Hello everyone and welcome to the next of
these lectures in this NPTEL Ideologies Course
2019-20.
We are part-way through our sixth topic, that
is, feminism.
We’ve had one lecture introducing it, we’re
going to look at some of the themes involved
in greater detail from now on.
But we’ve got to look at four particular
themes that run through all if not most forms
of feminism, aAnd these are concerns which
are common to all forms of feminism.
There are four of them - the public-private
divide, patriarchy, sex and gender, and equality
and difference.
We’ll look at each one.
We've seen something of the first one, first,
but it won’t do any harm to look at it again.
The public-private divide.
One of feminism's great achievements has been
to put firmly on the contemporary political
agenda the fact that politics extends far
beyond the purportedly or apparently conventional
arena of elections, parliaments, governments,
art, literature and so on.
Instead, any spaces where human power relations
are involved, such as the workplace, and the
family, are themselves also political spaces.
What happens within such spaces is also shaped
by the wider political forces in any society,
well you saw some of this when we encountered
Carol Hanisch last time.
Two people who were editing a volume or conference
proceedings in which she had given or was
about to give a paper, gave her paper the
title, gave Carol Hanisch's paper the title,
‘The Personal Is Political’.
And that showed us something we badly needed
to to learn, which was that apparently private
spaces are themselves shaped by and permeated
by much, much wider influences, economic,
political, cultural and so on.
So, as feminists have pointed out again and
again and rightly so, any spaces where human
power relations are involved, such as the
workplace and the family, are also political
spaces.
And what happens within those spaces is also
shaped by the wider political forces in any
society.
These may of course not just be political
forces, they can be of a range of kinds.
But as I said last time, what Hanisch has
enabled us to do, together with other feminists,
is to recognise that our conception of the
political needs to be very much wider than
it would be if we left it unquestioned.
So for example, inequalities of wealth and
power within the family and the different
male and female roles within the family are
themselves not natural, but they’re the
result of political and economic systems and
structures.
The consequences could be very far-reaching.
Many industrial countries have recognised
that state-funded childcare enables women
to resume working when a traditional family
structure would prevent them from doing so
either completely, or until children were
much older.
Some countries have legislated relatively
recently, perhaps in the last decade or so,
have legislated to grant paternity leave for
varying lengths of time too.
In addition, the earlier traditions of political
understanding quite simply grossly undervalued
and demeaned and even obliterated the contributions
women have made and always made to keeping
even traditional societies functioning at
all.
And these contributions, as we saw last time,
still include the great bulk of child care
and the care of the elderly or sick.
They also include the bulk of early years
and elementary schooling, and nursing care
and hospital or other forms of, organised
forms, of childcare.
And as I said last time, as we saw last time,
without this contribution, many of our societies
would barely function at all.
Let’s start with patriarchy.
This is one of the major concerns that runs
right through feminism and rightly so.
The feminist critique of patriarchy is based
on the argument that all social structures
and systems and all political systems are
patriarchal.
Patriarchy, of course, is a term derived from
Greek.
It’s a combination, it’s a neologism derived
from Latin and Greek, the Latin word pater
meaning father is combined with the Greek
word arche meaning rule.
Other analyses give the term ‘patriarchy’
entirely Greek roots, but we needn’t worry
too much about that issue here.
Now according to several feminist arguments,
the power division between men and women has
obtained throughout almost all human history.
And this systematically oppresses and disadvantages
women.
It operates throughout society, in politics,
in work, in the family, in legal and judicial
systems, and so on.
According to these arguments, gender is the
single most important division in human life,
and it is even more important than class.
Of course, societies vary, they vary in the
nature and extent of patriarchal oppression
of women.
And in most of the global north, the more
obvious signs of patriarchy are much less
clear than they were before women got the
vote, before legislation, legislation outlawing
gender discrimination was passed, and so on.
In many other societies, patriarchy is still
extremely crude and often violent.
About 80 million women mainly, but not exclusively
in African countries, still face female genital
mutilation or clitoridectomy.
And it may be impossible to count the tens
or hundreds of millions who face forced marriages.
