The predominant ideological positions within the movement are:  Liberal Feminism, Radical Feminism, Marxist Feminism, Socialist  Feminism and Post-Colonial/Post-Modern Feminism.(1)

Liberal Feminism

Liberalism emphasised the right of all individuals to pursue their self-interest and the duty of the state to enable them to do so. It stressed that men and women (all citizens) should have equal rights and women should get equal opportunities.
The liberal feminist ideology, encourages and makes it possible for women to enter all fields including so-called “male” professions. It speaks strongly for the individual woman’s rights and legal reforms and advocates networking and services for women -like childcare. The declaration of the UN Decade for Women and the  mobilisation of women during the Indian freedom struggle are examples of contribution by the liberal feminists.(2)

This approach however fails to challenge the existing structure and systems that keep women as subordinates. Nor does it question the inequities of the existing social order like unequal wealth distribution. Another criticism of liberalism has been, its tendency to protect the “personal” or the “private”. Struggles of women has shown that in order to break out of the cycle of violence and discrimination, women have had to come out and make these issues public.

Radical Feminism/The Existentialist Approach

Radical Feminism has historical linkages with the writings and thinking of the “second wave of feminism” in the West like those of Shulamith Firestone and Kate Millet. It stresses that the conflict between men and women is the primary contradiction in society. This approach holds that all structures in society are based on male power and therefore Men as a class are the main opponents of women.

It is this thesis that provides the critique of sexual violence as an issue of power and systemic oppression. Radical feminists have also succeeded in moving the debate from just “Ms” and voting rights to a dismantling of patriarchy itself. They assert that the “personal is political” and that the personal domain of a woman’s life is linked to the outside world. Radical feminism also raises the issue of sexuality, sexual-orientation and lesbian rights.(3)

The critique of this position is that it is unconcerned about the difference among women - which are based on class, caste, race etc. Radical Feminism stresses the biological differentiation (sex) rather than social categorisation (gender). Critics point out that   other categories of inequality should form an integral part of the analysis of the situation and thereby influence the approach.

Marxist Feminism

The ideology of Marxist Feminism draws its inspiration from Marxism, especially Engels’ important work on “Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State” (1884) [B.M00.E4]. It situates the women’s question in the antagonistic relationship between classes. Marxist feminists see their struggle essentially as one against capitalist systems of male domination and that liberation of the proletariat includes liberation of women.

Marxist Feminism has emphasised collective struggle against public forms of patriarchy and violence and the link between patriarchy and capitalism. They have taken up the rights of the working women like equal wages, job-security, betterment of the workplace. (4)

However Marxist feminists are accused of being blind to the sexual division of labour. Further the discourse of class struggle is mainly in terms of power and the domination of the liberating class — the “proletariat”. There is also the means and ends debate, where feminists have been as concerned with the means, as the end. For example, Marxist feminists are very active on issues of sexual harassment and unequal relations in the public sphere, whereas such incidents among party-members or within organisations tend to be underplayed “in the larger interest of the party”.

Neo-Marxist Perspective And Socialist Feminism

The socialist or the Neo-Marxist approach, goes beyond classical Marxism, and places women’s liberation in the wider context of transformation of the mode of production, economically as well as culturally. Patriarchy is placed alongside socialist concerns of class exploitation, private property, and the vision of an equal society.

Patriarchy, writes Gabriele Dietrich, is the “appropriation and control of women’s labour, sexuality and fertility”. This appropriation takes place first of all in the family - where a woman’s work, time, movement and body are not hers to control. Further, patriarchy has permeated the production process (sexual division of labour), political life (male dominated political structures in which women can only survive as ‘honorary men’), religion (barring women from priesthood, reinforcement of patriarchy through religious teaching), and the media (use of women’s body in advertisements, obscene films, etc.).

