Question

Article on Women's Movement in India

Answer 1

The term “women’s movement” does not refer to any one single, unified movement, or entity. It is made of several movements based on a wide range of issues. It involves using of different approaches at various points of time. It is a term used in recognition of the “feel that all these movements” are working in some way or the other towards the eman­cipation of women.

These movements aim at reformulation of public life, the educational sphere, the workplace, and the home; in short, they aim at total transformation of soci­ety. Women’s movements can be termed as conscious and collective movements that try to deal with a set of problems and needs specific to women. These needs or problems are, in turn, created by a socio-cultural system that categorically puts them at a disadvantage in comparison to men. According to Urvashi Butalia.Thousands of years ago, in 800 BC, legend has it that Gargi, a woman philosopher led a philosophical tournament in the court of the Hindu king Janaka. She challenged a newly arrived competitor, Yajnavalkya, a man. She is reported to have said: “Just as an expert archer attacks his enemy with piercing arrows, held at hand, so I assail you with two test questions. Answer them if you can”.

Defeated by the questions, Yajnavalkya took recourse to the same answer men have used for thousands of years: He told Gargi to-simply shut up. Thousands of years later, the number of challenges thrown up by women to men who have for long held the reigns, of power, has multiplied many times over.

There is no lon­ger one Gargi, standing alone in an assembly of men and posing two questions. Instead, Gargi’s descendents run into thousands. They have thousands of questions, and they no longer stand-alone. Nor are they any longer willing to be shut up. In general, resistance and protests against unjust structures of power and the insti­tutions of patriarchy and patriarchal oppression of women begins with the oppressions themselves. These oppressions are ever-present and ubiquitous (widespread).

Conscious rejection of injustice and resistance to the practices of oppression generally pass through phases of open manifestation of resistance and latent phases (when overt resistance is not visible). These phases depend upon the historical experi­ences of societies.

These forms of resistance—manifest and latent—determine the methods, strategies, and techniques adopted by women to fight for their identity, dignity, self-defence, and social justice. Sometimes, women’s movements contain a “zone of silent war” waged by women to gain control over men in everyday life.

Women have put up resistance because of generally silent and unorganized disenchantments, suppressed feelings of rejection, and of gender injustice in the patriarchal societies. These factors have led women to oppose erosion of identity at an individual level, and can result in an organized outburst taking the form of manifest women’s move­ments.They may remain dormant in terms of organized movements, but active at the individual level, and make a conscious use of a whole range of methods such as arts, ruses and moves against men. These methods are generally practised by women on men for coping with the day-to-day situations of oppression.

For any individual resistance to become an organized open movement, it has to pass through different stages of maturation. This process involves sharing of individual experiences of resistance with other individuals who are placed in similar life situations. This also includes a phase where the resistance is made obvious or becomes an exterior issue, and a collective group emerges.

An ideology that rejects the negatively defined authority, leadership, mobilization, and communication emerges. The progress from an unorganized and silent individual resistance to an open and organized women’s move­ment is uneven and difficult. It is also difficult for an individual resistor to become a part of an organized movement.

In the everyday life situations of women in the male-dominated world of most contemporary societies, the art of resistance at the individual level, as well as organized collective movements coexist and even work simultaneously, though they may be con­flicting practices and processes.The women’s studies of the 1970s and 1980s shifted focus from the perspective of family, marriage, socialization, or social status to treating them as autonomous human beings. The emphasis today is on women’s identity, consciousness, their subjectivity, and the bio-psychological foundations of their personality. Hope it will help you