That is in contrast to genuinely arranged
ones.
It may also be impossible to find any numbers
for any accurate numbers for female foeticide,
and of course, for also for explicit sexual
discrimination and oppression, insult or violence
- women encounter these throughout their daily
lives in hundreds of millions, perhaps billions
around the world.
On the evidence, South Asian countries are
the places where female foeticide and widespread
sexual violence against women are particularly
common.
Of course, South Asian countries are not the
only places, but for example, among the G20
countries, which is an economic indicator
of economic scale and size and production
or the rest of it, among the G20 countries,
India ranks last, behind Saudi Arabia in this
regard.
In addition, the practice of forced marriage
among South Asian communities has led countries
with substantial South Asian-descended populations
to declare the practice a criminal offence.
In June 2014, England and Wales followed Scotland
with new law.
The law also applies to UK nationals who are
outside the UK, we saw this in one of our
earlier passages, that is the criminal law
of the United Kingdom on forced marriage is
criminal law with application outside United
Kingdom jurisdiction, and British subjects
that is Commonwealth citizens resident in
the UK or British nationals are liable for
UK criminal proceedings even if the offence
is committed outside UK jurisdiction.
The British foreign ministry, the Foreign
an Commonwealth office, as I've said before,
has a unit tasked with preventing forced marriages
and helping victims thereof.
It has sometimes been very active indeed.
Daily sexual harassment and violence in the
form of groping and other forms of unwanted
contact, including unwanted speech, comments,
observations, even looks - these are still
widespread all over the world, even in the
global north.
And the spread of the internet, which affords
a form of anonymity, has shown the scale and
extent of hate directed against women.
For many feminist theorists, these are, these
kinds of conduct are expressions of patriarchy.
As are the feelings many women victims have
that they cannot do anything about it or will
not be taken seriously if they try to complain
or face even worse brutality if they fight
back physically or verbally.
Now Kate Millett took the arguments even further.
Patriarchal societies, according to Kate Millett,
are hierarchical in several ways.
Men dominate women and older men dominate
younger men.
Patriarchy can coexist with and is part and
parcel of other systems of power and status.
So there is no single form of patriarchal
oppression, it permeates other kinds of relations
besides those between men and women.
So it is part and parcel of other power systems
of power and status, and there is a vast amount
of material to support this, [so] a vast amount
of evidence.
For example, the concept of droit de seigneur,
which basically means the right of the master
or right of the landowner.
Droit de seigneur is a French phrase, and
was widespread in mediaeval Europe; when the
tenant of a feudal lord or landowner got married,
the lord of the manor could and frequently
did claim the right to have sex with the bride
first.
Now various historians have argued that more
often than not, the feudal master accepted
a payment or tax in lieu of in place of sexual
access to the bride, but that does not change
either the patriarchy or the sexism it involved.
Above all, it maintains the idea that the
bride is some kind of good or commodity or
chattel to be exchanged or traded.
And similarly, Manu decrees how many wives
men of different Hindu castes can have.
A Brahmin can have four, men of lower caste
three, two and so on.
Manu says nothing however about multiple wives
for Dalits.
The 16th century poem by the way, Radhika
Santawanam, goes in slightly different directions.
It is, among other things, a searing response
by a woman to male polygamy and by implication
to cultures which give men a right of polygamy
or right to polygamy.
Now there are powerful feminist arguments
that the very idea of polygamy is only tenable
in patriarchal societies where there are severe
social stratifications and where more powerful
men dominate other men, older men dominate
younger men.
Wealthier and more powerful men therefore
also decide whether they will have polygamous
structures in society or not, whether they
will practise [polygamy] it or not.
Now this leads us to the idea of natural divisions
resulting from our biological nature.
Feminism, of course, has challenged a great
many such ideas not only in respect of patriarchy,
but in respect of all relations between men
and women.
So our next theme is that of sex and gender.
A purportedly or supposedly traditional view
of view of sex and gender is that these are
natural divisions, resulting from our biological
nature.
According to this theory we’re male or female,
we therefore have natural powers and roles
as a result.