Socialist feminists have attempted to integrate the women’s movement with other class-based movements. They have come in for criticism and comment for tiptoeing around issues like the problems of sexuality and for being too “middle-of-the-road”. They have also been criticised for their tendency to understand gender, (as also other identities like caste and ethnicity), purely within the larger framework of class(5).

Patriarchy, like other systems and structures of dominance, is about power and subordination. Women’s experience of subordination is not just limited to their class positions. Feminists have extended the Marxist understanding of labour to include domestic labour and also other social labour namely maintenance and reproduction of the class as a whole. Women are expected to re-produce another generation of women to continue this maintenance function.

Harris and Young explore three aspects of the concept of reproduction.(6)

Social Reproduction: the process by which the conditions that maintain a particular social system are recreated and perpetuated.

Reproduction of Labour: care and socialisation of children and maintenance of adult individuals who will fit into the social structure of society.

Human or Biological Reproduction includes not only bearing of children, but also reproducing the relationships of marriage, kinship, fertility and sexuality.
 

The Left and Feminism
To sum up the ideological beliefs, we have three basic positions: the liberal stream, the left and the autonomous women’s groups. The liberal stream is mainly concerned with equality between men and women within an existing society, abolishing feudal patriarchy, but without challenging existing economic, political or social structures. The left stream calls for a questioning of these structures, and a transformation of the system itself. In India, most feminists have a vision of transformation of society where all forms of oppression cease, and therefore subscribe to one or the other strand of “socialist feminism”. They range from the traditional left – the CPI, CPM, CPI-MLs, Trotskyist to the social-democrat and the New Left.(7)(8)

The left parties have mobilised women of all classes in their struggles, though class was the predominant qualifying factor. A typical response then was that of the communist leader, Tara Reddy. While talking about the famous Warli uprising in Thana against bonded labour and sexual exploitation of the women by the landlords, Tara Reddy said “Warli women and girls participated in the struggle in a big way along with their men. There was not much difference in the level of political consciousness between men and women. But at that time women’s issue as a separate issue was not discussed. The question did not arise because the primary issue was that of exploitation of adivasis. Women’s problems were not separated from the general exploitation. Class issue was the main issue and women participated as part of a class. Women’s issues and class issues became one, at that level of exploitation.” (quoted in Saldhana, I 1986 p. WS48)”(9)

Over the last three decades, the left parties have attempted to understand and come to terms with patriarchy in its historical setting and its complex and problematic relations of production. They have also organised protests around issues of family violence, caste rape - especially of peasant women by upper caste landlords. They have denounced dowry and fundamentalist laws harmful to women. Vimala Farooqi says that since 1971, two important women-related issues of the CPI have been: “How to draw/attract more women to our struggle/movement, and - how to change attitudes of male comrades to encourage women to join the political struggle  the party.” The year 1975 saw the CPI(M) organise a conference on women’s issues in Trivandrum, Kerala.

Despite their involvement in women’s issues, women’s fronts and organisations of the CPI and CPI(M) have often steered clear of calling themselves feminist and of using terms like patriarchy. This is because they wish to avoid being labelled anti-men, a common (mis)conception attached to feminism. While the Left looked at women and the dominant production relations, it often failed to study patriarchy’s long history and its manifestation within Left politics and parties.
 
While socialist feminist thinking has been an important current within the autonomous women’s movement in India, Vanaik observes that discussion and debate around “practical and theoretical linkages between socialism and feminism has significantly declined as the movement has grown.” He further states that although the women’s movement in India is left-of-centre, and “though feminists who consider themselves socialists continue to constitute a goodly proportion of the leading activists, Indian feminism also seems increasingly less influenced by socialism than perhaps at anytime in its young history.”(10) (11)

