarath's criticisms come from this. The piece in question was addressed to women's studies scholars primarily and so I omitted what I presumed to be well known to the audience. I realise that more extended discussion of many of the issues was in order in a published piece.

Women's Studies

The prevailing paradigm in Women's Studies is predominantly a compensatory model: women as a disadvantaged group should be given greater facilities, benefits, etc. The seeds of a change in this paradigm are becoming visible in the critiques of development models.

Research on Women and Career-Issues of Methodology

Until the seventies university research on women was almost exclusively focused on the educated employed women. Subsequently while research on poor women became more innovative, highlighting class and gender linkages, studies on educated women were relatively sterile yielding little by way of either new methodology or insight A major reason for this lies in the uncritical imitation of the Western theoretical model of sex roles and role conflicts.

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