And therefore society has to be organised
according to the biological differences between
males and females.
This kind of argument can be called an argument
from biology because it bases a theory of
society on its conception of human nature,
and that is, human nature as a biological
fact or biological given.
We’ve seen similar things, for example with
conservatism, which has it that we rise to
the top in free competition, and therefore
the order of society reflects our natural
capacities and talents for using them.
We've seen it with fascism, which has explicit
theories of racial, racial hierarchy and racial
superiority and inferiority.
So - let’s take a look at how such biological
theories might be treated within feminist
thought.
Well, the traditional view would have it that
women can bear and suckle babies - and men
cannot do so.
Therefore, women must rear babies, men must
have other roles in the family, and so on.
The feminist challenge to this is that these
expectations and roles are largely social
or cultural, and are not biological in origin.
Women do not need to be mothers, and do not
need to take on traditional roles of motherhood.
Child-rearing can be shared whether by the
parents or by other members of the family,
and aspects of it can be and often are taken
over by the state.
There are plenty of examples; a great deal
of law in the global North has to do with
the state's part in providing facilities and
opportunities for child care, for parental
leave to bring up children and support to
parents in the form of health services, child-rearing
services and so on.
So, the evidence is fairly clear that we’ve
gone a long way from the very traditional
idea that male and female roles are biological
in origin.
We see examples all around us, and this is
no doubt going to appear in greater and greater
volume and extent in developing countries.
The idea that the state has a part, a significant
part to play - even the idea of compulsory
education is an example of how the state takes
on the role of education from the family,
which plays a different, now plays a different
part in childrearing.
Secondly, sex differences may be biological.
That’s again the traditional view, the second,
second part of the argument.
So sex differences may be biological, but
gender differences are not, and they are largely
social.
We’re brought up to be boys and girls, men
and women.
One very powerful critique of the way we are
socialized to be of a particular gender is
Simone de Beauvoir's book The Second Sex,
which was first published in 1949.
Now one consequence of works like this and
wider, a wider rethinking of the idea of sex
and gender, is that it’s more accurate to
speak in terms of gender than sex.
And a further consequence is that gender analysis
enables us to examine far more of our lives
and social structures and systems than the
idea of biological sex as the defining difference
between men and women.
I add here that anecdotally, of course, a
great many women will say, they've never felt
any desire to have children.
They might say, ‘Maternal instinct, what’s
that?
- I’ve never felt any such thing.’
And that given the way societies work today,
that that way of thinking may be far more
widespread than we realise.
We do occasionally meet people who are willing
to say it, but that leaves us ignorant of
those who think it and feel it, but aren’t
willing to say that they feel no maternal
instinct whatever and have no desire to have
children.
Our third issue here is equality and difference.
This is the third theme running through all
forms of feminism, we’ll see the different
forms.
What about equality and difference?
This remains one of the most [contented,]
contested areas in feminist thought.
Feminists can reach wide agreement with considerable
political, social impact on ending the oppression
of women and on ending discrimination against
them.
Now today, it’s likely that at least in
terms of political, democratic, political
constitutions, this kind of issue is over;
as they say in international law, chose acquis.
We find such legislation and at least stated
policies and commitments in virtually all
democratic states around the world.
And reaching agreement on ending the oppression
of women and ending discrimination against
women is not difficult to find, it’s not
difficult to reach either.
But it is much harder to say what is to count
as the achievement of equality, or even if
the idea of comprehensive equality is intelligible.
Well, let’s look at some examples.
In a sense, first-wave feminism has achieved
formal, legal and constitutional equality
in almost all democracies.
Throughout the world, women have the opportunity
to vote even in the most traditional cultures.
Similarly, laws forbidding discrimination
on the grounds of gender are found in almost
all democracies.
But these formal conditions remain, in much
of the world, still formal.
They’ve completely failed to bring about
substantive equality almost anywhere in the
world.
We can add here that there are some startling
examples.
Rwanda was the first country to achieve 51%
and slightly more of representation of women
in Parliament.
Rwanda’s parliament was the first parliament
ever to have 50% or more of women, that is,
to be composed of women to the tune of 50%
or more.
