An ordinary college girl named Farzana Sithi fiercely arguing about punishment of a sex offender before a police station in Dhaka; a India-wide protest movement over gang rape and murder of Dr Moumita in a hospital in Kolkata; the Home office in the United Kingdom (UK) announcing that actions will be taken in cases of extreme misogyny all in the month of August 2024; and abolition of Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court in the United States (US) in 2022 cancelling women’s control over their body enabling decision on abortion – all these events point to the fact that women’s struggle to enjoy their rights without any infringement and to be liberated from all restraints that reduce them to unequal status is not perhaps over yet. Betty Freidan, an American journalist who wrote the groundbreaking book ‘The Feminine Mystique’ (1963) detected a male-dominated campaign that women could achieve happiness in life only through marriage and motherhood, wondered in 1971: “In the year 2000 will some harassed, guilty daughter of my daughter’s generation have to start all over again?” Were she alive today, it would be a great surprise to her that in the 2020s, feminism remains as an urgent and pressing a concern as in her day.
Lucy Delap, a British historian recently wrote in one of her book: “Hundreds of thousands of women have marched, sang and danced in Chilean, Turkish, Mexican, Brazilian and Spanish cities in recent years to protect violence against women and the inadequate response of police and the courts; Swiss women have struck against unequal pay and cultures of sexism, vividly making their point by ringing cathedral bells and singing in train stations. If it’s women’s will, everything will stand still.”
Eco-feminists have shown how women, as the majority of world’s poor, are bearing the brunt of climate change. Climate justice has emerged as a major feminist issue, fought for by activists such as Honduran Berta Caceres and women’s rights activists like Arundhoty Roy. Women fighting for their rights continue to face violent and deadly state-led and corporate harassment, with activists recently jailed in Saudi Arabia, Russia, Uganda and elsewhere. Feminists have also been viciously targeted as part of the rise of populist and racist politics. Leaked documents in 2019 revealed that the Apple Corporation scripted its digital assistant Siri to never use the word ‘feminism’, even if directly asked about it. Reproductive rights and justice are sharply threatened in Nicaragua, El Salvadot and in a number of states in America.
Betty Freidan’s question in 1971 mentioned above implied that she visualised an end to women’s struggle against injustice and inequality as a result of the feminist movement that followed the publication of her book. Experiences across countries show that while not a holy grail, the causes feminism has fought for have not been totally won, at least not for many of them. What is more, the depth, breadth and diversity of the goals to achieve justice for women continues to grow. Because of these two realities it would be quite a while before the curtain on feminist movement can be rung down, if ever it can. When modern feminist history that spans over one and a quarter century and has many achievements to its credit, why this Sysyphus- like ordeal to which it is fated? A overview of the history of feminist movement and the intellectual discourse that accompanied it may give an answer.
Movement by women demanding that their rights be recognised by society and governments is thought to have come in several ‘waves’ and till the first quarter of the twenty-first century four such waves are believed to have occurred, each with its distinct goals and tactics. But even before the first wave began from the middle of nineteenth century, there were women like Mary Wollstonecraft in England who lived a ‘liberated life’ and wrote perhaps the first feminist book titled ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Women’ (1789) in which she argued that women were as intellectually capable as men and deserving of the same human rights.
FIRST WAVE: According to the history of feminism, the world’s first organised feminist movement was inaugurated in 1848 in Seneca, Falls, New York where Elizabeth Stanton declared that the time had come for the question of women’s wrongs to be laid before the public. The movement demanded voting rights for women, access to higher institutions of education, property rights and marital rights including divorce. The campaign waged by Stanton and her comrades met with belligerence and ridicule from journalists, politicians and churchmen. But the women persevered, calling conferences, delivering speeches, circulating petitions and making journeys to far flung towns and rural districts to address small groups. Soon the cause of women was taken up in western Europe and feminists on both sides of Atlantic followed one another’s activities and formed alliances.
