“The day for moving mountains is coming, You don’t think so? It’s coming; for a while the mountain sleeps, But in other times Mountains all moved in fire. If you don’t believe that. Oh man, this at least believe: All sleeping women, Will awake now and move.” (Yosano Akiko)
The above prophetic citation of 1978 conveys the rise of awakened, emancipated women. The women have awakened but the process of awakening and rising to the full stature of being a human being is still going on.
Simon de Beauvoir rightly observes, “The women today are in a fair way to dethrone the myth of femininity; they are beginning to affirm their dependence in concrete ways, but they do not succeed in living completely the life of a human being.” (The Second…show more content… While trying to identify what feminine protest is, an attempt has been made to show that feminine protest takes into its ambit women’s awakening consciousness, their conflicts, confrontations and protest of self-emancipation. This awakened woman earnestly desires to arrest her individuality as a human being. The Indian and Western woman deny to sit in the band – wagon of male dominated society. She awakens with a new sensibility and sensitivity which is essentially her own identity. In spite of being bind in traditions, ancient family and marriage laws of divorce, adoption, rape, dowry, inheritance and sexual exploitation, she is intensely eager to assert a new…show more content… They consider even the term “women writer” as derogatory, taking away their artistic autonomy and identity and categorizing them by gender. Feminist theories help to expose the hidden ideologies, the subtle patriarchal implications, in the world depicted by novelists. The social construct of femininity exerts enormous psychological pressure on women through what Betty Friedan termed “the feminine mystique”- “the notion that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of own identity.” Indian women are vulnerable to a culture- specific form of entrapment hidden in the age- old ideal of pativrata- a belief in the total submission to the will and welfare of the husband. The Sita- Savitri, Sati, Gaudhani- Damyanti myths hold up an ideal of self- sacrificing wifehood which has worked its way into deeper layers of the Indian woman’s