MGS-001 GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT:

CONCEPTS, APPROACHES AND

STRATEGIES
BLOCK 1 CONCEPTS OF GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT
UNIT 1 Basic Concepts 1
UNIT 2 Basic Concepts 2
UNIT 3 Social Construction, Deconstruction, Reconstruction
UNIT 4 Genesis: Trends in Feminism
BLOCK 2 APPROACHES TO GENDER AND DEVELOPMENT
UNIT 5 Development Discourses
UNIT 6 WID-WAD-GAD — Part I
UNIT 7 WID-WAD-GAD — Part II
UNIT 8 GAD Indicators
UNIT 9 Gender Dimensions in Planning and Policy Making
BLOCK 3 STRATEGIES IN GAD
UNIT 10 Gender Planning and Policy Making
UNIT 11 Affirmative Action, Inclusive Policy and Substantive Equality
UNIT 12 Engendering Governance
BLOCK 4 GENDER MAINSTREAMING IN POLICY MAKING
UNIT 13 Definition, Concept and Principles of Gender Mainstreaming
UNIT 14 Implementing Gender Mainstreaming Strategy: Origin, Approach
and Methodology
UNIT 15 Gender Mainstreaming in Policy Research, Programmes
and Schemes
UNIT 16 Gender Mainstreaming of Structures and Mechanisms
BLOCK 5 GENDER AND MARKET ECONOMIES
UNIT 17 Gender and the Process of Economic Development
UNIT 18 Enterprise Development
UNIT 19 Gendered Impact on Agriculture, Environment and
Ecological Concerns
UNIT 20 Formal and Informal Economy
UNIT 21 Neo-liberal Policies
BLOCK 6 GENDER, WORK AND HEALTH
UNIT 22 Paid and Unpaid Work
UNIT 23 Paid and Unpaid Work of Women: Some Theoretical Reflections
UNIT 24 Livelihoods And Subsistence Production
UNIT 25 Work-Life Balance
UNIT 26 Gender, Health and Well-being
UNIT 27 Sexual Harassment
UNIT 28 Gender Occupational Safety and Health
UNIT 29 Reproductive Health and Reproductive Rights
Unit 1: Basic Concepts – I

Sex and Gender

Sex is defined as the anatomical and physiological characterises that signifies the biological
maleness and femaleness of an individual. Gender emphasises the social construction of
masculinity and feminity. It explains that masculinity and feminity are products of social
cultural and psychological factors which are acquired by an individual in the process of
becoming man or a woman.

The distinction between sex and gender is often called into questions. One of the problems
created by this distinction was it has treated sex as a phenomenon which is „given‟ or a
„natural division‟. Therefore many feminist have opposed the disassociation of gender from
sex as this approach is unable to capture the interplay between women‟s‟ specific
embodiments and the socio cultural factors those devalued women‟s position in a society
within a particular point of time. Another difficulty associated with the distinction of sex and
gender is that often gender seems to be relevant only to women, as feminist have adopted the
concept of gender to reflect women‟s subordinated position in the society. Therefore the term
gender seems to be applied to women while focussing on the construction of feminity.
Feminist critiques often argue that the distinction between sex and gender has led to a failure
to introspect the nature of sex itself. For instance this distinction has failed to question the
ways in which a society constructs and understand the category of sex. Therefore sex is
primarily seen as division and a container which is universal.

The resurgence of feminism in 1970s has critically looked at the distinction between sex and
gender. Further they adopted the concept of gender to define the social construction of
masculinity and feminity along with emphasising on the social ordering of relations between
women and men. Gender explains the existing hierarchical division between men and
women which are grounded in both social institutions and practices. It is describes as socio
structural phenomenon which is produced, negotiated and sustained in every day interactions.
(Jackson and Scott, 2002:p1). In the present context, gender intercepts with other divisions
and inequalities such as race, class, ethnicity and sexualities. Therefore the meaning of sex
and gender, feminity and masculinity varies within societies and across.

This type of analysis of gender destabilises the division between the sex and gender and has
lead some feminists like Delphy argue that gender precedes sex. In Gender Trouble butler
points out that if gender does not follow automatically from sex there is no reason to believe
that they are inevitably only two genders. Once the immutability of the sex is contested it
becomes apparent that „this construct called “sex” is as culturally constructed as gender;
indeed perhaps it was always already gender‟(butler1990,p7) If sex, as well as gender, is a
construct it follows that the body does not have a pre given essential sex. Rather bodies are
rendered intelligible through gender and cannot be set to have a signifiable existence prior to
the mark of their gender. Jackson and Scott, 2002 p19) Bodies become gendered through the
continual performance of gender. In contrast Butler attempted to deconstruct sex and gender
distinction along with other binary distinction like nature and culture. Deconstruction of both
the sex and gender leads to liberation of body from any natural attributes and social
construction. Wittig, maintains that sex is nothing more than a social construct and that the
division between men and women merely a product of social power relations with no basis in
nature and human biology. According to Wittig women are nothing more than oppressed
social class. The disappearance of oppression and therefore of the dominant and the
dominated will see the elimination of women and of men as distinct groups of human beings.
In this world where sex classes will longer exist, Freedom for all human beings will be
attained beyond the categorisation of sex. And the both the concept and real existence of men
and women will give way to the „advent, of individual subjects‟ (Wittig 1996:p20).
Precisely the deconstruction emphasises the social construction of sex and gender as well.
Some feminist have criticises this approach and argued that the social construction of sex
leads to the rejection of gender as a term which creates for the confusion.

Sex Categorization

Men and women exist as distinct and separate categories. There are biological similarities as
well as differences that exist between the bodies of women and men. It is asserted that sex
categorization determines two physically and genetically specific groups of people. This
claim is called sexual dimorphism. Scholars consider sexual dimorphism as biological fact. It
is argued that sexual differentiation creates two “structurally distinguishable” categories of
humans.

Sex Assignment

This category explains the process of the interlinking of social meaning to biological sex.
This process happens at birth or before birth. It is the identification of people as male or
female. In other words it their identification with sex category. For instance, it is identified
through the external genitalia. There are exemptions that some infants can not be easily
identified in live births. They cannot be identified as female or male. In certain cases, sex
chromosomes, external genitalia and internal reproductive system do not confirm to the males
and females. Those individuals are called intersexuals.

Patriarchy
Patriarchy means the rule by the male head of social units like family or tribe. The patriarch
denotes a societal elder who has legitimate power over others to rule in the social unit.
Feminists in early 20th century have used the concept patriarchy to explain the social system
of masculine domination over women. Within gender studies three theoretical developments
such as Radical feminist, Marxist feminist and dual system theory have used patriarchy as
their central concept in analysis. Radical feminist analysed patriarchy in the context of men
having control over women‟s body. This analysis has been used in feminist views on
pornography. Is a pornography essential element of men‟s control over women that is
damaging women‟s interest or can pornography in the right circumstances‟ used by women
as part of sexual liberation? For feminist like MacKinnon to see sexuality is central to male‟s
control over women, pornography is the vital element of the male domination. Pornography
is seen as a central element in men‟s control over women and is closely linked to sexual
violence and rape. Morgan argues pornography is the theory and rape is the practice. Feminist
have argues against pornography for three broad reasons. It encourages sexual violence and
rape against women. Secondly, its humiliation of women it is itself form of sexual violence.
Third women are hurt and economically sexually exploited in the production of pornography.
(Freedman, 2002: p64)

Further, Marxist feminist have argued that patriarchy arises from the working of the
capitalist economic system. For example women‟s unpaid domestic labour benefits the
capitalist system to progress. Therefore the subordination of women to men is viewed as a
product of capitalist systems subordination of labour. Barrett argues class inequality is the
central feature of the society and it determines and reinforces gender inequality. Some
feminist writers have moved beyond economic explanation of women‟s suppression and
looked at how ideology creates gender division. Barrett had argues ideology plays key role in
the construction of gender through the institutions of family and ideology of familialism.
(ibid p49) Some Marxist feminist have moved beyond the limits of conventional Marxist
feminism and analyses women‟s oppression by conflicting capitalism and patriarchy in the
theory of dual systems.

Dual system theory has been central concern in the works of Mitchell, Hartmann and Walby.
The dual systems theory has prioritise two systems such as capitalism in patriarchy in its
analysis. These theories have understood capitalism in patriarchy as independent and
mutually accommodative systems of operation, and both the structures benefit from women‟s
subordination. (Pilcher and Whelehen, 2005). Hartmann argues that capitalism and
patriarchy are linked but that patriarchy proceeds capitalism and is not unique to capitalist
societies. She argues sexual division of labour is the means for women‟s subordination and
this division does existent non capitalist society. Therefore patriarchy and capitalism are
independent but linked. These two systems are intertwined and interdependent and show
solidarity among men, which allows men to dominate the women. (Freedman, 2002: p50)
Over the period, Patriarchy as a subject has been used and abused in the context of feminist
analysis. There are number of criticism over the context of patriarchy and its use in the
interpretation of gender relations. The number one criticism is the interpretation of patriarchy
seems to display tendency towards a historicism. Secondly, often theorists have adopted a
reductionist approach in the analysis of patriarchy. For example the explanation on patriarchy
has been reduced to factors like biology or capitalism or family. Thirdly, Patriarchy supports
to develop a narrow conceptualisation of gender relation that occurs between men and
women. Fourthly theories have described the concept of patriarchy as universal. This analysis
of patriarchy fails to recognise the variations exist within the culture, community and
sexuality. Fifthly, theories employing the concept have been criticised to over emphases for
the use of abstract structuralism. Walby‟s reconstruction of patriarchy claims to have
overcome this criticism and define patriarchy as a system of social structure and practices in
which men dominate, oppress and exploit women. He identifies six structures of patriarchy
such as household production, paid work, male violence, culture, state and sexuality. Walby‟s
analyses of patriarchy has shown the changes which has occurred in history. For example her
understanding of patriarchy from private form to public form. Private patriarchy describes the
subordination and exploitation of women around family and household. The public patriarchy
explains the exclusion of women from public life and reflects various forms of discrimination
faced by women in public space. Walby comprehends that patriarchy as change its form, as
she puts it, rather than being restricted to the household women have the whole society in
which to roam and be exploited. (1990 p201)

Matriarchy

There are two uses of the term matriarchy. The first is identical to common usage, denoting a
type of social organization in which mother hates families and descent may be reckoned
through them. The occurrence may be idiosyncratic rather than the basis of social structure.

Then second usage which is speculative and based in evolutionary theories refers to societies
in which mother holds the main positions. This theory was popular in the 19th century ,it was,
for example , a vital ingredient Friedrich Engel‟s Origin of the families, private property and
state,[Link] argued that early hunter gatherer societies in which property rights did not
exist would have been ruled by women because of their reproductive powers. However, once
land and goods becomes private property in the development of sedentary agriculture or
pastoralism, it became important for a man to ensure the legitimacy of their offspring in order
to transform wealth by descent .Thus, arose the system of patriarchy in which men began to
control the reproductive power of women who lost the political power they had enjoyed
under matriarchy. Like all evolutionary theories they claim human prehistory was
characterized by a shift from mother-rights to father-rights fell out of favour in the early 20th
century. Despite the attractiveness of this speculation for feminist theory there is accredited
evidence from either archeology or anthropology for the existence of matriarchy in the
second sense, at anytime in history or any human society.

Socialization

Socialization is defined as the process through which self acquire the rules, social receipes,
conceptions of appropriate contact and knowledge that allows them to act in their socio-
cultural political world. It is a mechanism of cultural transmission. Gender socialization
means the process by which the individual if taught to internalize socially determined values
of appropriate masculine traits and feminine traits.

Gender Socialization

Socialization is the process that enables people to think about the expectations of society
about them. People identify with the categories of feminine and masculine in this process. It
is about the expected behavioural patterns and norms for men and women to exist within the
society. The transmission of such values, norms happens in this process. People are exposed
to social world through the cultural information of parents, care takers and so on. This
process helps us to understand the embedded nature of gender in the process of socialization.

Gender Roles

Roles in the society are gendered in nature. Patriarchy determines the role of men and
women. It is the mode of patriarchal ideology which prescribes specific role to men and
women and they have to confirm those roles. Violation of gender roles become a taboo in the
society. For instance role reversals are considered as deviances according to dominant male
centred ethos of the society.

Gender Identity

It is the sense of people as male or female. It is related to our existence as male or female.
The sense of identity creates interest in their life. For instance children imbibe the values and
norms of the elderly people. It affects their sense of gender identity. Social construction of
gender as well as the sexual difference are very much part of the process of gender identity. It
is recognition of one‟s own identity. It is conditioned according to the dominant norms and
values of the society.

Gender Bias
Society produces bias that is structured on the basis of gender identities. Patriarchy
strengthens the gender bias and recognises the society as a male dominated space. Thus,
women face bias from the dominant patriarchal society. Practices of gender bias differ
according to the diverse social stratification of societies. For instance girl children are killed
because they are considered inferior to boys. Due to socialization process men tend to control
women and women are forced to behave according to the interest of the men in the society.
Thus gender bias is the construction of socialization process and it is the extension of
patriarchal ideology.

Feminism

The basic idea of feminism interprets the subordination of women by men. Feminism
believes in the liberation of women from such subordination. They argue that it is only
possible through the annihilation of patriarchy. Consequentially, it will result in a world
which understands the social location of the women. Mary Wollstonecraft‟s Vindication of
the Rights of Women in 1792 is one of the pioneering work which combined feminist theory
and feminist activism .Feminism, in the earlier stage, focused on the equality of women in the
political and economic realms. For instance, Women‟s Social and Political Union (WSPU)
founded in 1903 dealt with the question of suffrage. The second wave feminists explores the
impact of cultural oppression of the subordination of women, Feminists reject the notions of
universalized male and advocate their understanding based on experience and identities. On
the other hand, Marxist feminists argue that oppression of women is linked to social and
economic structure. Radical feminists explore the subordination women through the sexuality
and assert that sexual oppression is the invasion of male on the sexuality of women. Psycho-
analytical stream of feminism focuses on the subjectivity of women with in the cultural field
of sex. Socialist feminists examine the relationship between capitalism and patriarchy. The
homogenous as well as universal feminist models are being challenged by the differences
based on sexual orientation, race, caste and so on.

Liberal Feminism

Women‟s position in society became a debated topic during the 19th century in England and
the United States for liberal [Link] of the defenders of liberalism as a political
philosophy where Thomas Hobbes,John Lockes ,Jerry Bentham and James Stuart [Link]
Hobbes and Locke theorized that civil society is a private sphere where individuals can
exercise their rights freely without the interventions of state. They hold that humans lived in a
state of nature prior to the establishment of civil society and the State; in order to have
security over life, property and personal freedom , man voluntarily established the civil
society and the state by social contract whereby they renounced part of their rights in order to
enjoy [Link] the sphere of economics,Adam Smith propagated minimum state
[Link] to him ,total societal happiness will increase if individual happiness in
[Link] can happen only if everyone is allowed to invest for maximum private profit
without any interference from the [Link],political liberalism coincided with the rise of
capitalism in [Link] says ,“ it is often argued that the origin of liberal philosophy
are coexistent with in the rise of capitalism, so that the language of autonomy and self
improvement becomes inextricably linked to the property interest of middle classes”. Liberal
feminism sprang within the context of economic and political liberalism in England.
Philosophically, liberal feminist assumed the absolute authority of the “natural light of
reason” as an inherent trait of all human beings, regardless of sex by which individual can
reach universal neutral unbiased value judgments with out the help of any external authority.
For liberal feminists, individuals living in society should have political and legal rights
irrespective of their sexes. Thus, women should have right to vote , equal legal rights as
husband, right to education, right to be integrated in the political process vis representation;
further , liberal feminists critiqued the relegation of women to „private‟ domestic spheres as
women‟s natural place. Whelehan says “ the concept of public and private spheres are used to
identify the limits of state intervention in individual existence. The „public‟ comes to mean
aspects of social life where state intervention is legitimate: where the private sphere is the
realm of abstract individualism-where „man‟ maintains his domination free from the fetters of
civic interventions. This is where the term „ manifestly gendered „; male nature belongs to the
paradigm of social interaction by default, female nature belongs to the home and to their
irrational side of human nature, associated with qualities such as nurturance and
emotions.”.Mary Wollstonecraft, a 19th century feminist, was a champion of the women‟s
suffrage movement. She believed in an essential human nature that is common to each
individual who irrespective of his or her sex can reach universal through rational judgment.
According to Mary Wollstonecraft, each individual has natural rights in society irrespective
his or her sex. In her book,Vindications of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft argues
that democracy is not” true” one unless women get the right to vote. Also, Mary
Wollstonecraft criticized women‟s confinement to the “private space” outside of the public
[Link] proper dignity can come through education and getting access to public work
outside of home.

