And hello again, we’re about to start our
sixth topic, Chapter 6 in the set book.
And our sixth topic is feminism, and that’s
what we’re going to do next on our NPTEL
ideologies course 2019-20.
Right, I’m going to be completely blunt
about this.
The condition of almost one half of humanity,
that is women, is an obscenity.
It is as great an obscenity that almost all
of the world's societies and political systems
and economic structures are such as to resist
and [any] prevent any significant change to
this state of affairs, this obscenity.
It hardly needs saying that poverty or an
economic and social structure which enforces
and requires large-scale poverty is an overwhelming
factor here.
Poverty is one of the decisive factors.
And that is so not least because it keeps
girls and young women from education.
Consider the 15 to 19 age group in India's
lowest two income quintiles.
Only half the girls in that age group 15 to
19 in India's lowest two quintiles by income,
only half the girls have even completed the
fifth standard in school.
That figure is from the World Bank, 2011.
The figures may have improved since then,
and since the right of children to Free and
Compulsory Education Act was passed by India
in 2009.
Even at that time, 2009, they were shocking
- the figures were really startling.
The median length of time girls spent in school
in India at that time was 1.9 years.
That’s a median figure.
It means that one half of girls in India spent
less time in school than 1.9 years; they spent
less than 1.9 years in school.
That’s one half of girls.
For boys, the figure was 4.9 years.
That too was not a great record, didn’t
show a great record in education, but in school
time alone, let alone education.
But that is over two and a half times the
figure for girls.
Other things are inflicted on girls and women
which are even worse.
I quote from the World Bank; more than 1.3
million girls are not born in China and India
every year because of overt discrimination,
and the spread of ultrasound technologies
that allow households to determine the sex
of the foetus before birth.
We are of course aware of the extent of female
foeticide and female infanticide in, according
to the evidence, both India and China.
Over and above that, mass rape is now a standard
weapon of war.
It always was a weapon of war.
But it's now a standard mass weapon of war.
Indiscriminate mass rape of women by combatants,
by people carrying out war, is now a standard
weapon.
It’s also carried out by other men present
in war and in war zones.
It’s now a standard weapon in war, and has
included the deliberate transmission of HIV
and AIDS.
Now that, if I’m not mistaken, is from a
UN or UN-funded report, the sources are in
the set book.
And quite apart from that, women do the overwhelming
bulk of the world's work.
What does that mean?
It means running family homes in addition
to working outside the home.
They spent twice, at least twice as much time
as men, doing unpaid work in the home.
Women's participation in the global labour
force, that is not the workforce, which refers
to people in work, women's participation in
the global labour force, that is availability
for work, women's participation declined from
57 percent in 1990 to 55 percent in 2012.
And women workers are paid between 10 and
30 per cent less than men for the same work.
And this applies at every level of work in
apparently all occupations on the planet.
Now these figures say nothing about other
forms of inequality, such as the ownership
of wealth in the form of capital or land.
The World Bank does recognise that, I quote
again from the World Bank, women remain heavily
concentrated into lower-paying jobs, including
less productive and less profitable entrepreneurship
and farming than men.
Occupational segregation is enduring, as are
wage gaps; that too is from a World Bank report.
It is also the case that women writers, scientists
and philosophers, by philosophers, I mean
virtually everyone working in the humanities,
have never had the attention or the opportunities
given to their male counterparts.
Even the impact of particular women on our
world has been grossly underacknowledged.
In the early 1840s, Ada Lovelace, the great
- the daughter of the great poet Byron - Ada
Lovelace wrote what was probably the world's
first computer programme.
It was an algorithm for one of Charles Babbage's
calculating machines.
She saw that such machines could be used for
purposes which went far beyond arithmetical
calculations and nothing else.
She invented the first computer programme.
Other examples, they abound, there are plenty,
but they get grossly insufficient recognition.
Well, we might say, well, Marie Curie’s
discovery of the element radium in the late
19th century is famous, but it is less widely
noted that Marie Curie was, or Sk?odowska-Curie
to remember her earlier name, her birth name,
she was not allowed to deliver scientific
papers to many famous bodies.