Postmodernism and Feminism

Most modernist theories undertake to discover general all-encompassing principles that can be used to explain natural as well as social reality. Postmodernism basically has a deconstructive relationship with these modernist theories that we inherit; meaning post-modernism points out that both, working to reform these theories or adopting a separatist position and moving com-pletely away from them, are insufficient. Rather the effort should be to call to question the enterprise itself. Post-modernism maintains that all knowledge is “situated knowledge” and is governed by the perspective of the knowers. These perspectives are multiple and interdisciplinary. Therefore all concepts are “contestable” and language itself is non-neutral. Groups that are ‘objectified’ by most studies- women, colonials, peasants and ethnic-minorities i.e. the subalterns- began to orient the studies in terms of values which pertain to their origins and not just get assimilated in these studies.(12)

From about the beginning of the 1990’s, postmodernism and feminism entered into a relationship that many believe is beneficial to both. Put rather simply postmodernism forces feminist theorising to look at the politics of difference (that different subjects are placed in distinct historical positions), while feminism has introduced into postmodernism the politics of voice and representation. Feminist and postmodern intellectuals therefore made visible structures of domination and hold that the consensus that seems to exist is dependent on exclusion of those who would dissent if they were given a voice, which they are not.

The critics of postmodernism are many.  “Postcolonial and antiracist intellectuals such as Edward Said and Cornel West  view postmodernism as without any emancipatory dynamics of its own: it is “reaction” of the kind that seeks to preemt and coopt.” They along with others feel that postmodernism seeks to accommodate by depolitising the challenge to the order that the subaltern voices represent. Another criticism is that postmodern intellectuals often declare that their claims are right because they are more virtuous, more in line with contemporary standards of justice. More serious allegations are that the postmodernist tends to overemphasise cultural relativism, setting back years of battle that have waged to promote universalising of human-rights, and it is women’s rights that are often snatched away under the guise of “culture and tradition”. (13)

Today the feminist movement, with all it various strands and leanings, provides a possible common platform for many diverse actors and groups (environmental, trade unions, church-based groups, those working for Dalit liberation) including political party fronts and traditional foes (CPM and CPI-ML). The Movement has also greatly increased its horizontal and vertical reach. The agenda too is fairly diverse and broad. The question is can there be a convergence of such diverse forces? Will the multi-pronged approaches and strategies be able to take up the new challenges posed by conservatism, globalisation, social and environmental degradation?
 

Differing Perceptions

The seeming differences in our approach come from varying formulations of women’s oppression, its causes and the strategies for and meaning of liberation. These generally emanate from the vantage point of that particular position, as well as the proposed action that seems more relevant to that particular section. There is the continuing academic-activist or theory-practice divide. To the activist, feminism is about action and struggle against patriarchal structures and manifestations such as violence against women. To the academic, feminism is about challenging knowledge systems that are dominant and creating new theories of society, nature and so on.

Gail Omvedt speaks of feminism as an organising concept, which is not concerned with “movements of women that may be only for some reform or upward mobility within an established structure.” She advocates a feminist movement that, while “based on women as the most exploited group, often include both men and women in fighting for a basic change of patriarchal structures.”

For her feminism is “an awareness of patriarchal control, exploitation and oppression at the material and ideological level, of women’s labour, fertility and sexuality, in the family, at the place of work and in society in general, and action by women and men to change the situation.”(14)

Lorna Barret says feminism is “a label that gives us a life orientation, it enables us to challenge unjust structures, to look ahead with hope.” (15)

Feminism stands for “equality, for wholeness and creative energy in life. It opposes patriarchal models of appropriation and the ‘use and throw’ pattern of human relationships, of development and historical progression that is threatening to destroy our future today,” according to Ilina Sen. (16)

Kamla Bhasin says quite simply that a feminist is “anyone who recognises the existence of sexism, male domination and patriarchy and who takes some action against it.”(17)

Almost each woman will have a differently nuanced understanding of feminism; based largely on personal experience, interest and belief. This is, in fact, one of the greatest strengths of the women’s movement that it is able to accommodate and allow for very distinct and even contradictory interpretation.

