The Everlasting Shackle of Patriarchy:

From Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain to Anita Desai

Abstract

It is now over one hundred years that the women are fighting for their emancipation, equal rights and right to decision making from their male counterparts. However, this long struggle seems hardly providing equal rights to women, let alone the emancipation that they seek mainly. Although there has been significant change how women lead their life today from one hundred years ago, the inherent structure of patriarchy still suppresses them. This paper intends to scrutinize the condition of women in selected writing of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, a major proponent of feminism during the then British Bengal, and Anita Desai, a contemporary postcolonial writer on feminism in India. The objective of this paper is to prove that the women cannot attain emancipation from patriarchy even if they are provided education and economic freedom.