Marxist Feminism

Karl Marx argues that the fundamental way in which humans relate to non-human nature is
by production of basic necessities such as food and shelter. The production systems of any
society form the economic or material base or structure of that society. In negotiating with
nature, to produce things humans actually engage in social relations with each other to form
the relations of production which constitutes a society‟s non material base on which the entire
super structure of politico-legal system, ideology, philosophy, religion and culture of a
particular society rests. History moves , according to Marx,by contractions between the
structure and the super [Link],there is a primitive stage of hunting and gathering
system in which the modes of production was socially owned.(primitive communism); with
the invention of new forces or tools of production there was a contradiction between the
production and the relation of production resulting in the agricultural mode of production,
where people primarily produced via sawing and tilling the land; accordingly , there
developed a corresponding relations of production .The next two stages of history for Marx
are the feudal and capitalist system. In each stage of production, there is class division
according to those who controls the means of production and those who do not. A new
society is born out of the old one by class struggle in which the ruling class, that is the class
controlling the system of production, are over thrown and a new class ceases control of
system of production. According to Marx, capitalist system is the first economic system that
saw the evolution of commodities, wage labour, the separation of use and exchange value and
a priority of exchange over use value. For Marx, a thing becomes a commodity when it is
brought in to the market for the purpose of being [Link] drawing the major argument from
this premises Marxist feminists argue that oppression of women is linked to social and
economic structure.

They explore the dialectical relationship between biological aspects,practices and

physical/social worlds of [Link] emphasise on the productivity and labour of women.
Class is an important category to understand the interlinkages of labour and productivity.
They depend upon the perspective of Marx and Friedrich Engel‟sexual division of labour
which determines the social location of women. Marxist feminists argue that capitalism
appropriates its strength by maintaining the divide between family and economy. Thus, they
foregrounded reflections on the different aspects of class, patriarchy, women and capitalism.

Socialist Feminism

The origin of socialist feminist writings can be seen in the experiential accounts of socialist
women activists. They recognize that issues of women are sidelined in the male dominated
socialist parties. For instance, parties such as British Labour Party had differences with the
idea of the suffrage campaign for women. They argued that such campaign will only
strengthen the interests of middleclass. Male political leaders ignored the impact of day to
day forms of patriarchy in the lives of women. On the contrary, socialist feminists focused on
the relationship between women workers and capitalism. Simultaneously, they supported the
work of women which provides autonomy to them. They also addressed procreative and
sexual work of the women with in the home. Socialist feminist argue that differences
between men and women are socially constructed and it can be changed through social
interventions. They contended that abolition of capitalism and male dominance are important
for the liberation of women. They explored the alienation of women as sexual beings. For
instance , women are alienated as mothers and wives. Socialist feminists deploy discourse of
culture for their propaganda .In other words, they assert that creation of culture is important
to create political consciousness among the women. They opine that community based
activities are essential to forge political solidarity.

Psychoanalytic Feminism

Feminist developed a critique of the psychoanalytic perspective of Sigmund Freud by

debunking its inherent biases. Freud dealt with the questions of psychosexual development
and argues that deficient genitalia attributer inferiority to woman. Feminist argue that this
perspective of Freud is biologically determined and reduced woman to mere biological
aspects. For instance, Karen Horney, a feminist critic of Sigmund Freud argued that
difference on the bases of social location plays vital role in determining the differences
between sexes than sexes in genitalia. She contented that woman are envious of greater social
power of men rather than genitalia, Simon de Beauvoir argued that Freud‟s interpretations of
male as human norms and the female as „mutilated male‟. Thus, Beauvoir equates Freud‟s
position of woman as a deviation from male to that of cultural construction of woman.

However, Jacques Lacan re-interpreted Sigmund Freud by replacing Freud‟s under tag of
sexual differences and genitalia by language, phallus and law. Thus, they focused on the
location of women out side the discourse of language. Julit Mitchel emphasised on
understanding of human being about themselves and there interaction between people. She
argued that Freud‟s work provided an approach to the study of subject. She further argues
that Freud‟s works are essential to understand the development of woman and her being.

Black Feminism

Black Feminism deconstructed the white Universalist biases of the dominant feminism. Thus,
it is rapture from the hegemonic forms of feminism. Black women struggle against racial,
sexual, hetero –sexual forms including class oppression. Black feminist argues that they gain
their perspectives from historical realities of the struggle of Afro-American women for there
survival. However, they emphasized on the intricacies of sexual and racial identity, hence
they formed National Feminist Orgainzation in New York in the year 1973. They were also
connected with movements related to Civil Rights such as Black Nationalism, Black Panther
and so on. It draws its basic premises from the personal lives of Black women. However, they
place there movements with in the field of contemporary economy and Black politics. Thus,
contend that race and gender are related to there political repression. For instance, rape of
black woman by white man is political repression for them. At the same time, they are
conscious of the challenges of such as capitalism and imperialism. By claiming their position
on liberation of Black, they argue that if one is not free, how they can liberate others. Hence,
they are liberating black men too. Therefore, they provide critical dimension to there struggle
against racial and patriarchal domination. Black feminist positioned themselves as the most
oppressed, marginal and degraded communities. The middle class black women are
represented in Black feminist writing as the agency which has potential to create
consciousness among the poor black women by establishing communes. For instance, Patrcia
Hill Collins , one of the most pioneering black feminist argues that black women are the
„Outside within‟ their community as well as in the dominant –non black –white community.
Black feminist thus offers powerful critique of multifaceted aspects of race and gender.
Ecofeminism

Ecofeminism is a perspective which put forth people from environmental and feminist‟s
struggles to fight against the common cause, i.e., what cause the oppression of both women
and environment? It is a movement in which both elements such as women and environment
seem to be united to voice against the dominance of men. The term "ecofeminism" was
coined by French writer Francioise d'Eaubonne in 1974 to represent women's capacity for
bringing an ecological movement while challenging the dominant perspective of West
towards development i.e., human being‟s dominants over nature is in parallel to man‟s
dominants over women. Ecofeminism is a response to the perception of the society in which
both women and nature have been devalued in Western culture and, therefore, both can be
elevated and liberated through direct political action or collective struggle. For instance, earth
or nature is exploited by the dominance of modern science and technology, and
industrialization. Women, on the other hand, are being dominated and governed by the
complex patterns of social institution called capitalist patriarchy in which men‟s labor is
valued by the market economy and women labor in the home is completely devalued and
neglected.

In United States, ecofeminism as a perspective has originated during the Second Wave of
feminism when people within the peace movement started to think on the interrelationship
between militarism, racism, classism, and the environmental damage. Towards late 1980s and
the early 1990s, feminists began to theorize environmental damage and women‟s oppression
by relating these two conditions in the context of developing countries .Further, the
development of science and technology was viewed to be patriarchal and masculine in nature.
For example, the developments in biotechnology and reproductive technology denied the
freedom of nature and women respectively. As Mies and Shiva pointed, these technological
developments have aimed to dispossess women for their generative capacity (reproductive)
and nature for its productive capacity. Therefore, within this discourse, women became
instrumental in going against ecological destructions such as women peasants were actively
protested against the construction of nuclear power plants in Germany, in India, women in
Chipko movement strongly protested the construction of mega dams, and the women of
Kenya's greenbelt movement come together to plant millions of trees in arid deforested
region.
The basic argument of ecofeminists centers on the idea that women symbolize nature due to
their similar role of biological reproduction. Women are perceived to be closer to nature
because of their capacity of childbearing and therefore, both women and nature are subjected
to the male-driven technological progress and subjugation .Women‟s role in defense of their
family and home, served as a strong source to carry out a political struggle in defense of
ecology and its conservation and sustaining their livelihood. There are many types of
thoughts emerged within the ecofeminist movement. As Merchant have categories
ecofeminism in four types such as liberal, cultural, social, and socialist. Similarly, Mies and
Shiva discussed spiritual and political types of ecofeminism across the world.

Womanism

The notion of womanism is the opposite of stereotypes such as girlish, frivolous,

irresponsible and so on. It represents a paradigm shifts in the Afro-American feminist
ideologies. It signifies the black folk expression which is common among the dialogues
between black mothers to their female [Link] to Alice Walker, “Acting
womanish means „acting like a woman”. For her it is a commonly refused to audacious,
outrageous, willful or courageous behavior. This steam of feminism encourages intellectual
inquiry of Afro-American women. Thus, it associates with intellectual maturity.

Womenism explores the importance of love among women, sexual and asexual engagements
and so on. It also encourages culture, emotional flexibility and strength of women. This
stream of feminism also not negates sexual as well as asexual love for women. At the same
time, Alice Walkar argues that womanist is not a separatist. Womanism also emphasis on
aesthetes, sprits, struggle and so on.

Post modernist feminism

Post modernist feminist provides a critical reading of feminist empiricism and feminist
standpoint. In other words, it questions the feminist meta- narratives and focuses on the
multiplicities of feminist assertion, theories and so on. Post modernist feminism confronts
universalism, subject and self, reason, science, progress in a special fashion. This category of
feminism reflects the wilderness of feminist theories as the strength of the feminist assertions.
Postmodern feminist deploy the postmodern critique of the subjectivity. Thus,they engage
themselves in endless displacements of critical enquires. Though such intellectual endeavors,
they detach themselves from the authentic forms of knowledge of gender. A post modern
feminist scholar explores how the social entities such as man and woman are culturally
conditioned within the discourse. Postmodern feminist scholarship also examines the role of
autobiographies and constructions of „the natural‟ .They explores different forms of
oppression in categories such as class, racism, homophobia, basis of ability and
discrimination.

Postcolonial feminism

Postcolonial feminism derives its philosophical premises from post colonial studies. Scholars
describe the category of „post colony‟ in the manner in which formerly colonized nature state
produce new forms of power that have relation to their colonial past. They argue that
persistence of the authenticity of type still lack in the vestiges of coeval nature and natural
elitist cliques. Post colonial feminist group which belong to newly decolonized
spaces/regions explored their identity within the gendered space of new nation state. Scholars
debunked the politics of the colonial missionary projects and their ways of empowering
women in non-western countries. The representation of women with in the discourse linked
to colonial patriarchies produced as a culture of othering. For instance, studies on Sati,
Veiling, which are conducted by eurocentric scholars reproduce ethnocentric judgments on
non-western ways of living. Post colonial feminist scholars also resisted romanization of
postcolonial ways of life by the first world scholarship on feminism. Thus, they are engaging
with the gendered binary oppositions which constructs /operate in the spaces of coloniality
and post- coloniality.

Dalit feminism

Dalit feminism emerged as a critique to the value free, dominant, mainstream feminist trends
in India. Dalit feminist emphasis that Dalit women are oppressed on the basis of social factors
such as caste,gender and class. Thus, they challenged the dominant feminist framework
which focused on class and gender.

Dalit feminist established an autonomous organization called National Federation of Dalit

women (NFDW) in the year 1995. It is argued by them that caste is interlinked to the
oppression of Dalit women. For instance, Indian society is based on the hierarchy of caste.
Occupations in India are divided on the basis of caste such as manual scavengers, cobblers
and so on. Dalit feminist situate their critique by engaging with the multifaceted unequal
statues of Dalit women. They raised the difference of „internal‟ and „external‟ patriarchy as a
fundamental premise of their critical enquiry. According to them, „internal‟ patriarchy refers
to the oppression of Dalit women by Dalit men. On the other hand,the „external‟ patriarchy
deals with their oppression by the dominant /non-dalit / men and women. For instance,
victims of rape as dalit women, bonded dalit women labourers undergo internal as well as
external [Link] the same time, they argue, Dalit women have the authenticity to
represent themselves in the domain of politics. However, Dalit feminist assert that question of
agency is important for the overall development of lives of Dalit women. Thus, they also
deploy the writings of Dalit women such as autobiographies to foreground their distinct and
stigmatized socialization.

Post colonialism

Post colonialism refers to range of global cultural developments which occurred in the
aftermath of the Second World War to this current era. There are historical and theoretical
dimensions to this term. On the one hand, post colonialism means the cultural economic,
and the social events which have determined the decline of „European imperialism‟.
Postcolonial theories also deal with questions such as cultural identity, gender, nationality,
race and ethnicity, language and power, subjectivities that faced imperialism and so on.
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961) is one of the prominent thinkers who argued about the oppressed
consciousness of colonized subjects. He contends that imperialism started the process of
„internalization‟ in which those who are subjected to it experience economic, political and
social inferiority not in „external‟ terms but in a fashion that affected the sense of their
identity .Therefore, economic inferiority creates a condition of racial and cultural
inferiority. Fanon also tried to demonstrate how the language played a role within this
process of colonization, For instance, he mentions about the colonized persons who are
compelled to speak in the language or logic of the imperialistic forces .Thus, language plays a
vital role in the subjugation of the people. This category also represents the cultural
partialities that are ingrained in the European discourses. It denotes the cultural diversity of
the post-colonial conditions. It shows the new forms of colonialism which exists through the
transmission of the culture by the imperialistic forces.

Post Modernism
Postmodernism refers to style or movements with in literature, paintings, plastic arts and
architecture. Scholars such as Anthony Giddens argue that it deals with aspects of aesthetic
reflections upon the nature of modernity. A postmodern scholar rejects the authenticity which
is attributed to the rationality of the enlightenment. Scholars such as David Harvey contended
that a greater flexibility and change in capitalism is related to the post modern transitions.
There are different meanings for postmodernism in different field. Linguistic abundance,
stylistic anarchy and lexical exhibitionism are feature of the post modern literature. It
becomes resistance against the functional element in the architecture. Jean-Francois Lyotard
argues that postmodernism marks the collapse of grand narratives such as Marxism and
replace them with little narratives. However, postmodern scholarship engages with the
multiplicity of truth.

Nation-state

Nation state is the political community that is distinct from other forms of community
because of its autonomy with regard to legal codes and governmental structures, head of the
state, boundaries, system of military defense and so on. It also possesses a lot of symbolic
features which act to signify its identity in homogenous terms For instance, a flag, national
anthem; a popular self-image is essential part of its structure. Nation state is different from
the possession of nationhood. However, the19th century witness us in the struggle to achieve
the nationalistic vision with out the accommodation of political autonomy of the nation state,
for instance , the Italian states, or the unification of the German leadership of Prussia in1872.
Even today there are number of a nation which does not essentially have an accompanying
status of statehood, for example Wales and Scotland in the United Kingdom. From this
discourse we can understand that a nation state is may not be determined particularly, with
reference to such notions as nationality, ethnicity, culture or language. It is, rather, the social,
political and economic modes, but the fundamental features of nation state have different
norms, political autonomy, cods with respects to their system of social relations and
economic identity also.
 UNIT 2 BASIC CONCEPTS-II
Power
Power can be defined as the degree of control exercised by certain
people/institutions/organizations over material, human, intellectual and financial resources.
The control of these resources becomes the source of power. It is dynamic and relational and
exercised in the social, economic and political relation between individuals and groups. It is
also distributed unequally where some individuals or groups have greater control over the
resources and others having little or no control. The access to and control over resources
determines the extent of power one exercises. Different degrees of power are sustained and
perpetuated through social stratification like gender, class, caste etc. (Sri latha batliwala)
Power can be understood as operating in a number of different ways:
- power over: This power involves an either/or relationship of domination/subordination.
Ultimately, it is based on socially sanctioned threats of violence and intimidation, it requires
constant vigilance to maintain, and it invites active and passive resistance;
- power to: This power relates to having decision-making authority, power to solve problems
and can be creative and enabling;
- power with: This power involves people organising with a common purpose or common
understanding to achieve collective goals;
- power within: This power refers to self confidence, self awareness and assertiveness. It
relates to how can individuals can recognise through analysing their experience how power
operates in their lives, and gain the confidence to act to influence and change this. (Williams
et al, 1994).
Subordination
According to Webster dictionary Subordination means
1. One who stands in order or rank below another; -- distinguished from a principal.
2. Inferior in order, nature, dignity, power, importance, or the like.
3. To place in a lower order or class; to make or consider as of less value or importance;
as, to subordinate one creature to another.
4. To make subject; to subject or subdue; as, to subordinate the passions to reason.
5. Placed in a lower order, class, or rank; holding a lower or inferior position.
Women‘s subordination refers to social norms, culture and customs which maintain men as
primary, superior and paramount and women are secondary and subordinate to men. This
excludes and restricts women entering into public domain, taking decisions on their own,
occupying positions and so on. Women‘s conference in Beijing has said that there is no
nation under heaven, where women are not subordinated. Thus women‘s subordination is a
global phenomenon which is considered as the result of the manifestation of the patriarchy.
Empowerment
Merriam Webster dictionary defines empowerment as to give official authority or legal power
to the powerless; to promote the self actualization. It is providing opportunity to the people to
come out of their subordination, deprivation and seek their entitlement. Srilatha Batliwala
defines empowerment as a range of activities from individual self assertion to collective
resistance, protest and mobilization that challenge basic power relations. For individuals and
groups where class, caste, ethnicity and gender determine their access to resources and
power, their empowerment begins when they not only recognize the systemic forces that
oppress them, but act to change existing power relationships. Empowerment, therefore, is a
process aimed at changing the nature and direction of systemic forces that marginalize
women and other disadvantaged sectors in a given context.
Asian activists define women‘s empowerment as ―the process and the result of the process‖
of
- challenging the ideology of male domination and women‘s subordination;
- enabling women to gain equal access to and control over resources (material,
human, intellectual, financial); and
- transforming the systems, institutions (family, education, religion, media, etc.) and
structures (legal, political, economic, social) through which the ideology and practice
of subordination is reinforced and reproduced
Srilatha Batliwala, ―The Meaning of Women‘s Empowerment: New Concepts from
Action‖ in Population Policies Revisited, Sen.