The Diversity within
The women’s movement has always prided itself on its plurality. Yet at times, the differences seem antagonistic.

There are challenges relating to caste and religion (seen in the section on identity politics). Important differences revolve around urban-rural, activist-academic, mainstream-peripheral, etc. Specific issues have been also raised by disabled women, single women, lesbians and bisexuals, and women with subtly different notions of Self. Some of these differences drive wedges among women. Their common identity as “women” sometimes proves insufficient to bring about solidarity, let alone a unity.

Another problem has been the tendency to label others. Labels are often used to dismiss people and to stifle enquiry. People are pigeon-holed and compartmentalised as being “radical” or “bourgeois feminists” or “post-modernists” or something else. Most groups and individuals resist being labelled. Some reject “isms” as traps that people fall into, that blind and box them.(18)
Sometimes though, labels help to typify the theory behind the approach or understand relative positions on the gender question. It is a shorthand description of where one is coming from. And if used positively, labels can lead to better understanding, networking and joint action across divergent positions. One of the biggest tasks for the movement is to accommodate differences and represent the diversity of interests and identities.

There are other kinds of distinctions and questions of location that the Movement has had to deal with. The autonomous women’s movement in India is often criticised for its middle class character. However, over the years some of the focus has shifted to the struggles of women at the grassroots and to NGOs working with them. These organisations work with both women and men around ‘life’ issues of livelihood, access and rights to natural resources, health, water, sanitation, literacy and so on. Gender related questions are usually subordinate to survival issues. As one Dalit activist remarked,“with survival at stake due to poverty, marginalisation and discrimination of the community, domestic violence is not really an issue.”

Elements of the women’s movement have now, begun to widen feminist discourse and theory to accommodate material issues of survival and struggle of grassroots women, who, more often than not, feel alienated within the urban middle-class dominated situation.

Another division which causes apprehension and even bitterness within the movement, is the niggling suspicion that it is the more “elite” feminists who are able to hop on to the international circuits, at the cost of the many rural and tribal women. Often, academic or middle class women represent grassroots voices or speak about mass movements. The issue of Representation is now being seriously addressed within the movement. There is also an awareness on how those from the grassroots who achieve higher visibility can get co-opted into a circle made of the privileged few and that they slowly lose touch with their constituencies.

Another criticism that has been levelled, against the movement as a whole is that while individual “cases” serve as rallying points to push an agenda forward, the movement is insensitive to the individual woman. Where are Mathura, Rameeza , Shah Bano and others today?

If women’s groups are to work at the grassroots and develop a mass based praxis, they will have to address these issues. Many have begun the search. Some within NGOs, others without. We need to understand, and appreciate the role of voluntarism and mobilisation and the larger effort to tackle issues of poverty, oppression and inequality. More specifically we need to appreciate the priorities and concerns of local women, how they address their issues, and how their problems are connected to the larger context of women and development.

For the Movement to move ahead, these differences must be acknowledged, discussed, allowed full development and expression  so that it may speak many tongues and use myriad social and cultural idioms. There is no one path, nor is it necessarily desirable. The questions are: Can we maintain our individual traditions, and beliefs along with our plurality and diversity, without compromising on our ideals and principles? How does one reconcile major differences? And how does one work with political goals opposed to our own?
 

Constituents of the Women’s Movement
The late seventies and eighties were characterised by the emergence and proliferation of autonomous women’s groups which, having grown out of a tradition of socialist feminism, sought to evolve another politics and praxis, through the credo  “personal is political”. They have pushed what was hitherto considered “private” and “domestic” into the public and political arena. Initially, they focussed specifically on issues of personal violence like dowry murders, rape, wife beating, sexual harassment. Marked by widespread demonstrations, protests and extended campaigns, this movement challenged at a fundamental level the gender bias, not only in state institutions like the judiciary and in social institutions like the family, community and media but also in progressive political parties that failed to look at the specificity of the “women’s question”.

