Feminist? Who, me?

Whether you answer yes or no, there is no denying the debt every woman owes to those who went before

I am always baffled by young (and not so young) women who proclaim proudly that they have ‘no time for feminism’ or who declare when prodded that they wouldn’t really describe themselves as ‘feminist’. Women like this tend to say things like, “I am not really one for all that bra-burning nonsense’. Or even the risible, “I am not a feminist; I am a humanist.” And then there are those who misunderstand the concept completely and protest that they are not into all this ‘man-hating’ business.

This column is written for the benefit of women like these. Women who live in a world that grants them rights that the feminist movement fought for and won (and which they now take for granted). Women who need reminding what their lives would be like if generations of feminists before them hadn’t fought for their place in society.

So here, in no particular order of importance, are just some of the things that feminism brought us. Just so that these non-feminist ladies know that whether they acknowledge it or not, they owe a huge debt to ‘bra-burning, women-lib types’.

• The right to exercise control over your own body. Hard as this may be to believe, there was a time when women had no say in whom they were married off to. They had no control over their reproductive lives. And while this may still be true of millions of Indian women in rural households, middle-class educated women in our cities today have the right to marry according to their own choice; choose the contraception of their choice; and have an abortion if it fails. The law now recognizes the woman’s right to her own body. And we have feminism to thank for that.

• The right to property: While women had limited property rights the world over (control was effectively exercised by either her father or her husband) in India women who inherited property were effectively barred from disposing of it on their own. This ‘limited interest’ was abolished only in 1956 by the Hindu Succession Act, which made women the ‘absolute owner’ of any property they owned, and gave daughters an equal interest in the estate of their fathers. 

• The right to your name: No longer is it taken as given that a woman has to change her surname when she gets married (or even her first name, as happened with some traditional households). She gets to decide what name she is known as; a symbolic victory but an important one nonetheless when it comes to establishing her own identity. What’s more, thanks to a long legal battle waged by author and editor Githa Hariharan, women also have the right to be named as the ‘natural guardian’ of their children, a prerogative earlier restricted to men.

• The right to vote: We tend to take this right for granted in India, because women have had the vote ever since we gained independence in 1947. But this was only possible because of the suffragettes and suffragists movements – run entirely by feminists – that campaigned for years on end in Western democracies to get women the right to vote. 

• The right to work: Outside the home, that is. No longer do women have to be chained to the kitchen stove – unless that’s where they want to be. They have the freedom to go out into the world and earn their own living, using the skills they have developed in school and college (and there too, it is feminism that has made it possible for women to be educated at the same level as their male peers).

• The right to equal pay for equal work: You know all that brouhaha about Jill Abramson being fired as executive editor of the New York Times because she asked to be paid the same salary as her male predecessor? The story was quickly denied, but the controversy would have been a non-starter if it wasn’t for feminism. Not only would a woman never have been appointed to one of the top jobs in an organization but there would have been no question about paying her as much as a man would earn. You want to know what a pre-feminist workplace would look like? Just watch an episode of Mad Men. Do you really want to live in a world in which Joan Holloway reports to Roger Stirling and Peggy Olson to Don Draper? And all the while, combatting casual sexism – and the odd grope and grab – at the workplace? No, I didn’t think so.

So, all you ladies describing yourselves as non-feminists, unless you actually prefer being bare-foot and pregnant, slaving away all hours in the kitchen, with not a rupee (let alone a salary or a house) to call your own, and with no rights over your bodies or your children, maybe you’d do well to acknowledge the debt to those that went before and fought the good battle so that you didn’t need to.

In defence of men

In a free and frank gender debate, men must be allowed to air their views – no matter how offensive we find them

First off, a confession. I find myself increasingly discomfited by the newly-minted feminist narrative in which a woman is always considered to be right and the man is always seen as being wrong. In which a woman’s word is regarded as being more reliable than a man’s, simply because she is a woman. In which a man is assumed to be guilty until he is proved innocent, turning the principles of natural justice on their head, if a woman were to level a rape or dowry charge against him. And in which men and women are depicted as antagonistic entities, engaged in pitched battles across the gender divide.

