March 9, 2003

THE new world order, the hegemony of the US and globalization are bringing about profound economic and political changes in societies. The emerging single global, economic, social and political structure is undermining sovereignty of many states, reshuffling power alliances, increasing the gap between the rich and the poor and speeding up the process of marginalization of the communities. Perhaps the only silver lining is that globalization is also bringing civil society together to find collective ways and means to renegotiate the emerging realities and challenge the onslaught of abusive forces.

Women are part of the societies undergoing cataclysmic changes, and of the civil society that is gaining critical mass to impinge upon the world’s consciousness. Women have always been aware of the issues that impact their life and the society they live in. These issues have drawn women, since ages, into social activism and protest. However, the most visible of women’s attempts at renegotiating power have been related to historically specific definitions of “women’s rights” that in the early period of the women’s movement denoted individual freedom, sexual and reproductive rights, property rights, and the right to education, employment, credit and other basic necessities.

A factor that played a part in making women’s struggles on these issues more visible was an upsurge of women’s writings. During the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, immense literature poured in, written by women. In the west, the issues of personal freedom, expression of individuality, patriarchy, sex and marriage, sex roles and domestic labour were analyzed and theorized (Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics, Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch; Susan Brownmiller’s Femininity, Fatima Mernissi’s Beyond the Veil) and substantive feminist discourse held the centrestage.

In the developing countries the feminist discourse started evolving around the issues of survival and human dignity vis-a-vis women — education, poverty, domestic violence, social issues like child marriage, dowry and discrimination. The two decades also witnessed an increase in creative writings and literary expressions by women dealing with issues of personal freedom, femininity and sexuality. This happened both in the open, liberal Christian societies of the west and in the restrictive, oppressive Muslim societies in the east where these issues were not talked about openly.

It was in the decade of the 1980s that the definition of ‘women’s rights’ shed its rigid contours, became fluid and started embracing issues that have always impacted women with the same, and often greater, intensity than they touched upon the lives of men. These were the issues that were thought to belong to the ‘public sphere’ or men’s ‘domain’ — hard political and economic issues. Wars, insurgencies, armed conflicts, ethnicity, religious extremism, political systems, and control of economic resources have had tremendous implications for women since ancient times. Women all over the world, particularly in developing societies ridden with conflicts and poverty, have confronted these issues, negotiated the space and searched for alternatives.

In Latin American, Eastern European, African, Arabian Peninsular and Asian countries (Chile, Guatemala, Honduras, Colombia, Bosnia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Rwanda, Palestine, Kashmir, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, India and Pakistan), there have been women’s and mothers’ groups and collectives that dealt with the consequences of wars and armed conflicts — rape, widowhood, missing sons, loss of shelter and homeland, exile, destruction of habitat and other resources. In the 1980s, papers and documents, narratives and stories of women’s initiatives and struggles in zones of conflicts and wars, written by women writers and activists, started emerging in the alternative and mainstream media.

During the same decade, women’s involvement with and contribution to movements around environment, natural resources and ecology also came to the forefront through writings. (Vandana Shiva’s Staying Alive: Women, Ecology and Survival in India; Ursula Sharma’s Women, Work, and Property in North-West India; Rosemary Ridd and Helen Callaway’s Women and Political Conflict: Portraits of Struggle in Times of Crisis; Sana Hasan’s Enemy in the Promised Land: An Egyptian Woman’s Journey into Israel).

By the end of the 1980s, these writings began to be consolidated in the form of books, anthologies and research studies.

The decade of the 1990s witnessed the disintegration of the USSR and Eastern Europe, an upsurge in nationalistic, fascist tendencies, rise of religious fundamentalism, and the emergence of a unipolar world. Ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, massacres in Rwanda, demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, nuclear build-up in India and Pakistan, and the impact of globalization of economy were the issues that created a profound impact on societies. Women writers and academicians took to examining and analyzing the disturbing trends and their implications and searched for alternative vision. An increasing number of titles written by women appeared on varied issues — issues that were once thought to be the prerogative of men to think and expound.

Ayesha Jalal’s Democracy and Authoritarianism in South Asia; Tanika Sarkar and Urvashi Butalia’s Women and Right-Wing Movements:Indian Experiences (ed); Carla Petievich’s The Expanding Landscape: South Asians and the Diaspora (ed); Haleh Afshar and Stephanie Barrientos’ Women, Globalization and Fragmentation in the Developing World (ed) are some examples.

The developments at the start of the 21st century, dominated by the process of globalization and the spread of information technology, have accelerated the creation of knowledge by women on ‘hard’ issues. For one thing, this has come about as a result of decades of struggles of women, both in the developed and developing societies, to have greater access to corridors of knowledge, acquire analytical tools and gain insights through sharing and networking.

The other reason is that globalization has blurred the artificial boundaries between the ‘public’ and the ‘private’ spheres — categories created during the early phases of industrialization and urbanization, ascribing separate ‘domains’ to men and women. Hence it is not surprising that today even ordinary women are more concerned about inflation, rising food prices, security, peace, Bush’s ‘war on terrorism’ and the immigration laws in the US, and men are beset with anxiety about what the future holds for their children in this rapidly changing world.

What distinguishes women’s concerns at this particular juncture of time is that they are articulating the ‘hard’ issues and their impact upon their lives more forcefully, coherently and in the medium that is shared by the wider world, through writings, the Internet, collectives and networks and local movements.

Women writers are delving deep into current political-cultural trends, that are further distorting the power balance and threatening societies. Radhika Desai in her scathing analysis of Hindutva, Slouching towards Ayodhya (2002, Three Essays Press) notes that “...it (Hindutva) is rooted in important and interlinked changes in culture and society: the emergence of an exclusively capitalist ruling class which now requires a rather different configuration of politics, and a new intellectual climate of culturalism, which takes a specific Indian form as neo-Gandhian. Both are central to new politics of the Right of which Hindutva is an important instance.”

Women writers are challenging the prevalent theories and concepts and identifying the gaps in mainstream discourses. Gurpeet Mahajan, in her book The Multicultural Path: Issues of Diversity and Discrimination in Democracy (2002, Sage) critically examines the western discourse of multiculturalism. She points out that while the core elements of multiculturalizm are equality and preservation of diversity, the measures aimed at preservation and protection of minority cultures do not challenge the existing practices and traditional structure of authority which work to the detriment of the minority communities.

Women’s writings are gaining force. Women are addressing the power brokers with intensity and passion, pointing to alternative, rational vision of human society. “There is no easy way out of the spiralling morass of terror and brutality that confronts the world today. It is time now for the human race to hold still, to delve into its wells of collective wisdom, both ancient and modern. What happened on September 11 changed the world forever. Freedom, progress, wealth, technology, war — these words have taken on new meaning. Governments have to acknowledge this transformation, and approach their new tasks with a modicum of honesty and humility.” (Arundhati Roy in “The Algebra of Infinite Justice”)

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