Discrimination
The term discrimination refers to differential treatment taken against a person/group because
they belong to certain class, caste, gender etc which is considered as lower in the society.
Discrimination is the differential behaviour towards another group. It involves excluding or
restricting members of one group from accessing opportunities that are available to other
groups. Discriminatory behaviour takes many forms and involves in social, political and
economic exclusion. This disadvantages lead to different kinds of discrimination and
injustice. The economic disadvantage may be seen as one of the root causes of
discrimination. Unequal distribution of income gives advantages to the working classes than
others. Apart from economic causes people with socially despised sexualities as well as
people suffering from different types of illness also discriminated. In this scenario the gender
discrimination is more predominant. Gender encompasses elements of injustice which stems
from the dominant value of the society. The devaluation of women in the society leads to
their discrimination. This discrimination manifests in the form of dowry, son preference, sex
trafficking, unpaid labour, abuse, nutritional deprivation, lack of education, lack of
opportunities in the labour market, domestic violence, other economic, social and political
disadvantages.
This discrimination takes different forms in different context. In US race structures plays an
important role that too women from disadvantaged race is paid low, have low status, do
menial jobs and they are mostly in domestic occupation. In Indian context caste is also
associated with this discrimination. The lower caste women has triple burden of being a
woman, hailing from lower caste and being poor. Contact of any kind through touching,
having sexual relation, dinning, drinking from the same well and so on between
institutionally upper caste and lower caste is socially not accepted. According to Arjan De
Haan these discriminations and deprivations is multi dimensional. For example a landless
female daily labourer of scheduled caste is very likely to be poor, illiterate, with poor health
status, have little social capital and she finds difficult to exercise her constitutional rights. Her
quality of life is less because of discrimination. The lower castes are segregated on space and
they are confined to the margins of village. This distance and social disadvantage made them
socially, economically, culturally disadvantaged. By taking this disadvantage the upper caste
formulated their demands and fulfils their interest. And women are mostly deprived because
of this inequality.
The Constitution of India guarantees to all Indian women equality (Article 14), no
discrimination by the State (Article 15(1)), equality of opportunity (Article 16), equal pay for
equal work (Article 39(d)). In addition, it allows special provisions to be made by the State in
favour of women and children (Article 15(3)), renounces practices derogatory to the dignity
of women (Article 51(A) (e)), and also allows for provisions to be made by the State for
securing just and humane conditions of work and for maternity relief (Article 42). In spite of
these measures women discrimination in India is not rooted out. Social commitment and
political will has an significant role in uprooting the discriminatory practice against women.
Entitlement
Entitlement means the appropriate rights and claims. It is the right guaranteed by the
law/statute and provides certain benefits to the deprived and underprivileged group. In the
context of gender, women do not have access and control over tangible and intangible
resources and their equal rights with men are deprived because of patriarchal norms. The low
status of women is thus an effect of the entitlement failure. Family, other social institution
confines the capacity of women, restricts their independent activity and making them to
consider the needs of others above their own. Therefore to seek gender justice entitlement is
the primary requirement.
Entitlement in economics is often associated with the right to property. Many believe that
empowerment of women can happen if they have access and control over resources and
properties. Looking from this perspective it can be said that resources and properties are still
male domain and women don‘t have their claim towards it access and control. Women also
lack inheritance to property rights. In view of this the commission on status of women in
India 1975 has given many recommendations regarding the entitlement of women. Some of
them are:
- Legal recognition should be given to the economic value of the contribution made by
the wife through household work for purposes of determining ownership of
matrimonial property, instead of continuing the archaic test of actual financial
contribution.
- On divorce or separation, the wife should be entitled to at least one-third of the assets
acquired at the time of and during the marriage.
- Sections 15 and 16 of the Indian Succession Act 1925 to be amended, removing
mandatory linkage of wife‘s domicile with that of the husband.
- Equal distribution of not only separate or self acquired properties of the diseased
male, but also of undivided interests in co-parcenery property.
In order to ensure the entitlement of women legal reforms are mandatory. Even when law is
there is to ensure the rights of women social conventions and practices restricts women from
exercising their rights. Attitudinal change has to be brought in the society. Social reform
movement is necessary for creating awareness and changing the mindset of the people.
[Link] Gopalan, former secretary to Government of India has given following
recommendations to ensure women‘s entitlement.
• Increase awareness of laws through education institutions, general awareness and legal
awareness programmes;
• Sensitize Judiciary, administrators and legislators about implementation of laws in letter and
spirit;
• Consider long pending recommendations for amendments of legal provisions on
inheritance;
• Introduce compulsory registration of marriages and strengthen the administrative machinery
for the purpose.

Needs and Rights

Needs
From 1970 onwards low status and condition of women was brought into focus. To improve
their status and conditions gender planning is an important tool. The gender planning
concerns the fact that women and men not only play different roles in the society but also
their strategic and practical needs are different. When identifying interest it is useful to
differentiate between ―women interests‖, strategic gender interest and practical gender
interest following the three fold conceptualization made by Maxine Molyneux. (Caroline
O.N. Moser, Gender Planning and development: Theory, Practice and Training, Routledge,
London, 1999). After identifying different interest of women this can be translated into
planning needs and their concerns may be satisfied. The further concerning women‘s needs
divided into strategic gender needs and practical gender needs. For example the strategic
needs more concern about the equality in the society. On the other hand practical gender
needs talks about day to day survival like getting drinking water, fuel, fodder etc.
Strategic gender needs (SGN) are the needs women identify because of their subordinate
position to men in the society. SGN vary according to particular context. They relate to
gender division of labour, power and control and may include such issues as legal rights,
domestic violence, equal wages and women‘s control over their bodies. Meeting SGN helps
women to achieve greater equality. It also changes existing roles and therefore challenges
women‘s subordinate position. With regard to practical Gender Needs (PGN) are the needs
that women identify in their socially accepted roles in the society. PGN don‘t challenge the
gender division of labour or women‘s subordinate position in society, although rising out of
them. PGN are a response to immediate perceived necessity, identified within a specific
context. They are practical in nature and often concern with inadequacies in living condition
such as water provision, health care and employment.
Rights
The term women's rights refer to freedoms and entitlements of women and girls of all ages.
These rights may or may not be institutionalized, ignored or suppressed by law, local custom,
and behavior in a particular society. These liberties are grouped together and differentiated
from broader notions of human rights because they often differ from the freedoms inherently
possessed by or recognized for men and boys, and because activists for this issue claim an
inherent historical and traditional bias against the exercise of rights by women and girls.
Issues commonly associated with notions of women's rights include, though are not limited
to, the right: to bodily integrity and autonomy; to vote (suffrage); to hold public office; to
work; to fair wages or equal pay; to own property; to education; to serve in the military or be
conscripted; to enter into legal contracts; and to have marital, parental and religious rights.
Women and their supporters have campaigned and in some places continue to campaign for
the same rights as mens.
Women in Development (WID) The WID approach aims to integrate women into the existing
development process by targeting them, often in women-specific activities. Women are
usually passive recipients in WID projects, which often emphasize making women more
efficient producers and increasing their income. Although many WID projects have improved
health, income or resources in the short term, because they did not transform unequal
relationships, a significant number were not sustainable. A common shortcoming of WID
projects is that they do not consider women‘s multiple roles or that they miscalculate the
elasticity of women‘s time and labour. An other, is that such projects tend to by blind to
men‘s roles and responsibilities in women‘s (dis)empowerment.
The biggest difference between WID and GAD is that WID projects traditionally were not
grounded in a comprehensive gender analysis. The GAD approach is gender-analysis driven.
There is definitely a need for women-specific and men-specific interventions at times. These
complement gender initiatives. Research shows that the success of both sex-specific and
gender activities is directly linked with the depth of the gender analysis that informs them.
Gender Mainstreaming
Gender mainstreaming is the public policy concept of assessing the different
implications for women and men of any planned policy action, including legislation and
programmes, in all areas and levels.
The concept of gender mainstreaming was first proposed at the 1985 Third World
Conference on Women in Nairobi. The idea has been developed in the United Nations
development community. The idea was formally featured in 1995 at the Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing.
Most definitions conform to the UN Economic and Social Council formally defined
concept:
Mainstreaming a gender perspective is the process of assessing the implications for women
and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or programmes, in all areas and
at all levels. It is a strategy for making women's as well as men's concerns and experiences an
integral dimension of the design, implementation, monitoring and evaluation of policies and
programmes in all political, economic and societal spheres so that women and men benefit
equally and inequality is not perpetuated. The ultimate goal is to achieve gender equality.
United Nations has defined Gender Mainstreaming as the process of assessing the
implications for women and men of any planned action, including legislation, policies or
programmes, in all areas and at all levels. It is a strategy for making women‘s as well as
men‘s concerns and experiences an integral dimension of the design, implementation,
monitoring and evaluation of policies and programmes in all political, economic and societal
spheres so that women and men benefit equally and inequality is not perpetuated. Gender
mainstreaming is not only a question of social justice, but is necessary for ensuring equitable
sustainable human development by the most effective and efficient means.
Literacy Gender Parity Index (GPI) is the ratio of the female to male adult literacy rates
which measures progress towards gender equity in literacy and the level of learning
opportunities available for women in relation to those available to men. It serves also as a
significant indicator of the empowerment of women in society.

GAD
GAD, which shares elements with the empowerment approach, gained popularity in
the 1980s and attempts to address the loopholes of WID. It is rooted in post-development
theory and post-structuralist critiques in feminism.
GAD does not consider women as a uniform group. It maintains that women‘s
situation should be seen in the context of the socio-economic, racial and other factors that
shape a particular society. It points to the importance of understanding the relationship
between women and men and how society influences their respective roles. Development to
be meaningful will have to take all these factors into consideration.
This approach rejects the dichotomy between the public and the private. It focuses
attention on the oppression of women in the family, within the private sphere of the
household. It emphasizes the state‘s role in providing social services to promote women‘s
emancipation. Women are seen as agents of change rather than passive recipients of
development.
The focus is on strengthening women‘s legal rights. It also talks in terms of upsetting
the existing power relations in society. Gender is an issue that cuts across all economic, social
and political processes. The GAD approach attempts to identify both the practical gender
needs of women as well as the strategic gender needs that are closely related.
The problem with GAD is that it is easy in the name of gender, to disguise and even
side track real issues that affect women. Gender can rise above the personal, which means the
personal can remain behind the scene, despite all the efforts that go into the analysis of
‗social construction of gender‘.
Most often, however, GAD is seen as just a new label for the same old women‘s
programmes which do not address power relations in society or women‘s oppression. Though
it is popular among funding agencies and NGOs and has the potential to be different, it has
become institutionalized like WID.
Gender Planning
Gender planning is the recognition of existing gender inequalities in the society and helps to
formulate the policies to mitigate gender inequalities in the society. It aims to improve the
status and conditions of women by formulating appropriate policies and programmes. The
existing planning approach treats all as equal and it will make a plan for all without
considering the inequalities existing in the society. Gender planning helps to expose, analyze
and resolve the inequalities existing in social, economic, culture, legal and family structures
and serves to initiate processes of change to address inequalities in such structures and
processes.
Gender Budgeting
A budget is one of the most important instruments which reflect the economic policy
of the government. It can also be a powerful tool in transforming the economy at different
levels of State, District or Grassroots level of village Panchayats. It reflects the choices that
the government chooses inorder to achieve the economic and developmental goals. Of late,
Gender budgeting has emerged as a new process. This ensures the care for women‘s needs
and priorities in the total budget. This has become an effective mechanism to bring about
gender equity. A Gender Responsive Budget is a budget that acknowledges the gender
patterns in the society and allocates money to implement policies and programmes that
changes these patterns in a way that moves towards a more gender-equal society. Gender
budget initiatives are exercises that aim to move the country in the direction of a gender-
responsive budget.
Gender Auditing
Gender auditing is the analysis of the system and process of finance of any
government. Gender auditing implies auditing the income and expenditure of governments
from a gender perspective and also analyzing the development process including the process
of legislation, guidelines, taxes and social development projects. It understands that policies
have a differential impact on men and women by recognizing the roles and responsibilities of
men in the society form the basis for gender auditing. Gender auditing is the one aspect of
social auditing.
GDI and GEM
Inter -district, Inter-state and Cross country comparisons of women's empowerment are
obtained from Gender related Development Index (GDI). GDI owes its origin to its precursor,
the HDI (Human Development Index), three main components of which are per capita
income, educational attainment and life-expectancy which is a proxy for health attainment.
.Gender disparities are measured keeping these three indicators into consideration. "An
additional measure, gender empowerment measure (GEM) has been formulated to take into
account aspects relating to economic participation and decision-making by women. The
indicators used in GEM are share in income, share in parliamentary seats and an index that
includes share in administrative and managerial jobs and share in professional and technical
posts".
It was in 1995 that the UNDP brought out the Gender-related Development Index as a
method for assessing gender inequality. The variables used in GDI are similar to those used
for the Human Development Index; these being education, health and income.
While the HDI measures average achievement, the GDI adjusts the average achievement to
reflect the inequalities between men and women in the following dimensions:
 A long and healthy life, as measured by life expectancy at birth.
 Knowledge as measured by the adult literacy rate and the combined primary, tertiary
and gross enrolment ratio.
 A decent standard of living, as measured by estimated earned income (PPP US$).
Focusing on women‘s opportunities rather than their capabilities, the GEM captures
gender inequality in three key areas:
 Political participation and decision making power, as measured by women‘s and
men‘s percentage share of parliamentary seats.
 Economic participation and decision-making power, as measured by two indicators –
women‘s and men‘s percentage shares of positions as legislators, senior officials and
managers and women‘s and men‘s percentage share of professional and technical
positions.
  Power over economic resources, as measured by women‘s and men‘s estimated
earned income (PPP US$).
Gender Blind Approach
―Gender-blind approach does not consider these differences existing between men and
women, rather it views men and women belong‖ to the same category. Gender-blindness
refers to a failure to identify or acknowledge difference on the basis of gender where it is
significant. This approach does not recognize gender as an essential factor that determines the
choices for men and women separately in the society. Persons or institutions or policies based
on this approach consider both men and women as a homogeneous category and they become
blind towards their differential needs. This approach does not question the existing norms and
values that discriminate against women and focuses only on the development of
communities, households, agricultural sector in general. Moreover, gender-blind policies
display ignorance about the gender differences in the allocation of roles and resources and
accept the universal norms of the society as such which is patriarchal in nature. Therefore the
gender policies even though meant for development cannot be fruitful as they ignore the
differences in resources, entitlements, opportunities, influence between men and women.
Women are hence left out and do not get benefits.
Rights Based Approach
A Rights based approach aims at promoting and protecting human rights based on
international human rights standards. It serves as a conceptual framework in the process of
human development. Discriminatory practices, inequalities, unjust distribution of power are
some of the factors which serve as hurdles in the wholistic and inclusive development
process. A Rights based approach seeks to analyze these problems which impede progress of
development. Under a human rights-based approach, the plans, policies and processes of
development are anchored in a system of rights and corresponding obligations are established
by international law. This helps to promote the sustainability of development work,
empowering people themselves— especially the most marginalized—to participate in policy
formulation and hold accountable those who have a duty to act. While there‘s no universal
recipe for a rights-based approach, international organizations and rights-based organizations
have come together to fight for the rights of deprived and marginalized communities. Based
Strategic Gender Needs
―Strategic gender needs are the needs women identify because of their subordinate
position to men in their society. Strategic gender needs vary according to the particular
context. They relate gender divisions of labour, power and control and may include such
issues as legal rights, domestic violence, equal wages and women‘s control over their body.
Meeting strategic gender needs helps women to achieve greater gender equality. It also
changes existing gender roles and therefore challenges women‘s subordinate position‖.
Strategic gender needs are those needs that are formulated from the analysis of women‘s
subordination to men. While formulating strategic gender needs it also considers the nature
and structure of relationship between men and women in the society. It also considers
sociopolitical cultural context. By deriving from these analyses, strategic gender needs
provide equality in the society. on this, advocacy is being done to develop policies and
programmes to fulfill human rights.
Practical Gender Needs
―Practical Gender needs are the needs women identify in their socially accepted roles
in the society. Practical gender needs do not challenge the gender division of labour or
women‘s subordinate position in the society although rising out of them. Practical gender
needs are a response to immediate perceived necessity identified within a specific context.
They are practical in nature and often are concerned with inadequacies in living conditions
such as water provision, health care and employment‖.
Unlike strategic gender needs, practical gender needs are formulated from the experiences of
women. It includes their day-to-day survival like food, fuel, fodder, water, access to health,
etc. The practical gender needs can be sorted out at the grassroots level if local governments
and the decision making structure closest to the society are sensitive towards women‘s issues.
As Molyneux has written they do not generally entail a strategic goal such as women‘s
emancipation or gender equality..... nor do they challenge the prevailing forms of
subordination even though they arise directly out of them. As women they have dual roles by
managing household chores as well as earning. When the planners make policies to meet
practical gender needs they have to consider both women‘s needs with reference to the
domestic as well as income earning activities and also requirements of the community like
access to health and sanitation, access to education, proper connectivity to basic services,
opportunities to participate in community life. These needs concern not only the women, but
also for the entire community needs. Yet, due to the gender division of labour, society
imposes these activities on women. So planners consider these issues and effectively
implement practical gender needs at the grassroots level.
Gender Analysis
Gender analysis refers to the variety of approaches, and methods used to assess and
understand the differences in the lives of women and men, girls and boys and the
relationships between and amongst them including: their access to resources and
opportunities, their activities, and the constraints they face relative to each other. It is a
process that identifies the varied and different roles and responsibilities that women, men,
girls and boys have in the family, the community, and in economic, legal, political, and social
structures.
A gender analysis is an essential component of an overall analytical process that a successful
development program of social change requires. It is a simple equation, really: if we do not
fully understand the trends and dynamics that define and perpetuate gender inequality – a
core dimension of labor exploitation - we will be unable to mount a successful strategy to
promote gender equality and women rights. Knowing key facts, labor market trends in the
organized and unorganized sector, power dynamics of women within the family, institutions
and society, are critical factors for grounding the analytical and strategic work of gender
equality and development programming in reality. It also helps develop a snapshot of that
reality against which the impact of development programs and strategies can be measured.
Gender analysis is a way of seeing / analyzing problems, situations and solutions with
awareness of gender relations and in order to identify gender issues. The key elements of a
gender analysis should include identification of similarities and differences between men and
women and amongst women.
Gender Gap Index
The Gender Gap Index assesses countries on how well they are dividing their
resources and opportunities among their male and female populations, regardless of the
overall levels of these resources and opportunities. By providing a comprehensible
framework for assessing and comparing global gender gaps and by revealing those
countries that are role models in dividing these resources equitably between women and
men, the Index serves as a catalyst for greater awareness as well as greater exchange
between policymakers. It examines four critical areas of inequality between men and women:
1. Economic participation and opportunity – outcomes on salaries, participation levels
and access to high-skilled employment;
2. Educational attainment – outcomes on access to basic and higher level education;
3. Political empowerment – outcomes on representation in decision-making structures; and
4. Health and survival – outcomes on life expectancy and sex ratio.
Gender Policy
A gender policy is an integral part of all its organizational policies, programmes and projects
and involves building a culture that understands the issues and policies, which respect
diversity and gender, related concerns. A mere statement of policy and objectives does not
ensure the concerns relating to addressing the gender. Towards achieving the objectives,
clear indicators need to be defined to evaluate and assess the organization‘s commitment
towards gender equity on a periodic basis. The policy seeks to ensure greater consistency of
gender principles, policies and practices across the organisation and to provide an
accountability framework in relation to gender, against which all staff can be accountable and
against which the organization can audit itself.
UNIT 3 TRENDS IN FEMINISM

