Have women killed feminism?
Ashley Tellis argues that the women’s movement has been the biggest failure of the century and that women are to blame for it
The idea for International Women’s Day has its origins in a socialist campaign both in Europe and the United States around women workers, their wages, their rights. It began in Europe and Russia at a time of revolutionary ferment with women like Alexandra Kollontai in Russia, Clara Zetkin in Germany, Sylvia Pankhurst in Britain, women garment workers striking, women trade unionists rebelling and the idea was to use the day to press for demands. Yet what it has been reduced to today is a silly corporate celebration of ‘loving women’ or some such shit, just another day like Mother’s day and Valentine’s day.
It is amazing how institutionalization, by the state and international bodies, has erased the radical origins of this day from public memory, particularly as almost none of the demands those women were pressing for have been met for women. Women are still paid less than men for the same work, still forced to take on most of the labour of domesticity and childcare, still forced into heterosexual monogamy and marriage and still brought up to believe in these ideologies and institutions.
Poster Courtesy: Gender Studies Group, Delhi University
In effect, what Juliet Mitchell called the four structures that integrate women and which need to be transformed – production, reproduction, sexuality, socialization – all still await transformation. Mitchell stressed that all four structures need transformation simultaneously as “a modification in any one of them can be offset by a reinforcement of another.” This amounts to just a permutation and not a structural transformation and we have seen many such permutations over the twentieth century into the twenty-first.
Socialism itself did not seriously engage with the women’s question at all and that debate remains unresolved. Other traditions, like psychoanalysis, developed brilliantly by thinkers like Mitchell to transform the family as an institution, have not been taken up by the women’s movement globally. In many ways, it seems like we are just at the beginning of the process of transformation that Mitchell talked about decades ago yet feminism has already been reduced to sexist state programmes (‘Don’t kill the girl child, she’s tomorrow’s mother’), the consumerist lingo of the corporate world where feminism is just another marketable commodity (‘Designing their way to success,’ title of one of the special stories for women on Women’s day in a national rag) or the spinning of an illusion that we are in a ‘post-feminist’ world (Delhi University English Department conference last year).
Poster Courtesy: Gender Studies Group, Delhi University
Where do we begin cutting through this shit to ask some real questions and build collective struggle? How to do it? The Gender Studies Group at Delhi University organised a conference in the run-up to Women’s day to raise these questions and in a University with thousands of women not more than five turned up on all three days. Who were they speaking to? The walls?
The fact is that women are the most anti-feminist people in the contemporary world. They have bought into the backlash against feminism hook, line and sinker and don’t want anything to do with the f word. They have no sense of history, their own history, how they got where they are and they don’t give a damn.
Middleclass women are mesmerised by the rational choice theory throw up by late capitalism, make deeply conservative decisions and call them ‘choices.’ They are immersed in the soppy popular culture that celebrates their being used to wipe the floor with by men (Adele, Taylor Swift). They cannot envisage lives without dependence on men. They cannot dream of worlds other than marriage. They do not demand for anything in the professional world or the world of work. They fabricate a designer feminism that maintains that if they speak about their bodies and masturbating in their shallow writing (Tishani Doshi, Meena Kandasamy) and if they send pink chaddis to right wing politicians or dress up like ‘sluts’ (a word they do not even have the guts to claim, like in the Delhi march which became the besharmi march)), they are liberated.
Poster Courtesy: Gender Studies Group, Delhi University
Working class, Dalit, adivasi women are no better, romanticised though they often are. They stand behind their men and accept structural inequalities in production, embrace reproduction, accept the family and socialise their children to do the same. They are used by their men as political shields (Meira Peibis, Oriya women and children lying on the roads against mining) and kept out of all decision-making and political power and they accept that.
What do we put all this down to? False consciousness? The failure of the women’s movement? Whatever the reason, the fact is that it is time women went back to the drawing board, looked deep and hard at their own history and what has been achieved and what has not. It is time they realised that almost nothing has really been transformed, that far from a post-feminist world we are almost in a pre-feminist world. It is women who can and must change that. But do they even care?
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Neha, I would urge you to read my article carefully. Your binary between powerless women and powerful women is too neat and easy. Women do not fit these easy categories. Working women are not necessarily feminist. I quoted Mitchell as pointing out that a change in one of the four structures does not necessarily mean a change overall or a feminist position.