It really doesn’t have to be like that. Women’s rights are not just a feminist issue. They are a humanist issue. And we do the feminist cause a disservice when we try and shut men out of the discourse, or treat them as enemies of the movement. This is the good fight which all right-thinking human beings must fight; not just those with an extra X chromosome.

Because of our visceral reaction to such events as the Delhi gang rape last December, the gang rape of a photo-journalist in Mumbai, and more recently, the allegations of sexual assault leveled against Tarun Tejpal, we are finally talking about a woman’s right to a safe environment, at home, at the office, and on the streets. But because our rage and anger is so overwhelming, the pitch of the debate has been raised to such shrill levels that we are in danger of drowning out good sense.

The first sign of this is our absolute refusal to listen to what men are trying to say, if it doesn’t fit in with our narrative of woman=victim and man=predator. While there is no disputing that women are more at risk when it comes to sexual violence or harassment, we cannot dismiss out of hand the notion that some men may be victims too. Cases of the dowry and rape laws being misused may be rare, but they do exist. And we ignore them at our peril.

But what is also worrying is the new fashion of shouting down men who express opinions that we regard as sexist. Take Farooq Abdullah, for instance, who confessed that he was now scared of talking to women for fear of what would happen (“I don’t even want to keep a woman secretary. God forbid, there is a complaint against me and I end up in jail”). Or Naresh Aggarwal, who said that men would no longer hire women as personal assistants for fear of being accused of sexual harassment.

Whatever we may think about the mind-set that generated such sentiments, there is no denying that these sentiments do exist. These two men were just brave/foolish/foolhardy (take your pick) to say in public which many men were feeling (and expressing) in private. But given the viciousness with which they were greeted, I wouldn’t be surprised if men now run scared of even speaking out on gender issues, for fear of being shouted down, sneered at, abused, or dismissed as chauvinistic Neanderthals.

And, if you ask me, that is a real shame.

If we want to change people’s minds on issues such as women’s empowerment, sexual harassment, or even sexual assault, then it is important to engage with them in a meaningful way which facilitates dialogue and a free and frank exchange of ideas. Men may well have views that we regard as sexist but just screaming ‘pigs’ at them will not make them rethink their attitudes. It will just make them disengage from the debate and keep their views to themselves in the future. And those views will never change.

  

It is simply self-defeating to create an environment in which no man can express his true opinions on gender – however sexist we may find them – without being torn to bits by a lynch mob motivated by political correctness. Jumping down the throats of people who say things we don’t like will not result in their views being asphyxiated out of existence. These attitudes will continue to flourish in the dark, all the more potent for being unspoken and hence unchallenged. 

Also, I can’t help but feel that it is time that we injected some shades of grey into a discourse that has become too black and white to allow for a nuanced approach. The feminist movement will only benefit from acknowledging that all women don’t fit into one easy category of ‘downtrodden victim’ who must be protected at all costs. Women are human beings, and as such they have the same strengths and weaknesses, the same virtues and flaws as men. Some women are truthful; some are not. Some women are weak; some are strong. Some women are victims; some are oppressors.

To lump them all into a one-size-fits-all category smacks of intellectual laziness and a complete misunderstanding of how the real world operates. This kind of thinking doesn’t empower women; it belittles them by reducing them to easy stereotypes. True equality exists in having the same standards applied to women as they would to men, without conceding any special privilege or concession simply because they are women.

And it also means conceding the point that men have a right to their own views on the gender debate currently raging in the country – never mind how strongly we disagree with him. Feminists cannot become the Thought Police, no matter how grave the provocation.