Structure
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Objectives
3.3 Liberal Feminism
3.3.1 Liberal Thought
3.3.2 Classical Liberal Feminism
3.3.3 Second Wave Liberal Feminism
3.3.4 Weakness/Limitations of the Liberal Feminism
3.3.5 Contribution to the Women’s Movement
3.4 Marxist Feminism
3.4.1 Foundations of Marxist Feminism
3.4.2 Other Key Elements in Marxist Feminism
3.4.3 Limitations of Marxist Feminism
3.4.4 Contribution to the Women’s Movement
3.5 Psychoanalytic Feminism
3.5.1 The Beginnings of Psychoanalytic Feminism – Countering Freudian Theories
3.5.2 Explanation by other Theorists
3.5.3 Limitations of Psychoanalytic Feminism
3.5.4 Contribution to the Women’s Movement
3.6 Radical feminism
3.6.1 Definition
3.6.2 The influences that shaped Radical Feminism
3.6.3 What are the variations of Radical Feminism?
[Link] Radical- Libertarian Feminism
[Link] Radical-Cultural Feminism
3.6.4 Radical Feminism – Its Structure
3.6.5 The Outcomes of the Movement
3.6.6 Critiques of Radical Feminism
3.6.7 Contribution to the Women’s Movement
3.7 Postmodern Feminism
3.7.1 Postmodern Thought
3.7.2 Postmodern rethinking of psychological explanation of gender
3.7.3 Postmodern Feminist
3.7.4 Limitations of Postmodern feminism
3.7.5 Contribution to the women’s Movement
3.8 Black Feminism and Womanism
3.8.1 The Beginnings of Black Feminism
3.9 Cyber Feminism
3.9.1 Origin of Cyber Feminism
3.9.2 Definition of the 100 Anti Thesis
3.9.3 Cyber art and its relation to Cyber feminism
3.9.4 Cyber Feminism – Practical Manifestation
3.9.5 Cyber Feminism challenges and its future
3.10 Let Us Sum up
3.11 Answers to Check Your Progress
3.12 Unit End Questions
3.13 References
3.1 INTRODUCTION
The second half of the twentieth century has seen a new impetus to the women‟s
movement. There are many factors responsible for this. One of the main factors, however,
has been the recognition of a common experience of marginalisation between various groups
of subjugated peoples, and the development of various subaltern voices and movements that
articulate, analyse and protest against the various forms of oppressive power that have left
them outside of the mainstream of culture, tradition and life in each situation. The subaltern
has realised that it has been perceived as the Other, the different, the deviant. This attitude
has been the source of its marginalisation, the rationalisation that justifies the inhuman
treatment of human beings by other human beings. At the initial stages of any subaltern
movement, the tendency is to accept the value-systems of the dominant group, the
mainstream, even while one recognises that one has been excluded from that mainstream. At
this stage, the values of the oppressor remain the yardstick, the paradigm that is the norm, and
the subaltern endeavour is to prove itself of value in those terms. „Anything you can do, I can
do just as well‟, might well be the slogan of this stage: the subaltern is struggling at this stage
to prove that, despite the difference in colour, race, sex, caste, economic situation etc, there
is no essential difference between the oppressor and the oppressed. The same humannness
characterises both groups, and given the same opportunities, both would be equally capable
of achievement.

The next stage is, perhaps, a more positive one. The subaltern has reached a stage of being
able to look more objectively at both sets of value systems, the dominant and the dominated.
At this stage, it is possible for the subaltern to appreciate and value even those facets of its
culture and tradition in which it most differs from the dominant. This stage involves, then, a
recognition and a celebration of what is viewed as the „intrinsic‟ value of the subaltern, on its
own terms. This, by challenging the monopoly of the dominant value-system, subtly subverts
its authority, creating a space for an alternative weltanschauung, an alternative mode of
existence and of relating. „From margin to center,‟ Bell Hooks‟s famous phrase (cited in
Warhol and Herndl, 1991: 687) might well be the leitmotif of this stage, for with the
legitimising of the alternatives, the peripheries are now centre-stage, the subaltern is now
dictating the terms of political correctness.

Together with other subaltern movements, the women‟s movement has moved through these
stages. When we think of feminism today, we imply three levels of activity:
 1. A description of the oppression and subjugation experienced by women and an
analysis of its causes.
2. An action-plan or prescription that suggests ways of transforming the situation, so as
to liberate and empower women.
3. A celebration of the strengths and gifts of womanhood and an exploration of the
alternative ways of functioning that are part of the modus operandi of women. (This
point with its suggestion of essentialism in its understanding of „woman‟ is hotly
debated by feminists of various schools of thought.)

3.2 OBJECTIVES
After studying this Unit you should be able to
 understand clearly the way in which the various schools of feminist
thought describe the oppression and subjugation experienced by women.
 discuss the way in which each of these schools explain and analyse
the causes of this oppression.
 perceive clearly the strategies recommended by each of these schools
to liberate and empower women.
3.3 LIBERAL
 FEMINISM
comprehend the weaknesses/limitations of each of these approaches.
3.3.1 Liberal
 thought
assess the contribution of each of these approaches to the women‟s
movement as a whole.

Liberal feminism draws heavily upon the world-view presented by the liberal humanist
philosophy in which it has its roots. Very simply, liberal philosophy and liberal political
thought hold the opinion that human beings are characterised by the use of reason: liberals
tend to define the use in either moral or prudential terms. When the moral aspect is
emphasised, the focus is on the value of individual autonomy; when reason is perceived as
the best means to a desired end, the value of self-fulfilment is highlighted. A just society
then is one which allows individuals to exercise their autonomy and to fulfil themselves: the
ideal state maintains and preserves a system of individual rights which allows each person to
pursue his or her own understanding of the desirable good, provided the rights of no other
individual are thereby restricted.
Within the liberal framework, there is a distinction between the classical liberals and the
welfare liberals. The former expect the state to concentrate on protecting the civil liberties of
each citizen, and without interfering with the free market, to provide all individuals with an
equal opportunity to function within that market. The latter focus more on the need for
positive intervention from the state in order to correct situations of gross injustice that are the
legacy of past injustice – e.g. reservations for SC/ST students and candidates for jobs.
Welfare liberals assert that without such positive intervention from the state, these individuals
would not be able to compete on the open market with even a remote semblance of an equal
chance.

3.3.2 Classical Liberal Feminism

This extremely simplistic understanding of liberal political thought gives us a framework for
our understanding of the workings of liberal feminism. There has been a shift from the
classical position of the early liberal feminists of the 19th century to the welfare liberalism of
the 20th century liberal feminists, who are more concerned with equality of opportunity which
would then lead to a redistribution of wealth and thus a further equalisation of opportunity for
all people.

The classical liberal feminist text is, of course, Mary Wollstonecraft‟s A Vindication of the
Rights of Women (1792). In this truly revolutionary work, Wollstonecraft asserts that much
of what is perceived as “feminine” and biologically determined, is rather a social construct,
viz. Gender. While Wollstonecraft does not use these terms, she denies that women are by
nature more focussed on pleasure and less capable of rationality than men.
She reasoned that if men were confined to the same cages women find
themselves locked in, they would develop the same characters. If denied the chance
to develop their rational powers, to become moral persons who have concerns, causes
and commitments beyond personal pleasure, men would become overly
“emotional”…. (Tong, 1989: 14)
Wollstonecraft is outraged by the trend in 18th century society to trivialise and de-rationalise
the life and education of the affluent middle-class woman. She demands that girls and
women be given an education that sharpen and focus the mind, enabling them to develop
their rational and moral capacities. She posits this need not just for utilitarian purposes
(women need to be equipped to perform their wifely and motherly duties in a sensible and
satisfactory manner!) but also because if rationality is what distinguishes human beings from
animals, then, as human beings, girls are entitled to an education that would enable them to
develop their human potential to the fullest:
Contending for the rights of woman, my main argument is built on this simple
principle, that if she be not prepared by education to become the companion of man,
she will stop the progress of knowledge and virtue; for truth must be common to all,
or it will be inefficacious with respect to its influence on general practice. And how
can woman be expected to co-operate unless she knows why she ought to be virtuous?
unless freedom strengthens her reason till she comprehends her duty, and sees in what
manner it is connected with her real good. (Wollstonecraft, 1982: 10)
At the same time she claims for women, the right to autonomy, the right to make their own
decisions about right and wrong:
Consider…whether, when men contend for their freedom, and to be allowed to judge
for themselves respecting their own happiness, it be not inconsistent and unjust to
subjugate women, even though you firmly believe that you are acting in the manner
best calculated to promote their happiness? Who made man the exclusive judge, if
woman partake with him of the gift of reason? (Wollstonecraft, 1982: 11)

What Wollstonecraft wanted for women was the right to be fully human, fully autonomous
persons. She rebelled against a frame of mind that saw women as mere appendages, created
as a means to the end of masculine fulfilment, and she spoke out fiercely against both
masculine and feminine reinforcement of this perspective. But though she demands an equal
education for women, she seems to overlook the fact that the socio-economic condition of
women at the time did not afford them the opportunity to exercise that education in any
sphere other than the strictly domestic.

Other liberal thinkers who spoke out against the subjection particularly of the middle-class
woman of the 18th and 19th centuries, were John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor Mill. Writing
nearly a hundred years after Wollstonecraft, they join her in celebrating reason. Their
liberalism is more conditioned by the utilitarian approach to life, however, and they insist that
equality between men and women is only possible if women are accorded the same civil
liberties and economic opportunities that men enjoy. Though the two wrote several joint
essays, notably on the subject of marriage and the divorce laws of the time, they differed on a
number of subjects, especially on issues relating to working women. For instance, while Mill
believed that full liberation would be visible when women were allowed to enter and leave
the workforce at will, Taylor believed that liberation was only possible when all women were
actually working, regardless of financial necessity. Where Mills emphasises the need for
education and for collegiality in the formation and administration of laws, Taylor frequently
stresses the aspect of an equal partnership in the area of productive work; only so can women
be the partners rather than the servants of their husbands.

Where both Wollstonecraft and Taylor concentrate on the ordinary woman, tending to
downplay the exceptional woman, Mill uses the exceptional woman as proof that makes
nonsense of the patriarchal claim that all men are more intelligent, rational and capable than
all women. At the same time, all three recognise and seek to counter the double standard that
has been set up in society. It is interesting to note that of the three it is Mill who, in The
Subjection of Women (1869) makes the most radical claims for woman‟s intellect and gifts
(attention to detail, use of concrete examples, intuitiveness). It is Mill who makes the most
revolutionary assertions about the effects of education and social conditioning on the
development of women in psychological and moral terms. It is Mill who analyses in clear-
sighted terms the position of the wife under English law. Yet, oddly, it is Mill who believes
that given the possibility of choice, given every opportunity, both educational and economic
that would make the choice a viable one, liberated women would still opt to make a career of
wifing and mothering:
Like a man when he chooses a profession, so, when a woman marries, it may in
general be understood that she makes choice of the management of a household, and
the bringing up of a family, as the first call upon her exertions, during as many years
of her life as may be required for the purpose; and that she renounces, not all other
objects and occupations, but all which are not consistent with the requirements of this.
(Mill, 1982: 264)

The arguments of Wollstonecraft, Taylor and Mill shaped and oriented the women‟s
movement in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The suffragette movement, the struggle for
women‟s education, the efforts to change the legal system in order to achieve a greater
equality between men and women, all speak eloquently of the impact of liberal humanism on
the women‟s movement.

3.3.3 Second Wave Liberal Feminism

That, however, this was not enough is apparent from the fact that in the 50s and 60s, women
began once again to articulate their condition, asserting that the so-called gains of the last
hundred years or so had not in fact changed the essential evils of their situation. Virginia
Woolf‟s A Room of One‟s Own (1957) with its uncompromising demand for a room, a space
that a woman can call her own, in which she can choose to do whatever she wants, and her
belief that real creativity can only take place away from the domestic preoccupations that
seem a woman‟s lot, expressed something of a sense of dissatisfaction with the achievements
won so far. This dissatisfaction is underlined by the caustic comparison between the austerity
of Fernham (the fictional women‟s college described in the essay) and the almost sybaritic
luxury of the neighbouring Cantabrigian colleges for men.

In The Feminine Mystique (1963), Betty Friedan points out that the assumption that women
can find fulfilment exclusively in the traditional roles/functions of wife and mother is
fallacious, leaving middle-class urban housewives with an inner wasteland of emptiness and
frustration. This inner misery will inevitably affect their relationships with their husbands
and children, creating either resentment and rebellion or an excessive and unhealthy
dependence. Friedan insists that the only way out of this bind is for all women to be
equipped with educational and professional qualifications that will enable them to find some
meaningful work outside of the home, even if it is only part-time: this is necessary for the
physical and emotional health of the women themselves as well as for their families. While
Friedan is not asking women to give up marriage and families of their own in favour of
careers, she is combating the assumption that all “normal” women, all “good” women, would
choose marriage and motherhood over a career. It is, according to Friedan, possible to
combine a commitment to both marriage and motherhood and to a career. Indeed, for many
women, both commitments exercise an equal attraction.

This concept she stresses in her book The Second Stage(1981):

In our reaction against the feminine mystique, which defined women solely in terms
of their relation to men as wives, mothers and homemakers, we sometimes seemed to
fall into a feminist mystique which denied that core of women‟s personhood that is
fulfilled through love, nurture, home. (Friedan, 1981: 27)
In recommending that women can and should opt for both family and career, she
recommends that concepts like flexitime be introduced in the workplace. At the same time,
however, she still continues to perceive the tasks of homemaking and childrearing as being
the responsibility of women. Like her predecessors, Friedan too had sent women out into the
public sphere before an adequate sharing out of domestic responsibilities between men and
women. This tendency she tries to correct in her second book by balancing “women‟s
assimilation into the workplace with a counter assimilation of men into the family” (Tong,
1989: 26)

Liberal feminists today occupy various positions, ranging from the classical liberal to the
welfare liberal, both of which rely heavily on legal interventions and remedies to redress the
inequalities between sexes/genders. However, there also seems to be a movement today in
the direction of the development of the androgynous personality, combining traits that are
both masculine and feminine. Carolyn Heilbrun discusses this possibility in her book
Towards the Promise of Androgyny (1973):
Androgyny…seeks to liberate the individual from the confines of the appropriate.
…[It] suggests … a full range of experience open to individuals who may, as women,
be aggressive, as men, tender; it suggests a spectrum upon which human beings
choose their places without regard to propriety or custom. (Heilbrun 1973: x-xi.)