Events like the one I refer to have been held for decades. In the 70s and 80s many more women turned up. Now none do. What does that say about your argument? These are the powerful women in your category. Why don’t they care?
As for men, why should I speak about men when this is a women’s movement, a day for women and the article is addressed to women. Sure, men should participate in support of the feminist movement and surely most do not. But that’s another article and maybe you should write it. I will too at some point. I have been writing for years how the gay movement is anti-feminist, does not really engage with feminist issues and is not intersectional while going on talking about it.
But that’s another article, not this one. Stick to what this is saying and engage with it.
Aparna, I would urge you to read the particularities of my argument carefully. I am not making an axiomatic statement about all writing about the body by women being shallow and non-feminist. I spoke of a particular kind of designer feminism and gave specific examples (Kandasamy, Doshi, and I can give you many others) and campaigns (pink chaddi, slut walk) that mistakes simply speaking about the body as automatically feminist. My point is that their writing and campaigns are deeply anti-feminist and uncritical.
I contest your axiomatic assumption that if a woman writes about her body and “feels liberated” about it, that is automatically feminist or there is “nothing wrong” about it. Rightwing Hindu women (read the speeches of Sadhvi Rithambara) talk about women’s bodies to incite Hindu men to kill Muslims. There is nothing feminist about that.Further, simply writing about your body, masturbating or whatever else, does not automatically mean you are evolved or feminist or anything of the sort. The Story of O, long excoriated by feminists as vile, pornographic, anti-women and definitely written by a man was in fact written by a woman. There was nothing feminist about it.
Sure, women writers have written about the body very powerfully but not in these designer feminist ways.
What you call a blanket statement, I call a polemical assertion based on the fact that despite decades of a feminist movement nothing has changed much for women and that most women (simply numerically) have nothing and want nothing to do with feminism. That says something and we have to face it clearly and squarely.
It is rather pathetic when people cannot understand a rhetorical or polemical argument and make up straw men arguments of their own and then shoot at them clumsily and badly.
In terms of sheer numbers, it is a “fact” that women hate feminism. In their lives and practices, the largest number of women are completely untouched by feminism. Were this not the case, we would be living in a different world by now. That “fact” may have a lot to do with women’s consciousnesses (something the article points out at the start), so pointing out the structural nature of patriarchy only proves my point: patriarchy trains women to hate feminism and other women and, unfortunately, most women are anti-feminist and anti-women.
I mentioned compulsory heterosexuality again at the start and only an illiterate person could have ignored that.
Intersectionality is something women (and most people) don’t seem able to see at all and that myopia has further inhibited the growth of the women’s movement. No where do I claim that a classless or casteless society automatically guarantees gender equality. People read whatever they want to read into articles when they do not have any argument but only misplaced indignation to offer.
The meira peibis have no real political power and no say in decision-making in Manipur and Meitei feminists have themselves criticised the use of meira peibis as shields and their subsequent relegation to the background once their use is over, so it is quite clear who the ignoramus is.
Far from a point-by-point rebuttal, this was a stupid response by an anonymous coward who has nothing to offer but rather pathetic non-critiques that have nothing to do with what the article is actually arguing.
Mr Ashely Tellis if you think Indian women’s movement is a failure read this article http://feministsindia.com/feminisms-unfinished-business/
You will realise feminism is still live and kicking.
misogyny in its supreme form! Do us (women) a favour. Stick to your sex and sexuality. I have hardly come across gay men as misogynous like you. What a shame. Ignorant men like you think they can get away writing any crap. Forward it to the right wing groups in the country, you might even get a bharat ratna for this crap.
Maybe you wrote this with the wrong subset in mind. There ARE women in this world, who shy away from the F-word or from claiming what’s theirs.. which is what social conditioning has done to them. Women stand and watch as khap panchayats play out, because these are women who have been told that women don’t deserve any better. That they are entitled to see another woman burn because they themselves are not as “immoral” as her to go and find their own husbands. Where you do women a great disservice is by confusing the women I mention above – powerless, controlled by tradition, dependent and unable to think in terms of real equality – with feminist women who are making their voices heard. You only have to be on the internet for one day. You only have to compare working women figures 10 years back to today. And you’ll see what women are doing. 5 women turning up for an event is still more than last year when this event was probably not conceived.. though I’d not read much into an event attendance to conclude how serious women are about feminism.