She was not allowed to take academic posts
in at least one famous university.
And that’s the inventor of radium.
Think of the uses of radium in everyday life
today.
One of the early figures in the development
of the science of radioactivity.
And she wasn’t even allowed to deliver scientific
papers.
She was not allowed to take academic posts
in at least one famous university.
In political life, we are at least belatedly,
very belatedly, starting to take note of and
give credit, if not yet due credit, to women's
role in historical developments, such as the
French and Russian revolutions.
So the position and role and part played by
women are not only materially, but in our
understanding of it, in effect, a gross obscenity.
We ignore women's role, we ignore the amount
of work women do just to keep human life,
to sustain human life in all its forms.
This is an obscenity and I, I am not, I fear
that I can’t see evidence to make me change
my thinking very soon.
But - there have been plenty of criticisms
of 
this state of affairs.
There’s nothing new about feminism, and
there’s nothing new about the knowledge
of the condition and situation of women and
there’s nothing new about the will to do
something about that condition.
One of the earliest known statements of feminism
is by Christine de Pisan, an Italian woman
who wrote her critique in the early 15th century.
In addition, countless other works around
the world written over many centuries often
say things about the position of women in
society.
Even if they do so while expressing other
concerns, they still demonstrate this, they
still show the position and condition of women
in society.
What we need to do is to understand the ways
in which the present situation has been explained
and challenged; that it needs to be challenged
hardly needs saying, and that’s been said
again and again.
Potentially, almost all of human society as
we know it could be transformed; take it further
and say would be transformed.
Emma Goldman's comment is both anarchist and
feminist.
I quote:
First, by asserting herself as a personality
and not as a sex commodity.
Second, by refusing the right to anyone over
her body, by refusing to bear children unless
she wants them, by refusing to be a servant
to God, the state, society, the husband, the
family, et cetera. by making her life simpler,
but deeper and richer.
That is, by trying to learn the meaning and
substance of life in all its complexities,
by freeing herself from the fear of public
opinion and public condemnation.
Only that and not the ballot will set women
free.
Goldman is telling us exactly how comprehensive
and far-reaching are the changes we need to
end the captivity of women, the global oppression
of women.
Now historically, feminism does not seem to
have developed as a single ideology, even
though today it is much more like one, and
it is a very significant one at that.
It could, as Goldman has shown us, transform
the world.
I’d go further and say it would transform
the world.
The development of feminism parallels and
illuminates historical periods.
For example, what is taken to be the first
text of modern feminism was written shortly
after the French revolution had effectively
reshaped Northern Europe by abolishing the
French monarchy and by stating the doctrine
of universal rights.
The book I am referring to was Mary Wollstonecraft’s
book, Vindication of the Rights of Women,
I beg your pardon, Vindication of the Rights
of Woman; that was published in 1792.
Over the next half century or so, that is,
into the early 19th century, the demand for
women's rights gained momentum as forms of
democracy spread, and they spread particularly
as the elites, however reluctantly, accepted
the spread of the vote to other classes.
The franchise was still restricted to men;
the vote was still restricted to men.
Even though in industrial countries trade
unions were very much part of the struggle
for the vote, they were still largely male
organisations.
Women rightly demanded the vote too, and the
franchise seemed to be a vehicle for the emancipation
of all women from earlier restrictions and
oppressions.
Many of its advocates thought that the franchise
would cause all other forms of prejudice and
discrimination against women to disappear.
Now since 1893, in contrast to what may well
have been millennia of discrimination against
women, much of which continues, since 1893,
the vote for women has been achieved relatively
quickly.
New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893.
Australia followed suit in 1911.
In 1920, the United States gave women the
vote, and that was with the 19th amendment
to its constitution.
The amendment process for the United States
Constitution is extremely complex.
It requires, if I’m not mistaken, a two-thirds
majority in everything State Assembly - and,
again if I am not mistaken, a two thirds vote
in favour in both the chambers of the Federal
Congress.
The United Kingdom equalized voting rights
in 1928.
And since then, almost every country which
has adopted democracy has almost unquestioningly
started with equal voting rights for women
and men.