Critical of the deeply hierarchical structures and dogma of the left politics that many of the women had been part of (and therefore sought autonomy from), these groups also experimented with new ways of organising and working with non-hierarchical and more collective ways of functioning. Although accused of being ‘middle-class’ in nature and lacking a mass base, this stream of the women’s movement deeply challenged the general gender-blind perspectives, politics and programmes of all movements and organisations working for social transformation including trade-unions, political parties, grassroots organisations, mass movements and NGOs.

Apart from the autonomous women’s organisations, the women’s movement specifically has woven itself around varied  “types” of organisations.(19) (20) Some of these are:

•  Women’s groups controlled or connected with political parties, such as women’s fronts of centrist bourgeois parties, mainstream Communist and Maoist Left parties. “Such has been the impact of the autonomous women’s movement that right-wing parties have been spurred to highlight women’s fronts and the Left and Centre parties have been forced to view autonomous women’s groups with greater courtesy and consideration than were extended to them in the beginning.”(15) So today political parties of all ideological hues have a women’s wing, besides substantial female membership, and some women in leadership positions.
• Voluntary women’s groups, that are generally part of the broader NGO structure, funded by agencies abroad or by the State. They cover the entire spectrum from traditional social welfare and/or self-help type organisations that do not go into issues of feminist consciousness raising to others who are more focused on women’s development and to those who work towards consciousness raising and mobilisation
• Rural grassroots organisations, with women organised around basic rights, like water, land, housing, which has also led to greater consciousness and struggle by women against issues like wife-beating and alcoholism. Urban slum women too have rallied around similar points. These also include self-employed women’s groups.
• Women’s wings of movements, like the fish-workers struggle, peasant movements and the Dalit movement. A specific example of this would be Sharad Joshi’s Shetkari Sanghatana in Maharashtra, which has raised women’s issues to maximise rural support for farmer’s interests.
• Women’s research and resource centres, and other institutions, that are oriented towards women’s issues and involved in policy research. Such institutions act as support organisations where information is made available and accessible. They are largely urban-based.
• Professional women’s organisations such as doctors, nurses, lawyers, journalists, etc.

Women’s Studies
Colleges, universities and the academia in general have been strong recruiting grounds for the women’s movement. Many students have immersed themselves in women’s issues and protests  on and off campuses. These efforts lead to an entire discipline, with departments in most Indian universities being carved out by feminists, women academics and the women’s movement.
“The development of a discourse on women in the academia appears inextricably connected to the development of the women’s movement. Indeed, some believe that women’s studies is a response to the need to provide the women’s movement with a theoretical foundation,”(21) .

Women’s studies concentrates on “gender” as a category of analysis in the same manner that social scientists have studied caste, religion, class and status groups. Further, women’s studies has re-examined existing methodologies and theoretical constructs, and has widened the intellectual framework and contexts of gender questions. It is naturally interdisciplinary in approach and allows for an eclectic understanding of social phenomena. More importantly it sources information and perspectives from the informal, non-positivist arena – women, the subaltern, the oppressed, the hitherto unheard.

In India and in other Third World countries feminists have also worked to establish non-western reference points and are taking up the challenges posed by new developments like Globalisation.

However with the mindless proliferation of women’s studies courses being offered by colleges and universities in recent times, questions are being raised on whether it is being dished out as another “soft option” for girls or being reduced to another professional “career” choice. While in the initial stages the growth of women’s studies as an academic discipline was a cause of celebration, today there is a growing scepticism as to what these courses actually aim to achieve and if it has genuinely contributed to the awareness in society of the status of women. Women’s studies has also come under fire from academics who feel that incorporating it into “existing disciplines as courses or papers may be preferable to marginalisation (some call it ghettoisation) as a relatively new, independent area of study.”

