Education is the pathway that provides a direct link between illiteracy and women’s security. Today’s society in India, in particular, faces an intense level of gender inequality because of its looseness of proper educational advancement. We must concentrate on the proverb that speculates about the utmost necessities of woman education, “If you educate a man, you educate an individual. If you educate a woman, you educate a family”. Hence, women empowerment is a strong motif that is being provided through contemporary literature and various associations and organizations. This powerful process of women entitlement reflects women’s potentiality to act or thing freely. Liberty is the base of education, which women are yet to apprehend. Through this library they can make choices and control their life decisions, thereby diminishing gender discrimination and women exploitation.
According to a census in literary field in 2001, the male literacy rate is 75.3% and that for females is 53.7%, maintaining wide gap of 21.6 percentage points between the sexes at the national level. This vivid discrimination based on gender inequality still prevails not only in India but also in many other countries all over the world. Rustic people even today kill their girl child after they are born. Though sometimes these little futures manage to live but get deprived from all opportunities (education, healthy life etc.) that a male child enjoys. Education along with time increases the percentage of literate people but still carries the discrimination based on gender. Today, the female literacy levels according to the Literacy Rate 2011 census are 65.46% where the male literacy rate is over 80%. Even in twenty-first century, women are dependent either on their parents or treated as husband’s property. Women are still to seek the individual identity for their own entitlement. “A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction” is written by Virginia Woolf in her A Room of One’s Own to intensify the educational needs and women’s freedom. As there are women who are fighting against the male monarchy, it is women again who carries out patriarchal dominance being the very protector of it.
Nowadays feminism is in fashion. After women are proposed with every quality of being an individual, they through the enhancement of education articulate the requirements of women education in society. Influential poetry ‘Still I Rise’ by Maya Angelou where she depicts her feminist view to rise above and beyond of any unequal wall of gender discrimination saying, “still like life, I will rise”. Educating women at any age is a key factor to empower them. Education will contribute their position in households and as well as national economies. Furthermore, literate women will be much empowered and not to fall victim to the whip of human trafficking, forced child marriages, and will be protective against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV or ADIS. International women’s day is a reminder for women empowerment to break the high walls of superstitions that are used to bind women. The literate society has to take responsibility to take initiatives for women enrollment in the educational world and to make them complete their secondary education for the betterment of society and them itself.
