The Role of Women and Women’s Organizations in India

The status and role of women in India

A central role, long constrained by custom

Women have always been central to Indian society, sustaining the family, the farm and the community, yet for much of history their public role was held back by custom. Practices such as sati, child marriage and the denial of education and property kept women dependent and confined to the home.

The modern story of women in India is the long struggle to overturn those constraints. It runs from nineteenth-century social reform, through women's own organisations and the freedom struggle, to constitutional equality and the recent push for political representation.

The three phases of the women's movement

Historians divide the women's movement in India into three phases. The first, from the mid-nineteenth century, was led by male reformers who raised women's issues and reformed customs and education.

The second phase, from about 1915 to independence, saw Gandhi draw women into the national movement and independent women's organisations emerge. The third, after independence, has pursued legal rights, welfare and political representation, the stage the movement is still in today.

The nineteenth-century social reforms

Ending the worst customs: sati, remarriage and child marriage

The first phase attacked the customs that bore hardest on women. The campaign of Raja Ram Mohan Roy led to the abolition of sati, the burning of a widow on her husband's pyre, under Governor-General William Bentinck in 1829.

Other reforms followed. Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar's crusade produced the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act of 1856, and in 1929 the Child Marriage Restraint Act set fourteen as the minimum age of marriage for a girl, curbing one of the most damaging customs of all.

The reformers, women's education and their limits

These early gains were led mostly by male reformers and were aimed as much at modernising society as at empowering women, who were the objects rather than the leaders of reform. A central plank was the promotion of women's education, seen as the key to wider change.

The limit of this phase was precisely that it was led from above. Real change in women's own voice waited for the next phase, when women began to organise and speak for themselves rather than be spoken for.

Women's organizations

The first women's organizations

From the early twentieth century women built their own organisations. The Women's Indian Association was an early body advancing women's education and the vote, and the All India Women's Conference was founded in 1927 at Pune by Margaret Cousins to promote education, social welfare and reform.

These bodies, joined later by groups such as the National Federation of Indian Women, gave women a collective voice. They campaigned for education and against child marriage, and pressed for the rights to divorce, to inherit and to vote.

From welfare to rights and representation

Over time these organisations shifted from social welfare to demanding legal and political rights, lobbying for laws to protect women. This is where the modern role of civil society begins: organised women's groups turning private concerns into public policy.

That role continues today. Civil-society groups remain central to women's participation and representation in public life, from pressing for protective laws to campaigning for women's seats in legislatures, keeping the unfinished agenda of the movement alive.

Women in the freedom struggle

Women in the national movement

The freedom struggle pulled women into public life on a mass scale. Gandhi deliberately incorporated women's participation into the national movement, and peasant women played an important part in rural satyagrahas such as those at Borsad and Bardoli.

Women also rose to its leadership. Sarojini Naidu became the first Indian-born woman president of the Indian National Congress in 1925, a powerful sign that women were now actors, not onlookers, in the nation's politics.

What the freedom struggle gave women

Participation in the struggle changed women's place in the nation. It gave them a recognised public role and a claim to equal citizenship that could not be withdrawn once freedom was won.

That claim was honoured at independence with universal adult franchise, giving Indian women the vote from the start, and it set the stage for the constitutional guarantees of equality that followed.

Constitutional rights and political empowerment

Constitutional provisions for gender justice

The Constitution makes gender justice a basic commitment. It guarantees equality before the law (Article 14), forbids discrimination on the ground of sex (Article 15(1)), and expressly allows special provisions for women and children (Article 15(3)).

Further provisions deepen this. Article 16 promises equal opportunity in public employment, Article 39(d) equal pay for equal work, Article 42 maternity relief, and Article 51A(e) makes it a duty to renounce practices derogatory to women, a framework that the courts have steadily widened through their judgments.

Political empowerment: the road to representation

Rights on paper still leave women under-represented in politics, which is why reservation has become the chosen route to representation. Women already have reserved seats in local bodies, the panchayats and municipalities, which has brought lakhs of women into elected office.

The landmark step is the Women's Reservation Act of 2023, the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam, the 106th Constitutional Amendment, which reserves one-third of the seats in the Lok Sabha and the state legislative assemblies for women. It was passed by the Lok Sabha on 20 September 2023, a turning point for women's political representation.

How the role of women appears in the UPSC exam

Women, organizations and gender justice in GS Papers I and II

This is a core theme across GS Paper I society and GS Paper II governance. The high-yield points are few and clear.

• Nineteenth-century reform ended sati (1829), allowed widow remarriage (1856) and limited child marriage (1929).
• Women’s organisations such as the All India Women’s Conference (1927) gave women a collective voice.
• The Constitution guarantees gender justice through Articles 14, 15, 15(3), 16, 39(d) and 42.
• The Women’s Reservation Act (2023) reserves one-third of Lok Sabha and Assembly seats for women.

A strong answer traces the arc from reform led by men, through women's own organisations and the freedom struggle, to constitutional rights and reservation, exactly the movement from welfare to representation this article develops.

Sources and Further Reading

• Wikipedia: Women in India
• Wikipedia: Feminism in India
• Wikipedia: All India Women's Conference
• Wikipedia: Women's Reservation Bill
• Ministry of Women and Child Development
• National Commission for Women
• Press Information Bureau
• NCERT: Indian Society (Class XII Sociology)