There are also fears that these studies could be very localised, and hence narrow and limiting. Age-old dilemmas of theory and praxis also persist. Yet the movement has benefitted a great deal from theoretical and documentation work done in the departments; who in turn have borrowed and learnt from the movement. There is an interchange of ideas, information, and people between the movement and academia. A symbiotic relationship between the two continues.
 

The Beijing Conference

Huairou will go down in history.
To Beijing with hope!
World Conference: A Major Chance for Women.
Beijing 1995: Or What Remains To Be Done For Women.

These then were some of the headlines that the Beijing Conference provoked. The Fourth World Conference on Women and Development which flowed from the earlier three held in Mexico, 1975, Copenhagen 1980, and Nairobi 1985, marked a watershed in the history of the women’s movement. It was the single largest meeting of women ever (over 30,000) from all over world.

It was viewed differently by different women’s organisations. For many women in the movement the Conference was a window of opportunity for international lobbying and advocacy. Others saw it as part of a continuum of work, that they were already involved in.

Most participants remarked that it was an encouragement and a  reminder that there were “so many of us”. That we were moving towards a critical mass of feminists, who were thinking, talking, arguing and working to achieve a different society. It was a time to connect and network with other women engaged in similar work. It also represented a chance to learn of new issues and to situate local struggles in the global context.

The contingent from India consisted of over 170 women including  grassroots level activists. While some attended the official UN Conference, many went to Huairou, the site of the NGO forum. The workshops at the latter were designed to promote exchanges between academics, policy-makers, extension workers, and activists. It was a time to rekindle feminist visions in all its plurality, to recognise the universal oppression of women and to express solidarity with other struggles.

The Forum was also faced with the challenge of appreciating the differences in needs, problems and perceptions of women from different countries, and circumstances, and with diverse concerns. For example; some African women staged a walkout on a discussion on human rights when a lesbian from North America spoke of human rights violations against her. Women from developing countries felt the debate on issues like debt cancellation and primary health had to be accorded high priority. Many questioned the “universalism” of the human rights, and said that rights have to be interpreted from the specificity of culture and civilisation without falling into the trap of the cultural relativist. Academics reported that they were under-represented and misunderstood. Disabled women felt they were left at the periphery of the happenings.

Nevertheless, most women did say that they participated in something special, the import of which, some said, did not strike them fully until much later.(22)

In the run-up to the Conference, many regional and local workshops were conducted. Preparatory meetings were held to narrow the gap between the international fora and the grassroots. Indian NGOs and groups also set out to reflect women’s positions on various issues and to highlight demands and responses to government policies, and programmes. They also worked to facilitate the participation of many different women at the regional and national consultations and at the International Conference. The Draft Country Report and Draft Platform for Action(23) were studied in-depth and a lobby team was formed to incorporate the interests of the most marginalised women in the final report.(24)(25) A National Committee of Women was also formed and at the Conference of Commitment they presented an eight-point agenda to the government. The overall effort was to build capabilities, confidences, skills and increase the visibility of issues of concern to women.

The Conference also came in for a lot of flak. Some noted that  NGOs lacked unity and a clear strategy. Others emphasised that they failed to capitalise on this opportunity.The more skeptical critics argued that the whole exercise just served the jet-setting classes and that all the advocacy to change a comma and a dot in the conference documents did nothing to change the lives and realities of most women. Conferences like these, they charged,  only create an illusion that “real” women had been involved in decision-making, and allowed Conference hoppers to feel that they were doing a worthy job, without soiling their hands. Grassroots level workers who attend these Conferences, they maintained, were sucked into a privileged inner circle.

Despite the serious limitations of these International Conferences  most women felt that the Cause would have been ill-served if they opted out of it completely. The struggle was to get a foot-hold and more, in influencing policies that negatively affect all women (the poor and the dispossessed more than the others).(26) The document which was a product of these Conferences, could be used as a tool to highlight these issues and push the Establishment to take note  of them and to gain greater legitimacy for the many struggles that women all over the world have waged and continue to wage.