3.3.4 Weaknesses/Limitations of the Liberal Approach

One criticism levelled against the liberal feminists is that all too often their interiorisation of
masculine ideals and value-systems has resulted in their substituting masculine for human.
By insisting that women are just as capable of rationality and efficiency as men, they are
reinforcing a value-system that valorizes these qualities over and above the so-called
feminine qualities of sensitivity, nurturing and tenderness. The liberals seem to believe that
women want to be like men. Instead, claim other feminists, there is a value and a power to
the “roles” of mother and wife that transcend the patriarchal attempt to institutionalise them
and thus control the exercise of these functions and identities.
Mothering is not a “role” on par with being a file clerk, a scientist, or a member of the Air
Force. Mothering is a complicated, rich, ambivalent, vexing, joyous activity which is
biological, natural, social, symbolic and emotional. It carries profoundly resonant emotional
and sexual imperatives. A tendency to downplay the differences that pertain between, say,
mothering and holding a job, not only drains our private relations of much of their
significance, but also over-simplifies what can or should be done to alter things for women,
who are frequently urged to change roles in order to solve their problems. (Elshtain, 1981:
253)
The socialist feminists level yet another criticism against the liberals. Not only have liberal
feminists been too ready to accept and own masculine values, their very idea of the self as an
autonomous, rational agent is a fundamentally male concept – and a concept related to the
WASP mentality, at that. Other ways of perceiving and defining the human person could use
the framework of relationships and kinship, could valorize qualities other than rationality,
could stress “being” rather than “agency” as the key condition of humanness.

Western liberal thought has accepted a dualistic view of the world, which creates a problem
for feminists, since this tends to devalue activities and functions related to the body, at the
expense of those related to the mind. (The former are usually associated with women, where
the latter are associated with men.) At the same time, the liberal view of the world can lead
to two questionable assumptions:
 The rational, autonomous person is seen as being isolated, with needs and interests
separate from, and even in opposition to, those of every other individual.
 By placing such a premium on human liberty and the individual‟s rights, the liberals
seem to believe that there is no common answer to the fundamental questions of
political philosophy.
Socialist feminists assert that all persons are in community and it is the network of
relatedness in these communities that shape the individual.

3.3.5 Contribution to the Women’s Movement

However, in spite of its limitations, liberal feminism has contributed much to the women‟s
movement. It was the liberal feminists who agitated for and won educational and legal
reforms that have changed life so drastically for women, who enabled women to attain a
professional and occupational stature within the workplace. That there is more to feminism
in undeniable, but we cannot afford to trivialise their efforts, or even to relegate them to the
past, for the struggle to ensure that all women benefit from educational, legal and
professional reforms, still continues.
 Check your Progress

1. What are the main principles underlying liberal thought?

2. What are the differences between classical liberal feminism and welfare

liberal feminism?

3. What do you understand by Second Wave feminism?

4. What action, according to liberal feminists, would lead to greater equality

and empowerment for women?

5. What are the limitations of the liberal school of feminism?

6. How has liberal feminism contributed to the women’s movement?

3.4 MARXIST FEMINISM

3.4.1 Foundations of Marxist Feminism
The parallels between Marxism and feminism are immediately apparent. Where Marxism
offers the working-classes or the proletariat, first, the tools for analysis of the causes of and
reasons for their oppression, and second, the means whereby they can redress these
inequalities and exploitation, feminism offers women a similar agenda: analysis, followed by
strategies for empowerment.

Another parallel may be traced. In its articulation of “historical materialism”, Marxism

fosters the development of a “class consciousness” that draws together similarly situated
people with the same needs, problems and aspirations, through an arduous process of shared
reflection and struggle. The class consciousness described enables workers to recognise that
their interests, concerns and problems are shared by all their fellow-workers, and the best
interests of all would be served by mutual support and solidarity, rather than by competing
against each other. Feminism, too, makes evident that, while patriarchy is not a monolith (its
manifestations vary from society to society, from community to community), yet all women
experience subjugation and oppression in one form or another, and our best interests will be
served by sisterhood and solidarity rather than by rivalry and antagonism inspired and
reinforced by patriarchal structures.
Though Marxists in general treat women‟s oppression as part of and secondary to their
primary concern – the oppression of the worker – Engels addressed the problem of why
women are oppressed in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884). He
traces the origins of the family and its subsequent development through complex and highly
cohesive clan and joint family systems to the splintered nuclear family of his time (and of the
present day). He ascribes the movement from one stage to the next to changes in the mode of
production. From the earliest and most primitive form of subsistence, when the work of each
member of the tribe was essential for the survival of all, and gender relations were
characterised by what he calls “promiscuous intercourse”, the human race moved to a state of
pairing-for-life, or marriage, because of the biological need to exclude the possibility of
intercourse with various kinds of blood relatives and the subsequent reduction in the number
of women available to each man. In the earlier stages (when the mode of production and the
small wealth owned by the family, centred around the house, with women‟s work being vital
for the tribe, and women producing wealth that could be passed on to the next generation),
this pairing-for-life meant that the man would go into the woman‟s house and live there with
her: societies at this stage, Engels suggests, tend to be matrilineal and even matriarchal in
organisation, with much economic, social and political power invested in women.

With the domestication of animals and the breeding of herds, the site of production shifted
from the household to outside. New wealth was generated, this time controlled by men, and
women lost much of the power they once had. As the work of men gained in economic
importance and prestige, there was a concomitant decrease in the value and importance
ascribed to women‟s work. More important, with the generation of an actual surplus
controlled by men, they suddenly wanted to ensure that their wealth was transmitted to their
children. As Engels put it, “mother-right had to be overthrown, and overthrown it was.”

This move was pivotal and constituted “the world-historic defeat of the female sex”,
according to Engels. Man took charge of the household by virtue of his economic power: “he
is the bourgeois and the wife represents the proletariat”. Further, since biologically,
motherhood is easily proved, while paternity – until the days of DNA testing – remained a
belief, it was necessary to curtail and control women‟s sexuality, so that men could ensure
that only their own children would inherit their wealth. So sprang up an ideological
superstructure, with many accretions of mythic prescriptions and scriptural dicta through the
centuries: a superstructure that valorized chastity and fidelity, equating these with virtue
among women. Religion, law, tradition, education, social mores – all reinforced this in
various ways in different communities, but the fact remained. (The transition from the
matrilineal system among the Nairs in Kerala, with the relative freedom it offered the Nair
women, to the patrilineal system visible today, would appear to support this analysis, though
the transition must have been at least partially inspired by exposure to other societies,
structured both patriarchally and patrilineally.)

As societies move from the pastoral/nomadic to slave societies and thence to the feudal
system, as wealth is concentrated more and more in the hands of men, as ideological and
institutional superstructures continue to buttress men‟s power, women‟s inferior position is
reinforced, and over the years, internalised and transmitted to future generations by women
themselves. However, as Engels points out, while societies remained agrarian, women‟s
work was still of direct economic value and they retained a degree of importance in the
community. It is only with industrialisation and capitalism that the devaluation of women is
complete. Once workplace and home are separated, once women‟s work no longer brings in
direct economic advantage to family and community, women are reduced to nonentities.
Interestingly, Engels holds that this devaluation is more acute among bourgeois women than
among proletarian women, whose labour is visibly necessary for the survival of the family.
In fact, he compares the bourgeois marriage to “the crassest prostitution” in which the wife
“sells her body into slavery once and for all”.

Tracing much of the evil of women‟s position to the institution of private property and the
consequent development of the monogamous marriage, Engels argues that women‟s
liberation can only take place with the abolition of private property, and with women gaining
economic independence from men. He posits the need for, first, the reintroduction of women
into public industry and, second, the socialisation of housework and child-rearing.

3.4.2 Other Key Elements in Marxist Feminism

Other key Marxist concepts are also crucial in shaping the Marxist feminists‟ understanding
of the oppressive forces at work in patriarchy. Marxists believe that the supremely
humanising activity is work, i.e. the transformation of our environment in order to produce
our means of subsistence. Men and women through their work create a society that then
shapes them. Not consciousness but material existence determines our perceptions and
patterns of living. The forces of production and the relations of production generate a
superstructure that in turn supports and sanctions the mode of production that has generated
it. This concept is taken up and emphasized by Marxist feminists who point out that the
nature of woman‟s work and her role both in family and at workplace reinforce her social and
economic subordination to men.

According to Marxist theory, capitalism is not a system of voluntary exchange relations, as

the Liberal view has it. Rather, it is a system of exploitative power relations. The employers‟
monopoly over the means of production enables them to exploit the workers. The surplus
value generated by the worker, i.e. the difference between the wage he is paid and the value
that is actually created by his work, forms the capitalist‟s profit. Workers may be free in that
there is no overt coercion forcing them to work at a particular job (as there would be in
slavery). But is the worker really free? If the choice is between accepting the job offered by
the capitalist or starving, what becomes of the freedom?

Apart from the monopoly capitalists exercise over the means of production, they also exercise
another tactic to bolster their exploitation of the workers. By presenting the view that all life
is a colossal network of exchange relations, capitalist ideologues lead workers and employers
to accept what Marx termed “the fetishism of commodities” as one of the imponderable
givens in life. Thus the exercise of power that underlies the surface exchange transaction is
obscured. Marxist feminists claim that even as this fetishism of commodities deludes the
worker, it provides a theoretical underpinning for the easy acquiescence of society in such
relations as prostitution and surrogate motherhood, seeing them as being an exercise in free
choice. How free is the woman who “decides” to sell her sexual or reproductive services
only because she has nothing else to offer in the marketplace?

Marxist class analysis, too, has enabled feminists to understand their own oppression better,
while at the same time raising the pertinent question of whether women in themselves
constitute a class. There is, assert Marxist feminists, a vertical division of gender that cuts
across the horizontal stratification of class; an oppression and a marginalisation experienced
by all women regardless of their economic condition (or rather, the economic condition of
father, husband, son). Though the ways in which this is experienced may differ, the fact of
its existence is universal. It is this that enables women to perceive themselves as a class. The
feminist struggle, both for equal wages and in campaigns like the one for “Wages for
Housework” has helped women move towards a class consciousness that rejects as false
consciousness all attempts to convince them that wifely and motherly duties cannot be
recompensed as work because they are undertaken out of love. Marxist feminists also point
out that though women‟s work under capitalism is trivialised and women seen primarily as
consumers rather than producers, they are in fact primarily producers.

Alienation is yet another concept that gained special significance in Marxist ideology and has
served Marxist and Socialist feminists well as a unifying concept. Marxist thought identifies
multiple levels of alienation experienced by workers under capitalism:
 Alienation from the product of their labour which is no longer determined or controlled
by themselves
 Alienation from themselves, since the supremely humanising activity has been reduced
to a monotonous, repetitive, soul-deadening exercise on the assembly-line
 Alienation from other human beings who could have been colleagues and friends, but
have been turned into competitors and enemies
 Alienation from nature since the very process of industrialisation has resulted in a
perception of nature as a threat or an obstacle to survival.

Marxist and Socialist feminists, like Ann Foreman and Alison Jaggar, show that not only
does all this apply to woman as worker, it also applies to her very being as woman. The
reification of woman and especially of the female body, as a result of the combination of
patriarchy and capitalism, has created multiple layers of alienation experienced by woman.
She is alienated from her own body, from herself, from other women and from nature, as she
works away at her body, struggling to make it conform to an externally-imposed standard of
perfection. Motherhood, too, becomes institutionalised, and often becomes an alienating
experience in a similar manner, as does the attempt to exercise her intellectual capabilities in
the academic world.

3.4.3 Limitations of Marxist Feminism

Concvincing as Engels‟ argument appears, it has been challenged by feminists. As Millett
points out:
Engels ignores the fact that woman is viewed, emotionally and psychologically, as
chattel property by the poor as well as, and often even more than, the rich. Lacking
 other claims to status a working class male is still more prone to seek them in sexual
rank, often brutally asserted. (Millett, 1990: 122)

Simone de Beauvoir, tracing the oppression of women to their position as the Other in her
book The Second Sex, insists that the relations between men and women will not
automatically change with the change from capitalism to socialism, for women are just as
likely to remain the Other in the latter as in the former. Engels‟s assertion that men‟s will to
power may be traced to the institution of private property is erroneous, she claims: “If the
human consciousness had not included …an original aspiration to dominate the Other, the
invention of the bronze tool could not have caused the oppression of women.” (de Beauvoir,
1986: 89)

Marxist feminists themselves raise objections to Engels‟s theory. In an article entitled “Do
Feminists Need Marxism?” (Flax, 1981: 174-85), Jane Flax holds that Engels has stressed
the importance of production at the expense of reproduction. She is convinced that the
overthrow of mother-right probably reflected a change in the perception of reproduction
(“such as men discovering their role in reproduction and/or asserting control over
reproduction”) as much as in the method of production.

Another flaw in Engels‟ theory is that he does not in any way explain why women were
charged with household work while men engaged in productive work, The sexual division of
labour, for Engels as for Marx, seems to originate with “the division of labour in the sexual
act”. However, Socialist feminists like Alison Jaggar protest that this would seem to imply
that there is no hope of abolishing the sexual division of labour as long as the “division of
labour in the sex act” remains unchanged. (Jaggar, 1983: 69)

3.4.4 Contribution to the Women’s Movement

While classical Marxist ideology would suggest that women‟s oppression is but one aspect of
the exploitation of the worker and that both would be redressed when capitalism is replaced
by socialism, feminists have disagreed with this from the earliest days. Marching side by
side with their brothers in protest against injustice, they found that even the champions of
workers‟ rights were unable at times to perceive the nature of the injustice experienced by
women. From the earliest revolutionaries in Russia – Alexandra Kollontai, Clara Zetkin and
others – to the present day Socialists, feminists realised that there is a real need for women to
understand the forms that oppression takes in the “private” as well as the “public” domain.
Recognising that patriarchy has predated capitalism and will probably outlive it, Socialist
feminists combine the firm material base offered by Marxist analysis with the insights offered
by psychoanalytical and radical feminists to arrive at a more holistic understanding of an
oppression and injustice that touches every aspect of women‟s lives. Yet, by grounding the
discourse in a solid material base, Marxism has rooted the feminist movement in reality and
enabled it to join hands with all other liberation movements.

Check your progress:

1. How does Engels explain the reasons for the oppression of women?

2. How do other thinkers refute some of his arguments?

3. What are the parallels between Marxist thought and feminist thought?

4. What do you understand by the Marxist use of the terms “class consciousness”

and “alienation”? How have feminists used these terms?

5. What, according to Marxist feminists, action should be taken in order to enable

women’s liberation and empowerment?

6. What limitations do you see in Marxist feminism?

3.5 PSYCHOANALYTIC FEMINISM
7. How has Marxist feminism contributed to the women’s movement?

3.5.1 The Beginnings of Psychoanalytic Feminism – countering Freudian theories

Psychoanalytic feminism has its roots in a feminist critique of Freud‟s theories about
sexuality and his theories about the development of both sexuality and morality in children.
These theories have been challenged both by men – Adler, Lacan – as well as by women –
Dinnerstein, Chodorow, Mitchell, Gilligan (all psychologists) as well as by other feminists
like Millett, Firestone and Friedan.

Very simply, Freud‟s theories on the subject (expressed in his Three Contributions to the
Theory of Sexuality) may be summarised as dealing with
 the way in which anatomy as well as the process of development contributes to the way in
which each individual experiences and expresses sexuality
 the stages of sexuality through which each individual passes in a movement from
“perverse” to “normal” sexuality
 the Oedipus and the castration complexes, which need to be successfully resolved if the
child is to grow into a “normal” “healthy” adult
 the link between sexuality and morality in the development of the superego
 the effect of penis envy on female sexuality and morality

The main problems that feminists find in Freud‟s conclusions is that they tend towards a
biological determinism that implies that biology is destiny in a way that is not open to
change. Secondly, Freud‟s assumption is that boys learn to internalise the values of a
patriarchal society when they successfully resolve the Oedipus complex and learn to identify
with the father. This identification can never really happen in the case of a girl: on the one
hand she is spared the traumatising fear of castration, but on the other hand, she is, as a result,
never pushed into a situation in which she has to internalise the patriarchal value-system – the
value-system that characterises „civilised‟ human beings. Her assumption of these values
remain superficial, she is less capable of conscientious morality. In a famous essay on
“Femininity”(1933), Freud wrote:
The fact that women must be regarded as having little sense of justice is no doubt
related to the predominance of envy in their mental life. … We also regard women as
weaker in their social interests and as having less capacity for sublimating their
instincts than men…(Ruth, 1980: 138)

This highly unflattering picture of woman, which was taken as the last word on feminine
psychology until the middle of the 20th century, angered many feminists who countered the
stereotype vehemently, arguing that women‟s social position and powerlessness had little to
do with biology and almost everything to do with social constructs of gender.

Friedan attacked Freud for his biological determinism, and claimed that he was largely
conditioned by Victorian ideas about culture and morality. She questioned the assumption
that a woman‟s reproductive role and identity as well as her sexual preference were
dependent on her lack of a penis and her ability or inability to come to terms with that fact.
At the same time, she challenged the view that alternative ways of perceiving and living out
one‟s reproductive and sexual identity were necessarily “abnormal”. Finally, she quarrels
with the fact that for Freud the inquiry centres around sexuality. Such an emphasis on
sexuality further underscores the stereotypical identification of woman as a sex object and/or
a baby machine.

