Single Women's Land Rights in India

As I have been looking into land rights, for a prior blog posting, I saw a flier on campus announcing a talk, by Kim Berry, a Professor at Humboldt State University, called Disowning dependence: Single women's collective struggles for land rights in Northwestern India. So last Thursday night, I spent an hour and a half listening to this energetic women discussing her passion. I loved feeling her passion infuse me, but I also felt overwhelmed by the strong feminist language and push. This is a rundown of the talk.

Berry (2010) began research in India in 1992. She began getting involved and doing research with single women in Northwestern India. Her talk was about Ekal Nari Shakti Sangathan (ENSS): The Association of Empowered Women is made up of single women in Northwestern India. Single women were described as women who are widowed, divorced, abandoned, abused, or lesbians (i.e. outside marriage). In 2007, ENSS was made up of 6000 single dues-paying women. Berry started her talk by describing the bad/good women dichotomy, where good women were portrayed as women who were bowing their head sweeping the flours, and bad women stood tall in a defiant pose. She described how single women's identity is always positioned as bad women. Being dependent on men symbolically represents a good woman. These single women are always watched, talked about and blamed.

In 2008, 2700 single women came together to embark on a 3 day march to the capital in Himachal Pradesh to demand land rights and other benefits.

• free health care (including free tests, procedures, and medication) for single women;
  
• reservation of peripheral jobs in the public sector for single women;


• ration cards for those single women who are separated from their husbands;
  

• increased pension;

• de jure land rights for tribal women, for farming.
  

• long term lease rights to state land for poor single women.

List of rights and benefits taken from, a blog created by Berry's mother to supporting the single women, http://www.afamilyofonesown.blogspot.com/

The benefits other than the land rights were granted. Today, the government has not granted land rights to single women. ENSS is trying to raise money to buy 10 aces of land, which would be divided into 2 acre plots. A new kind of family called a homosocial household would take care of the land, designated 2 acre plots. The homosocial family would consist of an elder single woman and a young single woman and her children. They created this system because a single woman is unable to meet all the needs of substance farming, childcare, cooking, cleaning etc. alone. Having two women divide up the work and responsibilities will enable the single women to survive. The single women are doing this pilot project to show the government that the women would benefit from land rights and become self-sufficient. Berry (2010) pointed out that the single women's movement and the homosocial household will/are causing people to rethink marriage, kinship, gender relations, and land rights.

This is a great example of grass-roots, bottom-up fight for rights. These women, who are marginalized in their society, organized their community to change the very system that marginalizes them.

If interested to support these women visit the blog listed above.

Berry, K. (2010). Disowning dependence: single women's collective struggles for land rights in Northern India. Presentation at Humboldt State University.