The Dress Code

It really doesn’t matter what you wear; you can be a feminist in both a sari and a skirt

Women and clothes. It really doesn’t get more complicated than that. There’s conflicting advice coming from every corner. Everyone has an opinion on what you should or should not wear (and where you should or should not wear it). There are people who seem to believe that your choice of outfit has a direct connection with your personal safety. But no matter how much care you take to dress every morning – or evening – you can rest assured that there will always be someone out there who believes that in those clothes, you are simply asking for it.

As for me, all through my life, I have tended to take the path of least resistance when it came to clothes. Growing up in Calcutta, where I went to a school and college run by nuns, there was a certain assumption that ‘good girls’ always dressed conservatively. And quite frankly, I never had a problem with that. I wore salwar kameezes and churidar kurtas routinely and felt incredibly grown-up whenever I wore a sari on special occasions.

Looking back, I often wonder why more of us Loreto girls didn’t rebel against the unspoken dress code that even outlawed something as tame as pedal-pushers (if you have no idea what these are, consider yourself lucky). My guess is that it was mostly because we never really paid that much attention to what we wore. We didn’t see clothes as a means to making some sort of political statement. And I most certainly didn’t think that they defined who I was in any manner.

Clothes definitely did not make this woman, I would have said if I had given any thought to the matter. But quite honestly, I never did. I had more important things to think about (like when I would finally get through the interminable James Joyce opus; and why I could never keep all the characters in War and Peace straight in my head).

After college, I began working at the ABP group, which – in those days at least – was a bastion of orthodoxy. All the women wore saris to work (only one lady with a particularly racy reputation would wear tight kurtas with trousers, which was regarded as the height of daring) and I duly took my cue from them before relaxing into the odd salwar-kameez and finally graduating to that old journo standby, blue jeans.

However I may have dressed on my time off, at work I always veered towards the line of sartorial safety. I would no more have worn jeans and a T-shirt to cover an election rally in a rural area than I would have worn a bikini to an official banquet at Rashtrapati Bhavan. The idea was always to blend in, to seem non-threatening. If I was going to be the proverbial fly on the wall, then I had to be a cipher, nondescript enough to disappear into the background. I couldn’t be that girl in a Bermuda shorts, who thought she was striking a blow against patriarchy by showing off her legs.

But then, these are choices that most women of my generation made, because we wanted to be taken seriously – and we had bigger battles to fight. So, we wanted attention to be focussed on our brains rather than our bodies. And we wanted the conversation to be about our talent and professional abilities rather than our clothes.

I guess we’ve come a long way from that (er, baby, as the sexist Sixties line would have it). And in a way it is comforting that we now take enough of our freedoms for granted to finally be able to have that conversation about clothes. At some level, I suppose it must be seen as a sign of progress that women are all charged up to fight for their right to wear a mini-skirt and not be leered at.

But speaking for myself, I still find the idea of a Slut Walk risible in the Indian context, when women in rural areas who are wrapped up in six yards of fabric get sexually molested, assaulted and raped every day. And call me sexist if you will, but I find it hard to sympathise when women complain of being leered at after putting their breasts out on display in their latest push-up bras. Hell, there are times when even I gawp in horrified fascination at those acres of cleavage on display, so I’m not one to point fingers.

When it comes to clothes, though, I think the common-sense argument is the most compelling one. Of course, you can wear what you like. Of course, you can go where you like while you’re wearing it. And of course, nobody has the right to molest or rape you because of the way you’re dressed. But there is such a thing as ‘appropriate dressing’, and we would be fools to deny it just to sound politically correct. For instance, I still wouldn’t wear a short skirt to a political press conference. And I certainly wouldn’t wear a skimpy top while reporting from a rural area.

At the end of the day, it’s important to remember that clothes are really not that important. Because what you wear is not who you are. So, let’s not make the mistake of believing that our identity is wrapped up in our clothes. It is possible to be a feminist in a sari as well as a skirt – and we should never forget that.