Firestone, on the other hand, appreciates Freud‟s frank emphasis on sexuality as one of the
key elements in human life. However, she questions the apolitical interpretation of female
sexuality, which leaves out the issue of power relations between the sexes. Her assertion is
that Freud erred in viewing the penis as the object of desire and envy in itself: rather it
should be viewed as symbol of the power that is vested in the male in a patriarchal society.
As a result, Freudian therapy seeks to help the nonconformist/rebel adapt to the hierarchy of
power within the family and within society, rather than question and transform the unjust
structures and practices that are being perpetuated. It is “reactionary to the core, its potential
as a serious discipline undermined by its usefulness to those in power” (Firestone, 1970: 69)

Millett is angered by the Freudian attempt to explain the woman‟s desire to give birth as a
pathetic compensation for her lack of a penis, rather than as an impressive achievement in its
own right. She also challenges the assumption that male sexual aggression is a biological
given, built into all relations between sexes. Finally, she holds that if Freud were not so
convinced of the centrality of the penis to all theories about sexuality, he would have been
able to be more balanced in his interpretation of the neuroses of his patients.

3.5.2 Explanations by other theorists

Psychologists like Adler, Horney and Thompson reject Freud‟s claims about woman‟s nature,
contending that human experience of sexuality is, in the main, socially constructed.
Recognising that society is constructed in such a way as to privilege the man, they hold that
women‟s neuroses and other psychological problems are actually ways of protesting their
helplessness in a patriarchal world. Further, they see development as a growth away from the
basic instincts of one‟s biological nature and toward integration into the socio-cultural
environment. Sexuality is also shaped and structured by this development. They offer a
political understanding of the forces that control human behaviour and psychology, they see
creativity, action and growth as gender-blind in themselves, and they refuse to accept the
theory that there is only one way to be a normal healthy male, and only one way to be a
normal healthy female.
Feminist psychologists have also explored these areas of human experience. Both Dorothy
Dinnerstein in The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1977) and Nancy Chodorow in The
Reproduction of Mothering (1978) have analysed the aspects of sexuality and motherhood in
an attempt to understand gender relations and the way they affect our lives. While the
theories are too detailed to enter into at this stage, both insist that many of the problems of
unjust gender relations stem from the fact that in a patriarchal society it is almost always the
woman who does all the mothering and becomes therefore the scapegoat for all that is wrong
in our world. Dinnerstein emphasises that adult gender relations are coloured (usually
negatively) by experiences in childhood and infancy with capricious female power.
Chodorow, on the other hand, speaks of the desire of both men and women to re-experience
in adult life the intimate symbiotic relationship they had known as infants. Both posit dual
parenting as the solution: only when men and women are equally responsible for
childrearing, equally linked to their children in intimacy, will the sexual/gender divisions
break down, and men and women be equally free to develop their potential in both public and
private domains.

3.5.3 Limitations of Psychoanalytic Feminism:

Interesting though these theories are, they fail to take into account the effects of other factors
in the environment. The family does not determine society: it is the other way around. In
addition, while their theories might hold good for a Western, nuclear, middle-class, two-
parent family, they will not hold good inter-culturally or even intra-culturally. They have
assumed that the kind of family that they are most familiar with is the universal Family – an
idea that has never had any real manifestation. Finally, many feminists insist that Dinnerstein
and Chodorow have chosen the wrong remedy – one that will not necessarily solve all the
problems in gender relations, and which might in fact have a counter-effect in the long run,
since it will involve surrendering the woman‟s power in one of the very few areas in which
she has any power at all.

The question of morality is also raised by Carol Gilligan, who claims in her book In a
Different Voice (1982) that men and women have different, but equally valid concepts of
morality and justice. The problem arises in that the male concept is the one that is valorised
and reinforced by the structures in our world. Where men tend to think much more in terms
of abstract norms and paradigms, women function much more on the level of the specific, the
concrete, the real.
Juliet Mitchell, on the other hand, addresses the issue of the Oedipus Complex. She points
out that it had meaning in the days when families depended on an exchange of women for
procreation and when the taboo on incest was most necessary. It is no longer necessary
today, she claims, but lingers as a remnant of an outworn patriarchal structure. However,
other feminists question her work, pointing out that she does not explain the reason why men
were valued so highly and women devalued.

3.5.4 Contribution to the Women’s Movement

Psychoanalytic explanations for women‟s oppression do not provide a complete explanation
for women‟s subjugation and oppression. Nor are the remedies proposed sufficient in
themselves. But the psychoanalytic feminists do give us insights that mesh in with our
experience of life, of relationships and of ourselves. And they do present us with an
understanding of the inner working of our own psyche that must be faced and transformed,
together with external structures, if we are to arrive at true liberation.

Check your Progress

1. Why do later psychologists as well as feminists reject many of Freud’s theories

about sexuality and behaviour?

2. How do psychoanalytic feminists explain the oppression of women?

3. What strategies do they suggest for achieving liberation and equality for

women?

4. What are the main limitations of psychoanalytic feminism?

5. How has this school of feminist thought contributed to the women’s

movement?

3.6 RADICAL FEMINISM

3.6.1 Definition

Radical feminism (radical as “getting to the root”) is a philosophy emphasizing the

patriarchal roots of inequality between men and women, or, more specifically, social
dominance of women by men.

Radical feminism views patriarchy as dividing rights, privileges and power primarily by
gender, and as a result oppressing women and privileging men. (Jone Johnson Lewis)
THE FEMINISTS, a group of radical feminist formed in New York in October 1968, said
in their manifesto: „women, or “female”, were the first class to be separated out from
humanity and thus denied their humanity‟. 15

Second wave‟ radical feminism has from the beginning been concerned with forms of
oppression which affect the life chances and human dignity of women, that is, with all forms
of oppression. By attributing all forms of oppression to male domination, the early radical
feminist accounts linked these together, and provided the beginnings of framework for
understanding all forms of invidious hierarchical distinctions between categories of human
beings. Denise Thompson asserts that this early radical feminist account was never
challenged, despite its intrinsic faults.

One of those problems was a tendency to locate the primacy of male domination in „history‟.
The oppression of women, it was argued, provided the model for all other forms of
oppression because it happened first in human history. Women were the first social group to
be enslaved. Once men learned that other human beings, namely women, could be enslaved,
they applied that model to other groups of men.
The New York Redstockings said in 1970:

Male supremacy is the oldest, most basic form of domination. All other forms of
exploitation and oppression (racism, capitalism, imperialism, etc.) are extensions of
male supremacy: men dominate women, a few men-dominated and male-oriented
(Redstockings, 1970: 599)

Shulamith Firestone said:

The natural reproductive difference between the sexes led directly to the first division
of labour at the origins of class, as well as furnishing the paradigm of caste (discrimination
based on biological characteristics)…[Radical feminism] see feminist issues not only as
women‟s first priority, but as central to any larger revolutionary analysis…the current leftist
analysis…does not relate the structures of the economic class system to its origins in the
sexual class system, the model for all other exploitive systems, and thus the tapeworm which
must to be eliminated first by any true revolution. (Firestone 1981: 9, 37) 16

A poster for Radical Feminism

Fight porn culture!

Feminists were not convinced by the rationale that was

repeatedly provided by male politicos that the liberation of
women could wait until after the socialist revolution, that, because women‟s subordination
was connected to the private ownership of the means of production, the abolition of that
private ownership would automatically mean the abolition of women‟s subordination.

For radical feminists the aim was not simply to establish political priorities, although it was
certainly that. It was also a radically different way of looking at the world, from the male
dominant status quo. It placed the interests of women first, and from that standpoint spoke in
the name of the universal human by asserting that the overcoming of women‟s subordination
would mean the overcoming of all other forms of subordination as well. For Ti-Grace
Atkinson, for example, the oppression of women by men created a world where no one could
be free:
A human being is not born from the womb; it must create itself. It must be free, self-
generative. A human being must feel that it can grow in a world where injustice, inequality,
hatred, sadism are not directed at it. No person can grow into a life within these conditions: it
is enough of a miracle to survive as a functioning organism. (Atkinson, 1974:5)17

Radical feminism does not accept existing political and social organization in general because
they are tied to patriarchy. Instead, it supports cultural change that undermines patriarchy and
associated hierarchical structures. Radical feminism opposes patriarchy, not men. To equate
radical feminism to man-hating is to assume that patriarchy and men are inseparable,
philosophically and politically.

Where liberal feminism focussed on the issue of equal opportunities for women, in law, in
education, etc., and Marxist feminism concentrated on the issue of the economic exploitation
of women and the systematic devaluation of women‟s work, radical feminism explores a
number of different topics – art, religion, literature, ecology, reproduction and mothering,
sexuality and so on. The work of radical feminists has illumined a number of areas, and has
transformed our perceptions of many things that we have hitherto taken for granted. But
whatever area of human life the radical feminist discusses, each of them agrees on one thing:
the oppression of women is “the first, the most widespread and the deepest form of human
oppression” 18

Liberal feminist thinking is a more reasoned, intellectual perspective than the radical feminist
position, which has both emotional and political centring in its logical expressions. It has
been said of the radical feminists that their tactics and their philosophy are inseparable."19
This is understandable, since their focus is on widespread cultural awakening rather than on
scholarly debate."20 Their political vibrancy comes in part from the fact that (1) they are
saying something relevant and true about men that can almost universally be appreciated by
women, and (2) their logical standards are predicated on politics rather than precise theory
and thus they become the be-all and end-all for a diversity of people.

Gerda Lerner defines the radical position in the following manner:

"Reforms and legal changes, while ameliorating the condition
of women and an essential part of the process of emancipating
them, will not basically change patriarchy. Such reforms need
to be integrated within a vast cultural revolution in order to
transform patriarchy and thus abolish it."21

Symbol of Radical Feminism

The oppression of women by men is assumed to be of the same intensity among all men, yet
obviously as Imelda Whelehan has pointed out, “Men have different degrees of access to
22
[the] mechanisms of oppression.” ”Radical feminism focuses on men as oppressors, yet
says little about the possibility of the woman being an oppressor of other women or of
men.”23 Radical feminists do not view prostitution as a harmless private transaction. On the
contrary, they believe that it reinforces and perpetuates the objectification, subordination, and
exploitation of women."24 They see men as universally believing myths regarding their own
sexuality. Two myths are: (1) that men need more sex than women and (2) that they are
genetically the stronger sex and therefore should be dominant in relationships with women.
Feminist writer Alison M. Jaggar describes the radical feminist view as one in which “almost
every man/woman encounter has sexual overtones and typically is designed to reinforce the
sexual dominance of men.”25

“According to the radical feminist view, men are socialized to have sexual desires and to feel
entitled to have those desires met, whereas women are socialized to meet those desires and to
internalize accepted definitions of femininity and sexual objectification.”26 As men cling to
the idea that their sexuality is an absolute expression of their need and dominance, they
prevent women from effecting new attitudes, self-realizations, and behaviors.
As discussed earlier, when radical feminists speak of “degradation,” they inappropriately
apply the term in ethical statements setting forth right or wrong behaviour. What they mainly
are talking about is degradation in a social sense and not a moral sense, although they allude
to their ideas as morally sound. In a social sense they seem to see degradation as existing over
a broad spectrum of society in which everything that men do, from opening doors for women
to sexual assault, reinforces their view of men as “dominating.”

In spite of the fact that radical feminists tend to overemphasize concepts such as
degradation, they appear to more than compensate for it by making several assertions that
have high credibility. One of these assertions is that human sexuality derives essentially from
culture and not from biology. This idea is reasonable and consistent with contemporary
biological theories which emphasize the role of culture rather than genetics in viewing the
evolution of human societies. For example, zoologist Theodosius Dobzhansky would
recognize the radical feminist assertion framed in biological and genetic terms. He views
27
culture as an instrument of human adaptation that is virtually inseparable from biology.
”Dobzhansky separates biological and cultural theories into three categories: ectogenic,
autogenic, and biological.”28 Thus, there is a certain degree of support for the radical feminist
view that people are not necessarily responding to biological forces that are exclusive of
cultural influences.

In the same way that biological knowledge can expand the ground of support for the
arguments of feminists, so too can the study of ethics. The exploitation and oppression of
human beings is considered to be an immoral act. Once women‟s oppression is framed in
moral terms, it becomes easier to understand that there are other moral influences that can
cause and exacerbate oppression.

3.6.2 The Influences That Have Shaped Radical Feminism

Simone de Beauvoir's Second Sex was a pioneering work that shaped many of the thought
processes that influenced several other feminist scholars, like Kate Millett, who took up De
Beauvoir's ideas.

As Rosi Braidotti lucidly points out in her book Nomadic Subjects this description of the
difference between men and women resulted in a dichotomy were 'normal subjectivity' is
masculine subjectivity which is then phallogocentric, universal, rational, capable of
transcendence, self-regulating, conscious and denying bodily origins, whereas the female is
then conceived as the lack, the other-than-the-subject (which is then seen as an automatical
devaloration), irrational, uncontroled, immanent and identified with the body. De Beauvoir
thus thought that the best feminist political and theoretical thing to do for women was to gain
the same entitlement to subjectivity as men. Women thus had to go for transcendence and
rationality in order to bring their existence, which De Beauvoir thought as being yet
unrepresented, into representation.29

This idea of Woman as lack is closely connected to the model of power as developed by
Marx and which was also taken over by various feminist scholars in order to describe the
oppression of women in a patriarchal society and the feminist answer to this. In Marx' view
power consisted of the binary 'oppressors versus oppressed‟. The oppressors are then the
group who have something (power that is) and the oppressed group are the mere victims of
the oppressors. In her ground-breaking article De Lauretis states that thinking of gender as
sexual difference now keep feminist theory stuck in a patriarchal dichotomy which therefore
gets universalized: woman as the difference from man. This concept prohibits analyzing
differences among women, let alone differences within women, says De Lauretis; feminist
theory is thus complicit to the sustaining of a binary that is invoked by patriarchal ideology.
She gives a critique of feminist theory working with the Marxist notion of power relations, as
it relies on a universal and homogeneous oppression of women prior to their entry in the
social and historical field. Furthermore, this concept of gender as sexual difference keeps
attempts of radical feminist thinking of conceiving the subject in a totally different way, in
this case other than the dominant 'masculine' notion of rational and unified subjectivity, at a
long distance. De Lauretis thus draws attention to the epistemological framework with which
feminist theory was working.30

Women are not the mere victims of patriarchal oppression as their historical and cultural
backgrounds give them a certain amount of agency in their specific patriarchal ideologies for
as we can see with the Foucaulian model of power, power has also a positive side to it as you
are not only subjected to it but it also gives you a potency for certain entitlements. In other
words, because of ideology and power structures you can make an investment to work out
your subjectivity. The next question then will be, of course, whose investments yield more
relative power.

A shift rather similar to De Lauretis' one, only on a different field, is taken up by Chandra
Mohanty in her article "Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses".
In short, she uses this De Lauretis-shift not only on gender, but also on ethnicity, thus
proposing a anti-white-centrism (as De Lauretis was proposing an anti-hetero-centrism). In
this article Mohanty wants to give a criticism of hegemonic Western scholarship on the big
scale and of the colonialism in Western feminist scholarhip in particular. In fact, she does a
renaming of the feminist position coming from the post-colonialist other.31

This project is, as well as De Lauretis' project, typical for feminist theory in the eighties
which was a reaction to certain ideas in feminist theory in the seventies.32

The 19th Amendment, which was passed in 1920, is seen as the marking point of the
separation between liberal feminists and radical feminists. Some aspects of its philosophy
might be seen to have their roots in the American cultural feminist tradition in the nineteenth
and early twentieth centuries. There seem to be particular links with the works of Charlotte
Perkins Gilman, and her woman-identified utopia Herland (1911).

The locus of radical activism has traditionally been the consciousness-raising (CR) group. In
the early 70's, these consensus-based groups concluded that the linchpin of patriarchy is the
institution of heterosexuality and the nuclear family. As long as society eroticizes male
dominance and female subordination and thinks women's unpaid family labour is a fair deal,
we're not going to have real justice. With such startling insights, no wonder both the FBI and
the Socialist Workers Party planted provocateurs in these groups. However, most radicals
will admit that other problems also weakened the movement.33 Intense disputes over power
sharing, racism, classism, and in particular, heterosexuality and lesbianism corroded the
"sisterhood" and in 1975, the majority of CR groups died.

Gloria Steinem says, "I'm not sure feminism should require an adjective."

3.6.3 What Are The Variations Of Radical Feminism?

Radical feminism is known for its activism. It popularized the slogan, „Personal is the
Political.‟ Some of those actions can be seen as staged sit-ins, acted out dramatizations, and
marches. There are essentially two forms of radical feminism: radical-libertarian and radical-
cultural feminists.

[Link] Radical-Libertarian Feminism

According to Tong, Radical-Libertarian feminists tend to hold the Radical feminist views of
the 1960's and 1970's. They often argue that women's reproductive capabilities and sexual
roles and responsibilities serve to oppress them in a patriarchal society, and limit their ability
to be full human persons. They long for androgyny and hence embrace reproductive
technologies as they can help women escape from the chains of motherhood and
childbirth. "As we shall see, radical-libertarian feminists are convinced the fewer women are
involved in the reproductive process, the more time and energy they will have to engage in
society¹s productive processes." Beliefs stem from the idea that gender is an aspect that is
separated from sex, and that male dominated societies place unyielding gender rules to
control women. Patriarchy is the primary oppressor, not individual men. They believe that
deconstruction of the nuclear family in favour of the communal family and contracted
motherhood would also break chains of mothering stereotypes. 34

[Link] Radical-Cultural Feminism

This group of feminists sees femaleness as empowering and therefore believe women should
embrace the values traditionally associated with femininity such as community, sharing, and
body to name a few. Radical-cultural feminists see women's power to create new life as the
ultimate source of our power and believe it is in women‟s best interests to procreate naturally.