This was also the case in India, even though
in India, the universal franchise was the
subject of considerable dispute for some decades
before Independence and even after Independence.
But the vote for women, was almost unquestioningly
introduced.
Some countries have taken gender equality
in the electoral process very seriously.
Tunisia is where the Arab Spring famously
started in January 2011.
It requires, Tunisia requires, that all parties
field equal numbers of men and women in elections
to the national parliament, and the names
of male and female candidates are alternated
on ballot papers, with each woman candidate’s
name coming before the corresponding man's
name.
Now, Tunisia, if I am not mistaken, takes
this further, or provides wider opportunities
for women to be elected, because if I am not
mistaken, it has a fully proportional electoral
system.
We don’t need to go into the details of
fully proportional systems here, but there
is strong evidence that they provide much
wider representation because [candidate,]
because voters can chose from a wider range
of candidates in multi-member constituencies.
There are different proportional systems.
But what we need to note about Tunisia is
just how seriously it has taken equal opportunities,
equal candidature opportunities for male and
female candidates, the ballot papers are actually
written to favour this, to bring about this.
And, by putting women's names first before
the corresponding men's names, the electoral
system itself serves to reduce the extent
of discrimination against women.
Well, this achievement of equal voting rights,
which has taken place fairly quickly, and
is now virtually global in all democratic
states, this achievement of equal voting rights
has often been called first-wave feminism.
There is a second wave or what’s been called
second-wave feminism.
It is more recent and it stems from the fact
that by the 1950s, it was clear that achieving
the vote had not been enough to end systematic
structural and social disadvantage for women.
It was becoming clearer and clearer that more
fundamental changes were needed.
Mere voting systems, the vote itself simply
was not enough.
What kind of changes were needed?
Among the first pointers to these was a book
by Betty Friedan, an American writer.
She wrote a book called The Feminine Mystique,
published in 1963.
Friedan examined the lives of suburban American
women.
To the rest of the world, such women may have
seemed to be living the American dream.
They had husbands in relatively secure jobs.
Certainly in those days, the idea of a settled
job for life, whether in the private or the
public sector, seemed to go relatively unquestioned,
with the state as the major guarantor of the
economy, with the economy expanding very rapidly
after the war, and so on.
So - such women seem to be living the American
dream, husbands in relatively secure jobs,
comfortable homes in comfortable suburbs,
children in good local schools, access to
all the goods and appliances of American consumerism,
such as mass ownership of the motor-car, such
as mass ownership of television sets, high-quality
refrigeration for the home, and so on.
Instead, Friedan found something very different.
She went around and listened to women living
what looked like the American dream or the
suburban American dream.
Friedan found among large numbers of the women
a sense of boredom, frustration, and depression.
This resulted from their effective confinement,
a condition of what was in effect confinement
to the roles of housewife and mother.
Many of the women's doctors were prescribing
antidepressant medicines for what was in fact
a social condition.
The American dream was nevertheless spread
and reinforced with immense power and effect
by Hollywood movies, by television programmes,
and the rapidly [advertising,] expanding advertising
business.
All of these spread the vision of the American
dream - the 2 children or 2.4 children or
whatever the figure was with mummy running
the home, and daddy going out to work, all
living a perfect life in leafy American suburbs.
Instead, what Friedan found among the women
was a sense of boredom, frustration, and depression.
Needless to say, medication - antidepressant
medicines - were not going to change that
because that was a social condition, the result
of social structures and social systems.
We are also aware, and have become aware since
then, that many of the antidepressants used
whether today or in those days can be highly
addictive, and there have been serious scandals
to which we’ve referred briefly before.
Now, what are the implications of Friedan’s
work?
One is that women need much greater access
to education and careers than they have had
so far.
Others took the arguments much further.
Kate Millett wrote the book Sexual Politics
in 1970.
And in the same year, Germaine Greer published
The Female Eunuch, a global bestseller.
Both books had a huge impact, with fierce
criticisms of the ways in which the oppression
of women is not only educational and occupational,
but also has personal, psychological and sexual
dimensions.
