WORKING-CLASS WOMEN 147
on grounds of sex. Even then it is everybody's knowledge that women in all fields of life are treated as inferior partners.
All the same, one observes a number of programmes carried out by different organizations which have no relevance to the existing conditions. In observation of the International Women^s Year, there has been a series of gimmicks like post offices manned by women only, issue of stamps showing dancers, putting women police to guard women's meetings, a woman scientist to preside over the Science Congress, and release of long-term women convicts on the birthday of Indira Gandhi. These create apprehensions about the real aims and objects of the whole business, None of this fanfare takes into account the majority of women who are in the countryside and are illiterate, the women workers who have not heard about the Women's Year at all, poor housewives who are completely engrossed in the housework and looking after the children. To reach these women and make them alive to their rights is a very big job, indeed. And unless every democratically minded person takes up the challenge knowing fully well that it demands a change in his own outlook itself, the cause of the International Women's Year is most likely to be rung out with 1975.
Women Workers
Although a small fraction of working women in the country, women workers in organized industry have an important part to play in changing society by taking up the cause as women and as mothers. Therefore, while giving due consideration to the whole problem of women's emancipa< tion, this article deals with the question of women workers in various industries, their employment and unemployment, working conditions and related problems.
Women employed in the organized sector during March 1971 to March 1973 were as follows:
March 1971 19.24 lakhs March 1972 20.15 lakhs March 1973 21.35 lakhs
Including all the states and union territories, the public sector employed about 10.05 lakhs women at the end of March 1973 out of a total of 21.35 lakhs in the organized sector. The state governments accounted for the largest number in the public sector at 4.23 lakhs; local bodies, central government and government establishments accounted for 3.62 lakhs, 0.85 and 1.36 lakhs respectively.
The 21.3:5 lakh women formed part of 188.24 lakhs in the payroll of the organized sector at the end of March 1973. Women employees thus constituted only about 11 per cent. As observed in the above statistics, the increase in the^employment of women in 1973 was about 1.20 lakhs or 5.5 per cent over the previous year, accounted for mainly by jobs for middle-class women. During the last 15 years, the employment of middle-class women as clerks, teachers, doctors and nurses is on the increase.