Question

write an elecution on "dowry-a venom to womanhood"​

Answer 1

Dowry-a venom to womanhood

The negative consequence of bride-wealth is clearly seen in the debate on terminology. The term “bride-price” has the connotation of a purchase or financial transaction. Though it is always claimed that what we actually have is bride-wealth, in present-day society it is more like a financial transaction. Bride-wealth has been highly commercialized, leading to many negative consequences such as women treated as property, the idea of daughters as investment, come-we-stay marriages, forced marriages, enslavement, family conflict, inferiority, and dehumanization, and gender-based violence. Each of these several categories will be described briefly below.

• Women who can’t pay an expected dowry price or who are unable to make additional payments in the future are often subject to harassment and abuse. Other times, husbands or in-laws throw acid on a woman or set her on fire.  
• “The violence ranges from brutal beatings, emotional torture,  withholding money, throwing them out of the house, keeping them away from their children, keeping mistresses openly,” or in extreme cases, “burning the wife alive,” Savra Subratikaan, a women’s rights worker in New Delhi, told the Pulitzer Center.
• To keep dowry prices low, families also keep girls from going to school, because dowry prices increase with each additional year of formal education.
• The dowry system dehumanizes women by treating them as property — goods that can be exchanged. To make matters worse, the system also casts them as a burden, rather than an asset, to be passed along — a bride’s family pays the groom’s family for the cost of taking care of the bride.  
• Because women are viewed as a financial burden on a family, many parents abort girls or allow them to die after birth. This leads to both the chronic undervaluing of women and a huge gender disparity.
• Dowries were once meant to help women achieve a degree of independence in marriage, according to Varsha Ramakrishnan, a doctor, and journalist focusing on women’s health. A bride’s family would give her some money and this cushion would help her have some control over her decisions.
• The dowry system disadvantages women who are disabled or who have health conditions because a prospective husband’s family will often demand higher payments for marriage.
• Dowries are widespread and oppressive — but that doesn’t mean the practice is so entrenched that it can’t be dismantled.
• There are women’s rights and economic justice movements growing in India that seek to abolish dowries.