Millett and Greer argued that legal reforms
and legislative changes were not enough; they
[those] did not address those legal and legislative
reforms, did not address much wider and globally
powerful forms of oppression.
The roots of those lay in whole societies,
including their structures and political systems
and the attitudes prevalent across whole societies.
You will no doubt recall that at the end of
our topic on conservatism, our conservatism
topic, we looked at very recently published
findings from 19 states of India.
This survey was carried out by the centres
for, the Centre for the Study of Developing
Studies in New Delhi and the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung,
the Konrad Adenauer Research Foundation in
Germany.
19 states, a population aged between, if I
am not mistaken, if I remember rightly, 15
and 34, and what emerged were very deeply
conservative attitudes across the entire sample
and by implication across the entire population
surveyed.
These were attitudes to women's work, to authority
within the family, to the upbringing of women,
to matters sexual, and to conduct, including
conduct between boys and girls and men and
women.
So we shouldn’t be surprised that legal
reforms and legislative changes are simply
not enough.
Millett and Greer put forward extremely powerful,
highly passionately written arguments with
disturbing and very powerful examples to show
that changing the system by law, changing
institutions by law, is simply not enough.
In whole societies, the issues lay in social
structures, political systems, and attitudes
across entire societies.
What they did, what Millett and Greer did
in effect was part of a process which greatly
expanded or very greatly expanded our sense
of the political - because what they did showed
that something which had previously been,
at best, a minor part of public discourse
or had been kept to the private realm, the
private space of the family, was in fact a
crucial element in the way whole societies
work, and that that element should therefore
be a major focus of public concern.
This kind of insight was perhaps best encapsulated
by Shulamith Firestone and Anne Koedt, because
they in 1969 gave the title ‘The Personal
is Political’ to a paper by Carol Hanisch.
Firestone and Koedt were editing papers from
a feminist conference for publication.
Hanisch, for her part, was already very active
in what had come to be called the women's
liberation movement, and she had organised
protests at the Miss America and other contests.
Now the women's liberation movement started,
succeeded in challenging many of the most
basic assumptions of social and political
thought at the time.
And it was a decisive advance in the spread
of feminism around the contemporary world.
Well, the point that they the campaigners
at that time brought to global attention was
that the structure and shape of the family,
apparently a private space and regarded as
a private space in liberalism or liberal thought,
was shaped by social structures, by economic
systems, and by legal systems.
And it expressed nothing less than the global
]expression,] oppression of women.
Around that time, a great deal of feminism-inspired
research expanded very greatly.
Among other things, it exposed domestic violence
which might otherwise have gone unknown.
And it has been, this kind of research has
been complemented by work in other fields
in the 1960s and 1970s.
For example, in around that period, the psychiatrists
R.D. Laing, Aaron Esterson, and David Cooper,
all challenged the assumptions and methods
of mainstream psychiatry, and they used detailed
observation to show that the family, far from
being a universally caring and nurturing context,
was very often the site of terrible conflict
and cruelty.
Now that is the kind of contribution made
by second-wave feminism.
It exposed the conditions in which half of
humanity, the great bulk of half of humanity,
lived.
It also reminded us rightly that what looks
like a private space, the family, is itself
structured, shaped, permeated and informed
by social attitudes, economic and political
systems, and so on.
In other words, saying that the personal is
political does not reduce the political space
to matters of personality or to personal preference.
What it does is very greatly expand our sense
of the political space.
Well, since then, various analysts have said
that there is such a thing as a third wave
of feminism.
And in this, women feel sufficiently empowered
to readopt some of the clothes, such as, high
heeled shoes, cosmetics like lipstick, for
example, which for example, second wave feminists
often reviled and rejected.
And third-wave feminism seems to say, yes,
it is all right to use some of those and have
them and enjoy them without feeling oppressed
or constrained.
This may be an expression of a general, or
perhaps postmodern even, refusal to accept
fixed identities or the sex gender divide
or other concepts, which have featured in
feminist and other debates.
I have drawn that point from Rampton, published
in 2008.
Now many of the structural problems which
women face, nevertheless, have not been altered.
