Legal empowerment and status of women

Legal empowerment is a powerful tool for improving and transforming lives because it equips women with the knowledge and resources to control of their lives and fight discriminatory practices and policies. The struggle for legal equality has been one of the major concerns of women’s movement all over the world. Whether in the internal situation of her position in the paternal or matrimonial home or in the external situation of acquiring education, skills, professions, employment etc. all these involve the law. The present study was taken by the researcher to evaluate the working of the law related to women in practice. The study on law and status of women is attempted to know how married Hindu women are aware of their rights, their attitude towards the legislation, and in practice laws have been able to put women at par with men. The present study is exploratory in nature undertaken to examine the level of awareness and attitudes of women towards their legal rights. The study was carried out in urban and rural areas between elite and poor women for the purpose of meaningful comparison. The method adopted for selecting sample was known as stratified random sampling with purposive sampling. Hence a total of 300 women were selected as sample of four groups, each group i.e. urban elite, urban poor, rural Elite and rural poor consisting of 75 women respondents to serve as comparative groups. The data was collected with the help of questionnaires and interview schedule. The study indicated that the urban women had better awareness of legal rights than the rural women indicating the rural urban residence had influence on ones awareness of legal rights. Considering the attitudes towards the legal right of women, it was found that Urban – rural residence had no impact on the attitudinal levels of the women towards their legal rights. The results of the present study also indicated that the practice of legal rights would very much depend on their urban-rural residence. On the whole it may be concluded that the women respondents had greater positive attitude toward then legal rights in spite of low awareness and practice. It was also evident from the correlation matrix that exposure to mass media, followed by awareness of legal rights, life satisfaction and decision making power are contributing variables for the overall status of women.