In 1920 the American women achieved the goal of having the right to vote when an amendment to the constitution was made, a triumph of years of collective efforts. But although a great victory, granting of suffrage did not see great many female candidates contesting in elections, nor a separate woman’s vote was decreed. During the lifetime of Stanton women’s property rights and other legal rights like right to divorce and children’s custody were won and enlarged. Other achievements included new employment opportunities and access to higher education. But soon after 1920 the main women’s organisation in America disintegrated and feminist movement became dormant. Though across the Atlantic, British author Virginia Woolf wrote ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) and French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir wrote the groundbreaking book ‘The Second Sex’ (1949) on women’s rights, those were not strictly part of a feminist movement. After making an advent with a splash and achieving the most important of rights, suffrage, and gaining grudging recognition from male establishment in both America and England, feminism seemed to all but disappear.
second wave: The second wave of feminism began after the end of second world war. The United Nations (UN) affirmed the equal rights of men and women in its 1945 Charter; woman suffrage was granted or extended in France, Belgium, Italy, Japan, Venezuela, Korea and other nations; American housewife Betty Freidan’s ‘The Feminine Mystique’ (1963) questioned the traditional role assigned to women by society; president John F Kennedy ordered a Commission to study the status of American women; finally, in the late sixties a vigorous feminist movement began in America and rapidly spread to other countries. The feminists of the sixties set about on two separate paths, the first comprising business and professional women saw them join together to campaign for equality with men in employment; in the other, women belonging to anti-war and civil-rights movements worked in loosely organised groups for shock actions to liberate women from sex-role stereotypes and to reshape sexist institutions. Eventually, these two strands of second wave feminism merged together with a blending of goals and tactics.
Unlike the movement embodying the first wave, the second wave movement had a agenda that encompassed a wider range of issues and because of that attracted a broader constituency. The psychological consequences for women experiencing discrimination were given central importance and examined. In contrast to first wave feminist movement of 19th century, the second wave movement of the ‘60s addressed the issues of childbirth, abortion, rape and female sexuality. Many formerly taboo topics like ‘Our Bodies’ were explored with unprecedented openness. Finally, while the early feminists were internationalists with their contacts confined to developed countries only, the second wave of sixties stretching to early ‘80s, became global, encompassing both developed and developing countries.
The American writer Kate Millet saw sexual politics as the psychological power of sex-role stereotypes, elaborated through institutions of religion, family and marriage to produce a pervasive view of male superiority. Her ‘Manifesto for Revolution’ (1968) claimed: ‘All the historical civilizations are patriarchies: their ideology is male superiority’. She approached ideas of patriarchy through a review of literary figures like Freud, D H Lawrence, Henry Miller and pointed out the presence of ‘enforced heterosexuality’, violence and misogyny implicit in their works. Millet’s idea that opposite sex, gender-binary interactions are socially imposed was to have a powerful influence on lesbian thinking later. Millet’s later book, ‘Sexual Politics’ (1970) became an enduring influence amongst American and British women liberationists .Drawing on Simone de Beauvoir , Millet termed patriarchy a deep- rooted habit of mind that allowed men’ s domination of women to seem normal. Her account of patriarchy was supplemented by feminist theologian Mary Daly who considered Judeo-Christian tradition as a central institution of patriarchy.
An intriguing study around the same time concluded that the greater quantities of oestrone found in human males as compared with females determine their innate differences in aggressiveness, competitiveness, dominance, ability to hunt (for primitive men), ability to hold office and so forth. (L Tiger, Male Dominance, 1970). There is a second category of biology-based reductionist theory according to which sex-role behaviour in some primate species demonstrates male superiority on the basis of which it is concluded that this is the ‘natural behaviour’ for humans. This view has been contested on the ground that anything primates do is not necessarily natural or desirable for humans.
The key concept that drove the second wave feminism was the idea that women are not born but created — the product of social conditioning. First expressed by Simone de Beauvoir in 1949 in her seminal book, The Second Sex, this distinction between biological sex and gender as a social construct had a huge impact on second wave feminist thinking. Arguing that a woman’s biology should not determine her life, feminist writers such as Betty Freidan and German Greer later challenged the image of idealised feminity imposed on women by upbringing, education, and psychology, creating the stereotype.