However, now let me say what I wanted to when I started jabbering in the first place here. If women have failed so spectacularly in their fight for equality, what have men being doing all this while? I do not see any mention of the silent discouragement of feminism we face from our men folk every single day. It is “gay” to talk women’s rights in some men’s social circles. For most, it is an easily-available subject for jokes. Why is it that we talk of the failure of feminism in such sure terms but don’t discuss why it might be so? At home, work, on the road, while driving, in the neighbourhood and in every other social interaction, men are seen tsk-tsking when they see an independent woman. She threatens everything they portray to their own docile wives and daughters (the first category that I spoke of) as what good qualities of women are, and of their own worth as men – Exclusive Providers.
Why don’t you follow this up with how men have and will always continue to kill feminism, and why that makes women’s journey harder than ever?
And here goes the Epitaph….
You were dragged out from your being
And put on a golden pedestal
In the name glory and strength
… But now trapped in false consciousness…
A strength that shone from within
But now tossed and turned
To satisfy everyone’s weird needs and excuses..
Masking and shielding the true cause…
You are now so not what you are…
You do not need to be professed..
Ranted about and around..
You are there inside,in every part of its being…
In its being itself….
Its time to do away with these traps and shackles
Unveil and show the true lore
Its time these false glories wane and die
While you rest in peace in your own self…
For in there you are always rising and shining eternally…..
“if they speak about their bodies and masturbating in their shallow writing…they are liberated.”
Ashley, what is wrong if a woman feels liberated talking about her body, even if it is about masturbating? One should’t forget that the woman who flaunts her sexuality is continually branded as a witch or a whore,time and again women have been burdened with the responsibility to bear patriarchal honour.
All this when, men for ages have talked about his penis and his ejaculating experiences, which has been quoted, recited,and celebrated. So if a woman decides to talk and write of her body to feel liberated I don’t see how it becomes shallow. I can personally assert that in a society which treats the female body as either polluting or as an instrument of fertility, I have gained immense strength from reading women poets like Kamala Das taking ownership of their sexuality and their body with its imperfections and perfections.
It was really disappointing to hear you make blanket statements like “The fact is that women are the most anti-feminist people in the contemporary world”, rapists and wife beaters will approve!
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I think a point-by-point rebuttal is in order, just so as to clear some conceptual confusion and factual errors that the author has expressed in the above article. While Tellis is not wrong in pointing out that the radical origins of Women’s Day have been forgotten, the article goes downhill from that point forward. That a comment such as “women are the most anti-feminist people in the contemporary world” posited as a fact by the author, reeks of sheer lack of understanding of the structural nature of patriarchal ordering of society in which women find themselves positioned, which maintains the hierarchical status quo by pitting women against other women in a zero-sum game. Further, that a so-called gay rights activist should be ignorant of the role of compulsory heterosexuality and its critical link with relationships of dominance-dependence enabled as well as spawned by income, capability as well as status inequalities that women are subjected to; is ridiculous to the point of indignation.
His critique of middle class women as well as Dalit, working class and tribal women as being guilty of having co-opted into the system, whether, as in the case of the former, by buying into the world of consumerist “choices” or, as in the case of the latter, by “standing behind their men and accepting structural inequalities….” is flawed again due to ignorance of the intersectionality of class-caste-gender hierarchies which works in tandem to reproduce inequalities. Of course, its beyond the author’s comprehension that attaining gender equity is pivotal if class and caste struggles are to be successful, as gendered division of labour is the base on which class and caste structures are built. Also, neither a classless society nor a casteless society can automatically guarantee gender equity unless there is an autonomous and intersecting struggle for the same.
Moving over to factual errors, the author reveals even more woeful ignorance of women’s movements in the country when he talks of meira paibis as “shields” used by men. Its an insult to the torch-bearers of Manipur to call them the shields of men.
Lastly, whether or not the women’s movement/s is dead, we are assured of at least one thing, that ignoramuses like Tellis will certainly never resuscitate it.
@ A Reader: You couldn’t have said it better!
Why is Tellis writing crap after crap without doing some homework on facts and details on what he actually writes about? What this essentially is like an Internet Troll rant with a better grasp on writing and diction. That’s all.
Information is power and now I’m a !@#$ing ditacotr.
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