Struggle for women’s equality and rights

The Social Basis of Gender Inequality

Gender inequality is often mistaken as natural because of the obvious biological and physical differences between men and women. But scholars have shown that these inequalities are social, not natural. There is no biological reason why so few women hold public power, or why women generally receive a smaller share (or no share) of family property in most societies.

The strongest evidence comes from societies that break the common pattern. If women were biologically unfit to be inheritors or heads of families, how did matrilineal societies — like the Nairs of Kerala used to be, and the Khasis of Meghalaya still are — function for centuries? How have women been successful farmers and traders in many African societies? There is nothing biological about the inequalities that mark relations between women and men. Gender is therefore a form of social inequality and exclusion, like caste and class, but with its own specific features.

The Women’s Question in Modern India

The women’s question arose in modern India as part of the nineteenth-century middle-class social reform movements. These movements varied from region to region. They are called middle-class reform movements because many reformers came from the newly emerging, Western-educated Indian middle class. These reformers were often inspired both by the democratic ideals of the modern West and by a deep pride in India’s own democratic traditions of the past. Many used both these resources to fight for women’s rights.

The textbook gives illustrative examples from four major reform efforts:

• The anti-sati campaign led by Raja Rammohun Roy in Bengal
• The widow remarriage movement in the Bombay Presidency, where M.G. Ranade was a leading reformer
• Jyotiba Phule’s simultaneous attack on caste and gender oppression
• The social reform movement in Islam led by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan

Raja Rammohun Roy and the Anti-Sati Campaign

Raja Rammohun Roy’s attempts to reform society, religion, and the status of women can be taken as the starting point of nineteenth-century social reform in Bengal. A decade before establishing the Brahmo Samaj in 1828, Roy undertook the campaign against sati — the first women’s issue to receive public attention.

Rammohun Roy’s ideas represented a curious mixture of Western rationality and an assertion of Indian traditionality. Both trends can be located in the overarching context of a response to colonialism. He attacked the practice of sati on the basis of two grounds simultaneously:

• Appeals to humanitarian and natural rights doctrines
• Appeals to Hindu shastras

The Widow Remarriage Movement

The deplorable and unjust treatment of Hindu upper-caste widows was a major issue taken up by social reformers. M.G. Ranade used the writings of scholars such as Bishop Joseph Butler, whose Analogy of Religion and Three Sermons on Human Nature dominated the moral philosophy syllabus of Bombay University in the 1860s. At the same time, Ranade’s writings — titled The Texts of the Hindu Law on the Lawfulness of the Remarriage of Widows and Vedic Authorities for Widow Marriage — elaborated the shastric sanction for widow remarriage.

Jyotiba Phule: Attacking Caste and Gender Together

While Ranade and Rammohun Roy belonged to one kind of nineteenth-century upper-caste and middle-class social reform, Jyotiba Phule came from a socially excluded caste. His attack was directed against both caste and gender discrimination. He founded the Satyashodak Samaj, with its primary emphasis on “truth seeking.” Phule’s first practical social reform efforts were to aid the two groups considered lowest in traditional Brahmin culture: women and untouchables.

Sir Syed Ahmed Khan and Reform in Muslim Society

A similar trend of drawing upon both modern Western ideas and sacred texts characterised Sir Syed Ahmed Khan’s efforts to reform Muslim society. He wanted girls to be educated, but within the precincts of their homes. Like Dayanand Saraswati of the Arya Samaj, he stood for women’s education but sought a curriculum that included:

• Instruction in religious principles
• Training in the arts of housekeeping and handicrafts
• Rearing of children

This may appear very stereotypical today. However, once rights such as education for women were accepted, it started a process that finally made it impossible to confine women to only some kinds of education.

Women’s Own Voices: Early Feminist Writings

It is often assumed that social reform for women’s rights was entirely fought for by male reformers and that ideas of women’s equality are alien imports. Two books written by women show how wrong both assumptions are.

Stree Purush Tulana (Comparison of Men and Women) was written in 1882 by a Maharashtrian housewife, Tarabai Shinde. She wrote it as a protest against the double standards of a male-dominated society. A young Brahmin widow had been sentenced to death by the courts for killing her newborn baby because it was illegitimate, but no effort had been made to identify or punish the man who had fathered the baby. The book created quite a stir when it was published.

Sultana’s Dream was written in 1905 by Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. She was born in a well-to-do Bengali Muslim family and was lucky to have a husband who was very liberal in outlook and encouraged her education — first in Urdu, later in Bengali and English. She was already a successful author in Urdu and Bengali when she wrote Sultana’s Dream to test her abilities in English. This remarkable short story is probably the earliest example of science fiction writing in India, and among the first by a woman author anywhere in the world. In her dream, Sultana visits a magical country where gender roles are reversed. Men are confined to the home and observe purdah, while women are busy scientists vying with each other to invent devices that control the clouds, regulate rain, and build flying machines or “air-cars.”

Women’s Organisations and the National Movement

Apart from these early feminist visions, a large number of women’s organisations arose at both the all-India and local levels in the early twentieth century. Then began the participation of women in the national movement itself. Women’s rights were part and parcel of the nationalist vision.

In 1931, the Karachi Session of the Indian National Congress issued a declaration on the Fundamental Rights of Citizenship in India, committing itself to women’s equality. The declaration read:

1. All citizens are equal before the law, irrespective of religion, caste, creed or sex. …