Radical-cultural feminists theorize that women's oppression is not caused by female biology
and reproductive possibilities but rather by men's jealousy of women's reproductive abilities
and their desire to control them through new reproductive technologies. Many earlier Radical
feminists believed that reproduction was at the root of women's oppression and that we would
be emancipated if we could free ourselves from "the tyranny of reproduction". 35 At that point
36
in time, "Technology was viewed as liberating women". Things have changed since those
days, and today the more popular consensus is that technology is not the liberation Radical
feminists thought it would be. Instead of freeing women, our bodies are simply being
controlled by men in even greater capacities in the areas of in-vitro fertilization, artificial
insemination and other technological methods of reproduction by predominantly male doctors
and scientists.37 This however cannot be said for all Radical feminists.

Radical-cultural feminists conclude that the idea of heterosexuality is male domination over
females, and it sets the stage for a number of vices such as rape, sexual harassment, abuse,
and prostitution. They also believe that men should be educated about women, and shown
that their attitudes are detrimental to women. Only after this could men and women band
together to change patriarchy. Susan Brownmiller in her book, „Against Our Will‟ has done a
threadbare analysis of rape.

3.6.4 Radical Feminism –Its Structure

Radical feminists, possessing no single core doctrine which informed their ideology, were
fragmented from the start, a process exacerbated by their preference for small group
formation, where each individual woman could find a voice, and were all tasks could be
shared out equally.

Daly’s Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (1978) argues that men
throughout history have sought to oppress women. In this book she moves beyond her
previous thoughts on the history of patriarchy to the focus on the actual practices that,
in her view, perpetuate patriarchy, which she calls a religion.

Radical feminism‟s „invisibility„as an „organisation‟ with no identifiable leaders and centres

was perceived to be a major strength by its adherents: they did not subscribe to any one
tradition in political thought and were therefore at liberty to constantly reinvent themselves.
Much of their energies were focused on discussions around gender as a social construct from
which permeated all other forms of material and ideological female oppression. In order to
explore the nature of such oppression more thoroughly, radicals concentrated on the
experiences of the individual woman in society, often using writing and art forms as a vehicle
to communicate their own narratives of pain, and to convey their passionate belief that
sexism lies at the heart of women‟s oppression.

In terms of activity, sex role assigns domestic service and attendance upon infants to the
female, the rest of the human achievement, interest and ambition to the male. The limited role
allotted to the female tends to arrest her at the level of biological experience. 38

3.6.5 The Outcomes Of This Movement

Radical feminists chose both theory and practice and a combination of the personal and
political as a means by which women might transform their lifestyles. They were also
militant in their approach for social transformation. The belief that radical feminism needs „to
question every single aspect of our lives that we have previously accepted as normal/
39
given/standard/acceptable and to find new ways of doing things‟ , resulted in a speech for
alternative lifestyles removed from the stifling effects of patriarchy.

Communes, businesses, cafes, women‟s festivals and other women-only concerns were
established to allow women to pursue and construct their own identities unfettered by pre-
given social institutions such as the family, marriage and domestic labour.

Germaine Greer, one of the most significant feminist voices, has created controversy
ever since her book The Female Eunuch became an international best-seller in 1970,
turning her into a household name and bringing her both adulation and opposition. She
is also the author of many other books including, Sex and Destiny: The Politics of Human
Fertility (1984); The Change: Women, Ageing and the Menopause (1991)
and Shakespeare's Wife (2007). She currently serves as Professor Emeritus of English
Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick.

Germaine Greer has defined her goal as 'women's liberation' as distinct from 'equality
with men'. "The title is an indication of the problem," Greer told the New York Times in
1971, "Women have somehow been separated from their libido, from their faculty of
desire, from their sexuality. They've become suspicious about it. Like beasts, for
example, who are castrated in farming in order to serve their master's ulterior motives
— to be fattened or made docile — women have been cut off from their capacity for
Womyn is one
action. It's of a number
a process of alternative
that sacrifices vigour forspellings of the
delicacy and word "women".
succulence, “Womyn"
and one that's got will be
to befor
used changed.
simplicity, although there are many alternative spellings, including "womon" and
"womin". The term has been used in modern times tied to the concept of feminism, as a form
of the word without the connotations of a patriarchal society.

Betty Frieden was a leading figure in the "Second Wave" of the U.S. Women's Movement,
her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is sometimes credited with sparking the "second
wave" of feminism. Friedan co-founded National Organization for Women in 1966 which
aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal
partnership with men". In 1970, Friedan organized the nation-wide Women's Strike for
Equality on August 26, the 50th anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United
States Constitution granting women the right to vote. The national strike was successful
beyond expectations in broadening the feminist movement. The New York City march alone
attracted over 50,000 women. Friedan joined other leading feminists (including Gloria
Steinem, Shirley Chisholm,Fannie Lou Hamer, Bella Abzug, and Myrlie Evers-Williams) in
founding the National Women's Political Caucus in 1971.

All radical feminists agreed upon the need for separatism, but the scale of separatism varied
considerably, ranging from political separatism (women-only discussion groups, dealing
purely with issues that affect women), to complete separatism (communes, etc.) – or as
complete as was economically or practically viable. Separatism is one of the most lambasted
features of radical feminist policy.

3.6.6 Critiques Of Radical Feminism

The most common criticism of radical feminism are that its view of patriarchy remains
uninterrogated. Critiques feel that many of its arguments lapse into biologism of a reductive
kind, and its focus on women‟s personal experiences makes it politically ineffectual, or at
worst prescriptive – if, for example, it is seen to argue that „lesbian sexuality does serve as a
paradigm for female sexuality‟. It lacks meta-theory but does not question subordination –
domination relationship between women of different classes, castes, race, religions and ethnic
backgrounds.

3.6.7 Contribution to the Women’s Movement

We cannot deny however, that their contribution to the women‟s movement has been
immense. They have transformed our perceptions of our own bodies, our sexuality, our
understanding of the ways in which we have been shaped and conditioned by the patriarchal
society we inhabit; they have highlighted the connections between these and pornography,
rape, wife-battering, child-abuse, as well as the impact of the technological invasion into the
area of reproduction on the role and status of women. And so one of their most important
contributions has been to bring the issue of violence against women in the public domain.
Rape is shown as a patriarchal way to keep women in a perpetual state of terrorization,
humiliation, degradation and subjugation.

Indeed, if the media had really wanted to find feminists who didn't stand by their man during
the Clinton scandals, they could have easily interviewed the radicals--some in their 20s--who
wrote pungent, sophisticated critiques on the World Wide Web. And if the Women's Studies
community really wants to give students a feminist education, it cannot afford to view
"radfem" as an outdated anachronism, especially after reading Radically Speaking:
Feminism Reclaimed, Diane Bell and Renate Klein's bold, witty, and incisive anthology of
contemporary radical activism around the world

Radical feminists have pushed for many women‟s rights we know today, such as
contraceptives, improvements to the Pill, legalization of abortion, and in-vitro fertilization.
Radical feminists gained a lot of ground and respect from the LGBT movements, in helping
to ease the fear and hate of homosexuality.

Contrary to rumors, "radfem" in the 90's is not dead. Radicals are far less numerous
than their liberal counterparts (Kathleen Trigiani but they've made an undeniable
impact on American society. They made the world treat rape in Bosnia as a war
crime. They persuaded the medical community to admit that it's wrong to do "generic"
research on white, middle class males only. They challenged those who opposed
gay/lesbian sex to start taking homophobic hate crimes seriously. And these feminists
who "brainwashed women" even forced John Gray to admit "women should have
great sex", although for male-oriented reasons. Although financially leaner than
liberal groups, such radical organizations as Women Against Pornography, Men
Against Pornography, International Coalition Against Trafficking in Women,
Sisterhood Is Global Institute, and the Feminist International Network of Resistance
to Reproductive and Genetic Engineering (FINRRAGE) are still alive and kicking.

3.7 POSTMODERN FEMINISM

Postmodern feminism has often been termed French feminism, since most of its significant
practitioners have been French. However, today it is a term that is applicable to all those
who use a certain methodology – deconstruction – and who share a philosophical perspective
that is characterised by certain features that were first articulated by theorists like Derrida,
Foucault and others.

3.7.1 Postmodern Thought

Briefly, this perspective may be considered both a manifestation of and a contributor to what
may be termed a “legitimation crisis”. In other words, postmodernism challenges the grand
metanarratives of Western civilisation, the assumptions that were taken for granted. (e.g.
Enlightenment faith in a historically progressive science.) At the same time, postmodernists
like Foucault critique and resist the grand institutions of Western civilisation, seeing them as
reifying, dominative disciplinary practices. In Foucault‟s monumental work, Discipline and
Punish (1977, first published in French, 1975), he posits a homology between liberatory
bureaucratic institutions like schools and more rigidly controlled institutions like prisons and
armies. Both depend on regimental subordination of a kind that affects every dimension of
the individual‟s life and definitively shapes his or her attitudes and thought. Foucault calls
for an insurrection of subjugated knowledges. (The very use of a plural in a noun that
traditionally is only used in the singular indicates a polyphonic understanding of “Truth”,
“Knowledge” and other such ideas that were once considered to represent an objective and
absolute reality.) In other words, these metanarratives and grand institutions, now considered
forms of tyranny, are to be opposed and destabilised by shifting the epistemological ground
for such theories and institutions, so as to allow local and historically contextual
truths/practices to emerge and be heard. It is in this endeavour that postmodernism seems to
be an ally of feminism.

In short, postmodernism rejects all theory and all generalisations, indiscriminately. The
obvious drawback to such an approach is that, taken to its logical extreme, it would result in
an extreme nominalism in which only individual particulars have legitimacy. All theories, all
generic statements are suspect.

Three postmodern thinkers have been extremely influential in the development of

postmodern feminism. The first of these is Michel Foucault, with his questioning of the
metanarratives and grand institutions of civilisation. The second, Jacques Derrida, is
responsible for giving the world the concept and the tool of deconstruction. Derrida tried to
liberate thinking from the assumption of singularity. He questioned the existence of one
single truth or essence, of a transcendental signified which exists in and of itself as a giver of
meaning. He tried to show how traditional interpretations of texts (anything communicated
through language) have suppressed alternative interpretations.

A totally anti-essentialist philosophical perspective, deconstruction critiques everything:

ideas, social injustices, structures, language, systems. It views any search for universal
definitions as valueless, and challenges traditional boundaries between oppositions as well as
between disciplines. Deconstructionists questions two fundamental assumptions that have
underpinned the edifice of Western philosophy for centuries:
 The essential unity of the self through space and time: how is self-identity possible, they
ask, given that psychology has enabled us to understand that the workings of the
unconscious mind are often inaccessible to us?
 The essential relationship between language and reality that has traditionally been termed
truth: both language and reality are seen as variable and shifting, constantly missing each
other in a kind of Heraclitean flux. (There is an inherent paradox here, of course, in that
the postmoderns are challenging the assumptions and perspectives of tradition in the very
language that is created to maintain it. This point will be dealt with in greater detail
when we consider the Symbolic Order )

3.7.2 Postmodern Rethinking of Psychological Explanation of Gender

The third significant contribution to postmodern feminism came from a psychologist, Jacques
Lacan. Lacan reinterpreted Freud, offering an alternative understanding of the process of
development that a child undergoes in the journey from infancy to adulthood and pointing out
the the subconscious is structured like a language – the Symbolic Order – which has to be
internalised and submitted to if we wish to fit into society. He holds that there are three
stages in the development of any child: the pre-Oedipal, the mirror and the Oedipal. During
the pre-Oedipal (also called the Imaginary phase, since it is the opposite of the Symbolic
Order), the child is totally unaware of ego-boundaries, with an almost symbiotic relationship
between child and mother. During the mirror stage (also part of the Imaginary), the child has
begun to recognise its own identity: this is the stage at which the child can look into a mirror
and realise that the mirror image and the real flesh-and-blood self are different. This brings
in a very significant point: like Derrida‟s concept of difference, this implies that part of our
understanding not just of external objects, but of our own selves, is a recognition of that in
which we differ from the Other. The communication at these two earlier stages is conducted
in semiotic language, marked by rhythm, images, repetition, nonsense syllables and other
characteristics of speech between mother and child.

At the next stage, i.e. the Oedipal stage, there is a definite estrangement between the child
and its mother. The mother is now viewed as the Other and is associated with the silent,
undifferentiated womb state which the child now seeks to leave behind. There is incomplete
communication because of the limitations of the “adult” language that the child is now
beginning to learn. At this stage, the father represents the Symbolic Order, since the
Symbolic Order is the vehicle of patriarchal authority – in fact, there is a very deep and
integral relationship between the two. The male child identifies with the father and so enters
subjecthood and individuality. Internalizing the value-laden roles of the dominant order, the
boy is born again into language and the patriarchal structure that is created by and creates it.
The girl child, however, can only experience incomplete identification with the father. Freud,
as we saw earlier, had asserted that because of this, there is an incomplete development of
the moral sense in women. Lacan, on the other hand, interprets the situation rather
differently. Because there can be no complete identification between the girl and her father,
women find themselves excluded from and marginalised by the Symbolic Order. Forced
unwillingly into a Symbolic Order that disadvantages them, women are repressed, for they
cannot internalise the “law of the fathers”: it has to be imposed upon them, superimposed
over their natural beings. Femininity is squelched, silenced, straitjacketed by language. This
is an immeasurable and profound loss, for the only language we as women have at our
disposal is unable to express the way we feel. “Jouissance”, a term that communicates
something of the sexual experience of women at the moment of orgasm, cannot be known
because it cannot be expressed in phallic language. It can only be glimpsed, it exists only at
the level of potentiality. If jouissance could be thought and spoken, the Symbolic Order
would be destroyed.

Three aspects of the Symbolic Order, in particular, are seen as oppressive by postmodern
feminists. First, it is extremely logocentric: emphasising the primacy of the spoken Word.
Second, its phallocentrism implies a single unitary drive to a single attainable goal. Third, it
functions in a dualistic mode in which everything is traced to pairs of binary opposites.
Because of these three features, it privileges a certain kind of communication and mode of
thought that has been associated with “masculinity” in gender constructs. There is, as we
saw earlier, a built-in paradox here, since feminists are struggling to challenge the Symbolic
Order, but the only weapon they have – language – was in fact created to maintain the
Symbolic Order and in turn, creates and perpetuates it.

Though the Lacanian interpretation identifies and clearly articulates the repression of women
in a patriarchal society, where Freud saw women as being inherently less moral and less
capable of full personhood because they were women, both Freud and Lacan place women
outside the Symbolic Order, as permanent outsiders because of their biological nature. This is
a point that has been challenged by the postmodern feminists, even while they accept much of
Lacan‟s interpretation.

3.7.3 Postmodern Feminists

For the postmodern feminists, the basic premise is that woman, the Other, the feminine, has
been left unthematised and silent in the gap that blocks the union between language and
reality. They critique the dominant totalising structures of patriarchy like language, systems
of knowledge, etc., rejecting labels and generalisations since they carry with them the
“phallogocentric drive to stabilise, organise and rationalise our conceptual universe,” as Moi
puts it in her book Sexual/Textual Politics (1985: 130-1).

The other point on the postmodern agenda, while using a term suggested by the
existentialists, yet points to a major difference between the existentialist feminists and their
postmodern sisters. Both speak of “the Other”, but while de Beauvoir sees Otherness as an
undesirable state, as something that is objectionable, the postmodern feminists celebrate
Otherness and valorise the very qualities that were once used as negative epithets.

There are three main figures – Cixous, Irigaray and Kristeva – who have been responsible for
postmodern feminism as we know it today, though the ideas and the orientation have been
taken over and further developed by later feminists.

