In India if a man dies it is considered to be from a curse of a woman. His wife or even the young girl that has been promised for marriage is held responsible and becomes an outcast. I recall watching clips of a documentary about a young girl around age seven who was living in city of widows. Although we realize that this seems silly, the belief is strongly rooted in the Indian culture. Many widows are homeless and have nothing. Dr. V. Mohini Giri’s Guild For Service created a safe haven for over 100 of these women giving them job training and a sense of dignity. Take a look at her remarkable work!
For more information on this topic got to http://r-evolver.net/dressedinwhite/
Check out the documentary in Production:
There are 45 million widows in India today—that’s 10% of the country’s adult female population. Half of these live in deplorable conditions, ostracized by their families and communities, casualties of anachronistic customs. As one of the documentary’s interviewees, Harvard professor Martha Chen, writes, “In India, the experience of losing one’s spouse is, overwhelmingly, a female experience [and] the consequences of losing one’s spouse are very different for men and women.” Through profiles of widows across different castes and experiences (and those advocating for their rights), this film peels back the complex layers of historical, political, and religious doctrines, social constructs and ancient customs that lead to widows’ marginalization, and seeks to inspire an alternate movement toward a model of empowerment, self-determination, and self-sufficiency.
Will do! Thank you for giving us more information on such an important topic.
This is so barbaric, what can I do????
If you check out our “Be Empowered” page, we try to list some references there. You can also contact OWN on Oprah.com and see if there are additional new references that the producers of the show have captured.