And that is in the same work by Rampton.
In many ways, these problems have grown even
worse, particularly for women in the developing
world.
I will offer example, my former colleague
on the national newspaper, The Hindu, P. Sainath
has often pointed out both in his writings
and in public lectures that women on whose
lives he has reported, who are out working
very long hours are in the workplace, but
they’re paid terribly badly often working
10 and 12 hours a day, paid very badly because
of gender discrimination in the workplace,
even if they’re working in the public sector.
I’ve seen this myself when I talk to people
who come and collect my pre-sorted rubbish
in my own neighbourhood.
I talk to them, ask them about their working
days, ask them what they are paid and it is
inevitably less than the men doing the same
job are paid, even though they’re doing
exactly the same job.
Sainath brings out another equally serious
point.
The women invariably, almost without exception,
run their homes as well.
Some were in effect working 20 hours a day,
and getting four hours’ sleep before they
had to get up, often travel very long distances
to work, work all day, often in subordinate
positions for wretched, obscenely poor pay,
and then go home and run the house all over
again.
Sainath has written about that and you may
wish to look at his writings.
I make the point because it’s an example
of how the structural problems women face
have in many ways made things even worse,
even if women are starting to play a greater
part in the workforce in various parts of
the world.
There may be regional variations in certain
parts of the world, but that’s a matter
for the social science investigators.
But nevertheless, the structural issues have
often simply not been altered.
Well, whether or not a third wave has emerged,
and irrespective of the range of issues and
approaches which shape and inform feminism,
certain concerns are common to all forms of
feminism.
What are they?
I’ll list them here and we’ll have a slide
on them when we resume next time.
I’ll list them here and spend a short time
reviewing some of them, and we w’ll refresh
our memory on those when we meet next time.
What are these common issues, common concerns,
which run through all forms of feminism, the
public-private divide, that’s the first
one, patriarchy, the second one, sex and gender,
the third one, equality and difference, the
fourth one.
We’ll spend a little time on the public-private
divide, because that follows on naturally
from Carol Hanisch’s insight that the personal
is also the political.
In other words, the political space has to
be recognized as shaping, informing and permeating
the family itself.
By that, we mean not just party politics,
but legal and institutional systems, social
attitudes, historical and cultural inheritances.
In other words, the public space is the whole
of society, and shutting the family out enables
women's oppression to go unexamined and unknown.
So the public-private divide is an obvious,
examination of that is an obvious consequence
of the kind of insight that Hanisch crucially
provided and which we are fortunate to inherit.
Well one of feminism's great achievements
then has been to put very firmly on the contemporary
political agenda the fact that politics extends
far beyond the purportedly, the 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 also political spaces.
What happens within such spaces is also shaped
by the wider political forces in any society.
For example, inequalities of wealth and power
within the family and the different male and
female roles within the family are themselves
not natural.
They’re the result of political and economic
systems and structures and cultural and social
attitudes and so on.
Now the consequences of our recognition that
the shape, form and relationships, the shape
of the family, the form of it, the relationships
within it, are themselves part of our wider
political and social culture, the consequences
could be - of that insight could be very far
reaching.
Many industrial countries have recognized
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 to grant paternity
leave for varying lengths of time too.
Now in addition, the earlier traditions of
political understanding, our understanding
of the political or public space, grossly
undervalued and demeaned and even obliterated
the contributions women have always made to
keeping even traditional societies function
at all, functioning at all.
These contributions still include the overwhelming
bulk of childcare, and the care of the elderly
or the sick.
They also include the bulk of early years
and elementary schooling, and nursing care
and hospital or other organised forms of health
care.
Women are overwhelmingly involved in these
areas of life.
Now, what that tells us is that what we thought
was a private or familial space is political,
and that women are crucial to keeping entire
societies, entire countries and cultures functioning
- and that they do far more of the work keeping
societies functioning than men do.
Much of this work, in addition, goes almost
completely unrecognised.
Well, I’ll pause this topic here.
We’ll go on to look at the other three major
issues in feminism - that is, patriarchy,
the sex and gender divide, and equality and
difference when we meet next time.
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