Women's movement in India and the West

Feminism as a position of marginality in patriarchal society has is roots in the oppression of woman all over the world, with its roots in the Bible and classical literature up to the present time; with its appearance in the writings of major authors such as Milton, Dickens, and Lawrence.  Early Feminists focused on the images of women as depicted in male texts, and later on, upon the “male-construct” language which either denies women the felicity to express their experiences or silences them.  In Vedic India women enjoyed a “fairly satisfactory” position. They had a fair amount of freedom and equality with men in the fields of education and religion. With the passage of time femininity was denied to the divine, and divinity to the feminine. Education too was denied to the woman, thus denying freedom and empowerment.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s lone voice rising against such patriarchal opinions against women in the late 1700s, as in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), can be rightly named the first feminist document. Feminism had emerged as a powerful political force by the late 1960s and 1970s. What is central to feminism is the precept that male or female is biological, and that masculinity or femininity is cultural, which can change in accordance with cultural demands. The aim of feminist work is to alter the traditional, patriarchal way of looking at woman as the weaker sex/ secondary citizen as evident in history, culture or literature. The year 1848, marked the beginning of the long struggle for women’s rights in the United States, which later spread rapidly to Europe. Even as the first decade of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a strong woman’s movement dedicated to reform, the second decade witnessed the birth of feminism. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860), the major feminist academic of the early twentieth century, in her famous book Women and Economics (1898), argued for education and economic independence for women, which would make both the sexes equal. Meanwhile Elizabeth Cady Stanton, the American social activist, abolitionist, and leading figure of the early woman’s movement, gave a clarion call to women at Seneca Falls Convention, to recognize the “solitude of self”; a really organized feminism did not happen until then. The Feminist movement issued a declaration of independence for women, demanding full legal equality, full educational and commercial opportunity, equal compensation, the right to collect wages, and the right to vote. 1920 saw the fruition of the demand; the right to vote, a hard won and crucial landmark in the history of women’s movement.

In the late 1960s, at the height of the black liberation movement, women suddenly began to get together and to seriously address the inequalities and injustices most of them had taken for granted. The woman’s liberation movement (1960) seems to be the offshoot of civil rights movement. It was that feminism had experienced a rebirth especially in the United States.  By the early 1970s the message of women’s liberation had spread from the universities to their surrounding communities and had reached almost everyone around the country. It did raise the consciousness of women. Thus women began to organize politically, to form force groups that eventually changed some laws. Gradually, women’s demands for higher education, entrance into trades and professions, married women’s rights to property, and the rights to vote were accepted. In 1946, UNO established “The UN Commission on the Status of Women”, to protect equal political rights, economic rights, and educational opportunities for women throughout the world. The National Organization for Women (NOW) was formed in 1966.

The impact of feminism in the field of literary criticism has been deep and extensive but literary criticism did not emerge fully formed. Women’s writing has been around for several centuries. Women of all generations had natural felicity to write and put forth their experiences in letters, diaries, songs and stories. Nevertheless, lack of education, financial and personal dependence, fear of social norms, and suppression in patriarchal system urged women to conceal their writing. Education boosted their self-confidence and gave impetus to feminist consciousness, which had been around for several decades. Literature and literary criticism gained importance in the movement as women realised their importance in subverting the male hegemony.

Women’s movements in the West and in India have not followed parallel paths of development in spite of the fact that women all over have questioned their social roles, and the role society and its rules play in the construction of the social identity of the self.  In Pre-independent India, the feeling of nationalism brought about social reform movements, and the struggle against colonial rule intensified. Women’s participation in the freedom struggle developed their self-awareness about their role and rights, which heightened further in independent India. Feminism in the West as the male subjugating the female at all times may not at all times be concurred with in the Indian context because it was men who appeared to have  initiated social reform movements against various social evils. Feminism in India was conceptualized differently from that in the west. The freedom movement and the Nationalist movement witnessed a large number of women opposing child marriage and dowry under the leadership of Gandhi. “The All India Women's Conference” was founded in 1927. This resulted in the introduction of the franchise and civic rights of women in the Indian constitution.

Susie J Tharu and K.Lalita Antarjanam create a separate tradition of Indian Woman’s writing in Woman Writing in India: from 600 B.C. to the present; keeping “issues of gender, class, caste, nation, empire” in mind. A lot of lost, censored and forgotten writing by women have regained validity by their efforts at consciousness-raising not only among the popular public but also among the women themselves. Tharu and Antarjanam state, “We believe that there are powerful alliances feminists of all classes the world over can make, and equally powerful alliances feminists can make with other oppressed groups if we accept the challenges held out to us.” (Tharu,1991:31).

Though there are no written records of the earlier critical writings of women writers in India, the body of poetry by Buddhist nuns or Therigathas in the 6th century BC could be taken as the first ever acknowledged body of critical writing. It was the freedom offered by religion, freedom from marriage and male dominance which gave them the liberty to inscribe their thoughts. In the 12th century AD a volume of religious writings of the medieval mystic and poet Akkamahadevi existed. In 15^th-17th century AD, Islam rule influenced women's literature in India due to the prolific writings by the literate Muslim women who became literate to read the Koran. In the 18th century, the poetry of courtesan in the kingdom of Tanjavur, Muddupalani’s Radhika Santwanam, created a stir among the literary critics. The mid-18th century, at the height of British rule saw the loss of patronage by kings to courtesans as they lost their kingdoms. The courtesans were educated women, skilled poets and artists and thus education became associated with bad women. Consequently women became divested of education but the trend of educating women again picked up in the 19th century due to the reformist movement in India.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the genre of the novel came into being in India in a big way. Women, by the end of the nineteenth century, with access to education contributed to it in a major way. The Indians started writing in regional languages as well as English. They voiced the pain of tradition and narrow mindedness in the Hindu society and campaigned for social reform in their novels. Savitribai Phule was among the earliest who championed the cause of education for women and she herself was a scholar. Among the other women writers who followed her was Pandita Ramabai Saraswati. Tagore’s Streepatra can be regarded as the first feminist work in India. Bankim Chandra Chatterjee’s novel, Rajmohan's Wife (1864) is credited with being the first full length Indian novel in English, while Toru Dutt's unfinished novel, Bianca, published after her death, can be considered the first novel, written by a woman novelist. Two other early women novelists are, Krupabai Satthianadhan (1862-94), who wrote Kamala (1894), Saguna (1895) and Shevantibai M. Nikambe  with her  Ratanbai:A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Young Wife (1895). Tarabai Shinde (1850-1910) a young Marathi housewife wrote Stri-purusha-tulana, Women in A comparison of Men and Women.