As a child, Harshit Gupta binged on various historical war series and it was while watching a show on the history of the country that it struck him — If a woman is capable of giving birth to a child whilst bearing tremendous pain — equivalent to all the bones in her body being crushed at once — why isn’t she good enough to fight in wars, on par with a man? And this question was enough to open a Pandora’s box for him, after which, many more questions followed — ‘Why wasn’t my mother getting paid for the work she was doing? Why wasn’t my father a househusband?’ Questions like these stuck in his innocent mind and stayed with him even when he joined college.
“I began my journey to seek answers to the above questions. I started paying more attention to the social news in newspapers and tried to understand and comprehend the circumstances leading to them. I read more and more of such articles and reports. My research led me to the conclusion that women empowerment is an umbrella under which there is a myriad of issues that need to be addressed,” says the 22-year-old Delhi University graduate.
Thankfully, Harshit’s dream journey didn’t collapse as he grew up and he started Womenite with an objective to transform our male-dominant and patriarchal society, into an egalitarian one. Given the work they do, you would not want to doubt their capabilities. With a team of 100+ members and affiliations to experts and professionals in different fields through global mentorship programmes, Womenite has conducted workshops and sessions in over 100 schools, colleges and other institutions, thus establishing a reach of over 20,000 students.
Why Womenite is the way to go
The workshops’ anecdotes are something that you would not be able to talk freely at home. To change that attitude, Harshit aims to talk about three separate yet overlapping fields — Child Sexual Abuse (CSA), Gender Equality and Menstrual Hygiene.
Being a male-feminist? Not a cakewalk!
Harshit shares that the biggest challenge that he faced was the attitude of people around him when he told them that he is working on women welfare. “When I started Womenite, people used to mock me by saying that I do some kind of business that involves supplying girls at night. I am not even kidding! I face a lot of ridicule for being a feminist, but I tend to not let such things get to me. I have very clear ideas and motives in life, which are not affected by such comments. Until and unless all the problems and issues we are aiming to solve, get solved, we won’t stop,” says the motivated young man.
