Gender Perceptions Towards Disabled Women And Marriage

In accordance with socially expected roles, disabled women experience more restrictions on their daily activities within the domestic sphere. This is to be expected, as the majority of women’s work is centred on the household as opposed to men’s role as primary income earners. The disabled women are not heard complaining so much to the society, this is probably because women are socialized to conform and accept their culturally assigned subservient role from childhood and therefore, may be more accepting of imposed restrictions than men. Women are accustomed to restrictions on their lifestyle. Furthermore, if a woman is forbidden from doing the very activities that ultimately defines her position in the household, her worth is immediately drawn into question.

One man who is married to a disabled women had this to say “My villagers told me that I could not stay in the village. I had to stay outside of my village because I wanted to marry a disabled woman”.

This shows that we have many of the changes in behaviour by families towards disabled women which are reflected in community-based stigma.

A disabled woman who, against all odds has pride in her womanhood narrated this “I was not allowed to walk in the presence of visitors in my matrimonial home, So usually did not I come out of my house when visitors were around”

Such public restrictions of stigmatized behaviour perpetuate fear, reinforcing false beliefs, which in turn, encourage stigmatized behaviour at the household level. Yet again, the common perceptions and beliefs combined with the shock and fear of disability, drive these changes in behaviour.

The key themes that emerge from the relationship between disability and marriage for women in many communities who look at life from the cultural perspective are; Stigma, Perceptions and Behaviour, Marriage and Attitude and Expectations of a wife in the community.

We find that research firms shy away from conducting these kind of research, it nees a dedicated individual to have the guts to do this, and the most important thing is to ensure that we go for the real victims and not just people we assume to be knowing about the topic in question.