We might have thought some of the Scandinavian
countries or Nordic countries that achieved
this earlier.
But if I am not mistaken, the closest one
of them got was to have a parliament which
was 48% made up of women.
Now, in addition, it’s not clear that the
existing world is so wonderful that women
must achieve equality in say, combat roles
in war or in the notably coarse and ugly world
of everyday politics, or in doing backbreaking,
manual labour in often extremely dangerous
and illegal conditions.
Now, we can consider some empirical examples
here.
For example, some countries have recognised
that women can participate in combat roles
in war, if I'm not mistaken.
Women in the Indian Armed Services, particularly
the Air Force, now fly combat aircraft.
In the United States, women have been involved
in military combat, again if I'm not mistaken.
In politics, in everyday politics, yes, particularly
in the global North, far more women are involved
than were even 20 years ago or even 10 years
ago.
But we should note that even in the last fortnight
or three weeks, perhaps even more recently
than that, women in British politics, with
a general election currently in progress,
the campaign’s already started, a number
of women have said they are standing down
because of the amount of online hatred and
abuse that they get through social media.
And, well, it may well be that they're getting
far more and far coarser and uglier threats
and spoken violence or written violence on
the internet than the men.
But we must remember that women's participation
in the public space is still fraught with
global, globally continuing and enormously
powerfully persistent ugliness and brutality
towards women, whether it’s in form of words,
in politics, or physical violence.
As to backbreaking manual labour will be familiar
in the developing world with the fact that
women often do enormously backbreaking work
say on construction sites, often carrying
cement and bricks day after day, in conditions
which are enormous or enormously dangerous
working in without shoes, working in bare
feet, without helmets, without protection,
climbing scaffolding [which] without any safety
harnesses, without any protection at all.
And it is not unusual, certainly in South
Asia and quite possibly in other parts of
the world to see women involved in backbreaking
manual labour often at much lower rates than
the men, even for the same work.
So equality as an undifferentiated concept
makes no sense unless we can also consider
in respect of what it is that we want equality.
The question is equality in respect of what?
If we accept that war is going to [consider,]
continue for the foreseeable future, should
we be seeking combat roles for women rather
than doing all we can as peoples and as states
to put an end to war?
Only one question - do we really want women
to be equal in backbreaking manual labour,
mending roads, digging trenches, putting up
buildings?
Shouldn’t we be looking for far better working
conditions for everyone, men and women?
The question is therefore equality in respect
of what?
Do we all want equality in respect of a brutal,
terrifying, and violent world in which we’re,
certainly in construction work in much of
the worldwe are at serious risk of being killed
or injured by the time we are 45.
Our earnings will go down as we suffer physical
injury and loss of physical powers by the
time we are 50 or so.
We can notice our, the waning of our physical
powers.
So the question is equality in respect of
what?
Now, as long as we are asking that, we can
argue about it and reason about it.
It’s not surprising that equality and difference
are two of the most contested areas of feminist
theory, but it is right that they’re contested
and we should contest them across the board,
so that we are clear about what were the kinds
of issues in which we are speaking of equality.
Do we want equality of access to something
that is brutal, violent, and murderous?
Do we want equality of access to backbreaking
and destructive work for next to no pay at
all?
Do we actually want that?
So equality in respect of what does remain
a crucial question and it’s right that it
does.
What about feminism and other ideologies?
We’ve looked at three major or four major
concerns of feminism, but how does feminism
relate to other ideologies?
Now at this point, I will introduce the theme.
We’ll keep it, keep the detail for another
lecture, but let’s introduce the theme,
feminism and other ideologies.
Feminism cuts across all other ideologies
and rightly so, partly because many ideologies
have been propounded by men - and because
political parties or movements which express
those ideologies or embody them have historically
been overwhelmingly controlled and run by
men.
Nevertheless, different forms of feminism
have clearly been informed by different kinds
of ideologies, and they show this in assumptions
or sometimes explicit commitments, and we’ll
need to look at those next.
So we’re going to move on to look at feminism
and other ideologies in our next lecture.
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