Second wave feminists were often known as the Women’s Liberation Movement developed in the context of the civil rights activism and anti-war movement of ‘60s. Its proponents saw feminism as a cause for liberation rather than simply a struggle for equal rights. Second wave feminists examined issues of sexuality more deeply than any feminist group before. They argued that it was men who had shaped attitudes towards and opinions about female sexuality because men defined women’s sexuality only in terms of their own desire. Reproductive rights and the ability of women to control their own fertility continued as feminist issues. Feminists campaigned intensively for access to free contraception and woman’s right to legal abortion. Second wave feminism also raised the profile of rape and domestic violence which they alleged men used to control and intimidate women. From the late 1970s American feminists mounted attack on pornography, arguing that it was degradation of women and helped men to see women as object of lust, causing oppression and violence. Equal rights feminists continued the work of their first-wave sisters focusing on achieving equal pay. In Britain equal pay legislation in 1970 followed working -class women’s strike action. By late Seventies, feminists were applying their ideas to many issues, arguing that all were feminist issues.
During the second wave feminism the feminist’s agenda was broadened to include women’s personal experience about how they were viewed and treated in home and society. They enquired into the roots of women’s oppression with a view to gaining liberation. Simone de Beauvoir’s book, ‘The Second Sex’ provided the most significant theoretical basis to second wave of feminism, even though it was a book on philosophy and she was not a feminist- activist at the time (1949). Her book came between the end of first wave feminism and the beginning of the second wave in the 1960s. The central finding in the book is that womanhood or feminity is a social construct and it underlies the causes of women’s oppression. In the book she explains that women are defined in relation to men and says that women are simply what men decrees, and is defined and differentiated with reference to men and not him with reference to her. Man is the subject, woman is the ‘Other’, the ‘Object’, she writes. In the first part of the book she explores biology, psychology, and historical materialism to find out the reasons why women have a subordinate status and she finds none. These disciplines explain differences between the two sexes but find no justification for women’s second class status. She recognises particular processes of a woman’s biology — puberty, menstruation, pregnancy, and menopause — but is not convinced they establish a fixed and inevitable destiny for her. In the second part of the book she goes through history, tracing changes in social custom and finds that women are not born feminine but that femininity is constructed for them by patriarchal society. She concludes that no biological, psychological or economic fate determines the figure that the female presents in society. She argues that it is civilisation that has created the feminine creature whom she considers intermediate between male and eunuch. According to her, until the age of 12 the young girl is as strong as her brother and shows the same intellectual capacity. Then she spells out how the young girl is conditioned to adopt what is presented to her as femininity, and she faces a conflict between her autonomous existence and her objective self when she is taught that to please others, particularly men, she must make herself the object rather than the subject and she must renounce her autonomy. Simone de Beauvoir believes women should seek autonomy and liberate themselves through fulfilling work, intellectual activity, sexual freedom and social change that would include economic justice. The value she places on the personal experiences of women encouraged consciousness rising within the second wave feminism. Conceptually, de Beauvoir’s most important contribution is to distinguish between sex and gender. She does not choose the word ‘gender’ instead of ‘sex’ in her book but she explains the difference between the two. Her argument that biology is not destiny, and her explanation of gender as distinct from sex or biology, still resonate through feminist discourse.
The second wave of feminism saw issues of equal pay for equal job settled in America and England in the ‘60s, contraception available to women in the West by ‘70s, abortion rights granted under law in the ‘60s in the UK and ‘70s in America, lesbianism was adopted as a agenda of feminist groups on both sides of Atlantic in the ‘70s and rape was shown as assertion of male power. Of these rape and lesbianism along with transgender issues spilled over into third and fourth waves of feminism. When Susan Brownmiller wrote ‘Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape’ in 1975, rape was kept in the closet and considered to be rare. The prevailing opinion was men being driven by biology to need sex it was up to women to protect her or control male lust.
Since the ‘70s many countries have updated rape prevention laws, making punishment more stringent. Best practices in courts, hospitals and media have been promoted for the benefit of survivors. Centres and groups that provided shelter and legal support to survivors in the seventies have continued their activities in America, UK and Australia, demonstrating the persistence of the crime. Mangan Lucy is her ‘The Feminism Book’ (2019) writes: “Despite some positive steps, sexual violence remains a hidden, or barely acknowledged problem in many countries.” [To be continued]
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