Helene Cixous is a novelist experimenting with literary style as well as a literary theorist.
She applies Derrida‟s notion of difference to writing, and contrasts literatur, which she
associates with white, European, ruling class and patriarchal structures, with l‟ecriture
feminine. She objects to the binary oppositions and the dichotomies that abound in masculine
writing and thought. These “dual hierarchized oppostions,” as she terms them in “Sorties”
(Lodge, 1990:287) find their inspiration in the fundamental opposition between man and
woman in which the first is the concept and the second, the deviation. Man is the self, she
claims, in the same essay, woman is his Other. Thus woman exists in man‟s world on his
terms. She is either the Other for man, or she is unthought. After man is done thinking about
woman, “what is left of her is unthinkable, unthought.” (Lodge, 1990: 288)
Cixous challenges women to write themselves out of the world men have constructed by
putting into words, the unthinkable, the unthought. According to her, men‟s writing, in being
canonised, has been petrified. It cannot move or change. Women‟s writing is characterised
by marking, scratching, scribbling, jotting, which makes of it a Heraclitean everchanging
river. In “The Laugh of the Medusa”, she asserts that women‟s writing holds within itself
“the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive
thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural standards”
(Warhol and Herndl, 1991: 337)

Cixous also draws analogies between male sexuality and masculine writing, on the one hand,
and female sexuality and feminine writing, on the other. The former are both characterised
by a pointedness and singularity which is, for Cixous, ultimately limited and boring. The
latter are open and multiple, varied and rhythmic, full of pleasures and possibilities. “Her
writing can only keep going, without ever inscribing or discerning contours….Her language
does not contain, it carries; it does not hold back, it makes possible.” (Warhol and Herndl,
1991)

Cixous‟s own writings are characterised by an optimism and a joy that are lacking in both
Derrida (who believed that logocentrism is inevitable) and Lacan (for whom the phallus will
always dominate). Cixous, in contrast, believes that we can escape our dichotomous prisons,
and that women can lead the revolt that will liberate men and women alike. “Now women
return from afar, from always: from „without‟, from the heath where witches are kept alive;
from beneath, from beyond culture.” (Warhol & Herndl, 1991: 335)

The next key figure in this school is Luce Irigaray, who further developed and challenged
Lacanian ideals. For her, the feminist enterprise was to empower women to move into the
subject position – becoming “subjects and protagonists of their own reality, rather than
objects and antagonists in the Father‟s drama.” The quest is to discover the feminine
feminine (as opposed to a patriarchal construct of femininity) that has been entrapped in an
Imaginary stage full of untapped possibilities; to enable mothers and daughters and wives to
become women.

Irigaray suggests three strategies of subversion. First, she invites women to develop and
deepen their awareness of language and to discover a language that is neither masculine nor
“neutral” (there is no such stance, it merely gives one the illusion of objectivity). Next, she
invites us to an exploration of the multi-faceted terrain of the human body in order that we
may find ways of expressing women‟s experience, and learn to speak words, think thoughts,
that will blow the phallus over and set the feminine feminine free. And finally, she suggest
that we mime – and exaggerate – the roles men have imposed upon women. This subtle
specular move, mirroring the mimicry of all women, subverts the effects and the authority of
phallocentric discourse, simply by making the process conscious through exaggeration.

At the same time, there is a tension between the conviction that we must end the process of
labelling and categorising, and the antithetical conviction that we cannot help but engage in
this.

The third feminist in this group is Julia Kristeva, who shares an orientation with the other
two, but at the same time disagrees with them. Primarily, she disagrees with the collapse of
language into biology as being part of the patriarchal straitjacket. The equation of male
author and literatur, female author and l‟ecriture feminin is rejected, for Kristeva insists that
boys can identify with mothers and girls with fathers. Boys can exist and write in a feminine
mode and girls in a masculine mode.

Another point of difference between the other two and Kristeva is that the latter adheres
radically to the notion that even if the feminine exists, it must not be. “Woman, as such, does
not exist,” she proclaims. Concepts like “woman” and “the feminine” are rooted in the
essentialist philosophy that deconstruction seeks to deconstruct. At the same time, the fact
that woman cannot be on this deeper level – always becoming, never being – allies her with
other marginalised “misfit” groups: minorities, Jews, homosexuals, etc. Kristeva was
preoccupied with the scapegoating of such groups, which she held was grounded in the
“abject” – a sense of irrational disgust traceable to pre-Oedipal experiences of excrement,
blood and mucus. As a sense of sex difference develops, this becomes associated with “the
feminine”. Society‟s fundamental problem is with the abject: the feminine is just one angle
of it.

Kristeva wants society to come to terms with the abject. All that has been marginalised,
repressed by culture - the discourses of madness, of the maternal, the sexual, the irrational –
must release their energies into language. She links social revolution to poetic revolution:
“the historical and political experiences of the twentieth century have demonstrated that one
cannot be transformed without the other,” she asserts in Revolution in Poetic Languages
(1982).

Using Lacan‟s framework, Kristeva posits a contrast between the “semiotic” and the
“symbolic”. Phallogocentric thought is based on a repression of the semiotic (and by
extension, of the sexually unidentified pre-Oedipal maternal body). Maternal space is
characterised by a different perception of time. Where symbolic time is historical, linear,
pointing to a goal, semiotic time is cyclic, monumental, rhythmic and eternal. Symbolic
writing, too is linear, rational, objective, repressed, decent, with normal syntax. Semiotic
writing emphasises rhythm, sound, colour, with breaks in syntax and grammar; unrepressed,
it has room for the repugnant, the horrific. A truly liberated person is able to acknowledge
the interplay of the semiotic and the symbolic, the continual vacillation between chaos and
order, and is able to avail of both with equal facility.
3.7.4 Limitations of Postmodern Feminism
The postmodern feminists have been criticised on several grounds. They seem to delight in
their own opacity and are often dismissed as ivory-tower academicians, irrelevant to the
majority of women who cannot even access their work.

The content of their work seems to border on a kind of biological esssentialism, preaching the
salvation of women through women‟s bodies. However, this may be a matter of inadequate
translation, since most postmodern feminists do maintain that there is a difference between
woman as a biological entity and woman as a social construct. Further there seems to be a
valorization of female and feminine over male and masculine which could result in a fascistic
matriarchy replacing the fascistic patriarchy that feminists are challenging.

And finally, the philosophical underpinnings of postmodernism can lead us to chaos. Can we
sustain any sort of community in total multiplicity, diversity, profusion. The issue here is a
profoundly philosophical, political and personal one. Is difference a threat or an
opportunity? Postmodern feminists have thematised the “many”, but the problem of creating
community is as much ours as theirs.

In “Women‟s Time”, Kristeva herself points out that “The reality of a world that is
provisional in meanings, where logic is denigrated as a mode of thought, where all
interpretations are valid and values are upset but not replaced, would be impossible.” (Warhol
& Herndl, 1991) Deconstructing our world, our codes, is one thing, but it will not provide us
with new conceptual frameworks, new values and priorities, new boundaries. However
different in scope and nature to the ones with which we are familiar, these things have to be
for a society or a community to survive.

3.7.5 Contribution to the Women’s Movement

However, the basic contribution of postmodern feminism to the women‟s movement is
undeniable. They have given us an appreciation for the latent possibilities in nothingness,
absence, the marginal, the peripheral, the repressed. They have also challenged us to think in
non-binary, non-oppositional terms: no word (logos) but a myriad voices open to any
number of interpretations. And with their celebration of multiplicity they have provided a
new conceptual start that includes the ostracised and alienated, the abnormal, the deviant.
They have reminded us that even if we cannot be One, we can be Many.

Check your Progress

1. What are the characteristic features of postmodern thought?

2. What, according to postmodern feminism, are the causes of women’s

oppression?

3. What suggestions do postmodern feminists offer to help women transform

their lives for the better?

4. What are the limitations of postmodern feminism?

5. What has postmodern feminism contributed to the women’s movement?

3.8 BLACK FEMINISM AND WOMANISM

3.8.1 The Beginnings of Black Feminism
All the Women are White, All the Men are Black, but Some of us are Brave. The title of this
anthology, edited by Gloria Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith in 1982, clearly
indicates the roots of black feminism. Black women realised that they were the ultimate
silenced Other in both black and feminist discourse. While the black movement took little
note of the problems specific to black women, feminists too seemed to use racist assumptions
of universality as a foundation on which to build their arguments. „Black women‟s existence,
experience, and culture and the brutally complex systems of oppression which shape these,‟
comments Smith, „are in the “real world” of white and/or male consciousness beneath
consideration, invisible, unknown.‟ (1982:157)
3.9 CYBER FEMINISM

"Cyber feminism emerged at a particular moment in time, 1992, simultaneously at three

different points on the globe. In Canada, Nancy Paterson, a celebrated high tech installation
artist, penned an article called "Cyber feminism" for Stacy Horn's Echo Gopher server. In
Australia, VNS Matrix Josephine Starrs, Julianne Pierce, Francesca da Rimini and Virginia
Barratt coined the term to label their radical feminist acts and their blatantly viral agenda: to
insert women, bodily fluids and political consciousness into electronic spaces.

In a similar year, British cultural theorist Sadie Plant formulated a term to describe her recipe
for defining the feminizing influence of technology on Western society and its inhabitants.1
In 1997 at the first International Cyber feminist conference in Germany, the Old Boys'
Network (OBN), the organization that had arisen to be the central hub of Cyber feminist
thinking, refused to define the school of thought, but instead drafted the "100 Anti-Theses of
Cyber feminism" in order to make it open and free of classification. Their methodology to
draw it was multilingual and non-restrictive. The underlying assumption was that there can be
no definition because that limits what Cyber feminism means? 2

According to Jennifer Brayton- Cyber feminism, takes feminism as its starting point, and
turns its focus upon contemporary technologies, exploring the intersections between gender
identity, the body, culture and technology.3
Cyber feminism is a way of redefining the conjunctions of identities, genders, bodies and
technologies, specifically as they relate to power dynamics. It is a celebration of multiplicity
Carolyn G. Guertin, Quantum Feminist Mnemotechnics. 4

However, they simplify and argue that Cyber feminism refers to feminism(s) applied to
and/or performed in cyberspace. An authoritative definition of cyber feminism is difficult to
find in written works due to the fact that early cyberfeminists deliberately evaded a rigid
elucidation. At the first International cyberfeminist conference, delegates avoided stating
what cyberfeminism was and instead devised the 100 anti-theses and defined what cyber
feminism was not. The idea of defining/not defining it through several overlapping ideas
(anti-theses) is appropriate to post-modern feminist ideals of a fluid worldview rather than a
rigid binary oppositional view and reflects the diversity of theoretical positions in
contemporary feminism denoting cyberfeminism as an International movement. This
combination of serious real world action mixed with a good dose of irony and sense of fun is
also evident in many cyberfeminist artworks. Carolyn Guertin has perhaps lucidly dubbed
cyberfeminism: "a way of redefining the conjunctions of identities, genders, bodies and
technologies, specifically as they relate to power dynamics" in an interview for CKLN-FM in
Toronto. 5
Cyberfeminism is a feminist community, philosophy and set of practices concerned with
feminism‟s interactions with and acts in cyberspace.
3.9.1 Origin Of Cyber Feminism

Equity studies have documented the massive historical resistance to women getting the
education, credentials, and jobs available to similarly talented men; Rossiter (1982b); Walsh
(1977). They have also identified the psychological and social mechanisms through which
discrimination is informally maintained even when the formal barriers have been eliminated.
Motivation studies have shown why boys and men more often want to excel in science,
engineering, and maths than do girls and women.

Some of these studies show how the uses and abuses of biology, the social sciences, and their
technologies, reveal the ways science is used in the service of sexist, racist, homophobic and
classist and social projects. Oppressive reproductive policies; white men‟s management of all
women‟s domestic labour; the stigmatization of, discrimination against, and medical “cure”
of homosexuals; gender discrimination in workplaces – all these have been justified on the
basis of sexist research and maintained through technologies, developed out of this research,
that move control of women‟s life from women to men of the dominant group. 6

In her 1997 book, Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Techno-culture, Sadie Plant
takes up what was – at the time – an emerging, though still relatively unexplored, connection
between feminism and „cyber culture‟, through a cultural historical and poststructuralist
philosophical exploration of the history of technology via the development of the first
computing machines in the industrial age of the 19th century. Plant‟s analysis shows the
essential role played by a woman in the development of the difference engine through the
example of the mathematician Ada Lovelace. It is by drawing attention to the contributions of
Lovelace that Plant shows how women have generally been excluded from the narrative
discourses supplying the established history of industrial and post-industrial technologies,
and thereby it is women, in this case Lovelace, who provide a condition of possibility for the
development of these world-changing inventions.

Donna Haraway is the inspiration and genesis for cyber feminism with her 1991 essay "A
Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth
Century" in "Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature" (1991). Cyber
feminism was born mainly as a reaction to “the pessimism of the 1980s feminist approaches
7
that stressed the inherently masculine nature of techno-science”, so it became a counter
movement against the „toys for boys‟ perception of new Internet technologies. As cyber
feminist artist Faith Wilding argued “If feminism is to be adequate to its cyber potential then
it must mutate to keep up with the shifting complexities of social realities and life conditions
as they are changed by the profound impact communications technologies and techno science
have on all our lives”. 8

Contemporary science fiction is full of cyborgs – creatures simultaneously animal and

machine, who populate worlds ambiguously natural and crafted. Modern medicine is also full
of cyborgs, of couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices.9
Neelam Kumar outlines in “Gender and Stratification in Science: An Empirical Study in the
Indian Setting” how women in India have been marginalized, excluded or even barred

entry to many science institutions in the 19th century, and how issues such as neo- liberal
policies of globalization, privatization of research, reduced Government aid and the increased
cost of education in the 20th century have only worsened this exclusion. One of the feminist
paradoxes - one that challenges many of its optimistic histories - is how patriarchy remains
persistent over time. In this context Kumar seeks to show women in 19th and 20th century
India as historical protagonists through their involvement and active participation in science
and scientific research. There exists a gender gap in institutions of science in India, which has
deepened even after independence
 Cyber feminism and its usage

RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, was

established in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 1977 as an independent political/social
organization of Afghan women fighting for human rights and for social justice
in Afghanistan. It projected Afghani women„s voices to the outside world
during its many political crises‟, particularly during the years when the Taliban
held sway in this troubled country. 10

3.9.2 Definition of The 100 Anti-Theses

The 100 anti-theses range from the serious and instructional, for example “Cyberfeminism is
not just using words with no knowledge of numbers” (i.e. cyberfeminism requires active
engagement with technology in addition to theory), to the whimsical, for example
“Cyberfeminismo es no una banana”. The 100 Anti-theses is written primarily in English but
includes several other languages in line with the 100th anti-theses “cyberfeminism has not
only one language” denoting cyber feminism as an international movement. The 'definitions'
exist only in opposition. The underlying assumption is that there can be no definition because
that only limits what cyberfeminism is. These definitions are given only in opposition eg.
Cyberfeminism is "not a structure," but is "not without connectivity," and being neither "a
lack," "a wound" or "a trauma," it is also "not an empty space." This combination of serious
real world action mixed with a good dose of irony and sense of fun is also evident in many
cyberfeminist artworks .The idea of defining/not defining it through several overlapping ideas
(anti-theses) is appropriate to post-modern feminist ideals of a fluid worldview rather than a
rigid binary oppositional view and reflects the diversity of theoretical positions in
contemporary feminism. 11

3.9.3 Cyber Art and Its Relation to Cyber Feminism

The practice of cyber feminist art has a deep connection with cyber feminist theory. The 100
anti-theses makes it clear that cyber feminism is not just about theory, but that it requires
participation too. As one member of the cyber feminist collective of the Old Boys Network
writes, cyber feminism is “linked to aesthetic and ironic strategies as intrinsic tools within the
growing importance of design and aesthetics in the new world order of flowing
pancapitalism”. Cyber feminism also has strong connections with the DIY feminism
movement, as noted in the seminal text DIY Feminism, a grass roots movement that
encourages active participation, especially as a solo practitioner or a small collective.
Around the late nineties several cyber feminist artists and theorists gained recognition for
their works, including the VNS Matrix and their Cyber feminist Manifesto12 for the 21st
century, and Faith Wilding and Critical Art Ensemble. Some of the better known examples of
cyber feminist work include Olia Lialina‟s My Boyfriend Came Back From the War, a
browser based art work that plays with the conventions of HTML; Linda Dement‟s
Cyberflesh Girlmonster a hypertext work that incorporates images of women‟s body parts
and remixes them to create new monstrous yet beautiful shapes; and Shu Lea Cheang with
the 1998 work Brandon which was the first Internet based artwork to be commissioned and
collected by the Guggenheim.
3.9.4 Cyber Feminism In - Practical Manifestation

Women have appropriated this space and used it with great creativity and innovation for a
variety of purposes: creating solidarity, networking, building pressure groups, information
sharing, giving a higher profile to women‟s contributions in the various fields. Often it has
given voice to women‟s concerns and in some instances acted as the medium through which
women have challenged tyranny, misogyny, political crisis etc. and given voice to their
concerns. In UK, Discover! clubs have been devised as learning spaces dedicated to changing
dominant cultural attitudes and to widening access and recruitment of Women into STEM
Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths; subject and occupational fields traditionally
dominated bymen13. They are a learning tool devised to capture the imagination and interest
of young school aged girls, close to selecting their General Certificate in Secondary
Education (GCSE) first choices. They provide a learning zone where dominant gendered
constructions of curriculum and occupation that discourage young women from pursuing
STEM are potentially disassembled.

Shireen Ebadi Nobel Prize in Peace 2003 known for her work for the rights of women and
children used the net as a means for speaking against the political establishment. Tatania
Mamonova was the first feminist dissident exiled from the Soviet Union in 1980 for re-
igniting the Russian women's movement; initiating her organization, then called Woman and
Russia, the first NGO promoting the human rights of women from the Soviet Union and
connecting Russian speaking women‟s voices and needs with the international community;
and editing and publishing the samizdat Woman and Russia Almanac, now called Woman
and Earth Almanac, an art and literary journal containing the first collection of Soviet
feminist writings, which has now been published in 11 languages and in over 22 countries.
In India too the cyber world has opened up new spaces for those women who have been
marginalised from the outside world, either because of economic compulsions or traditional
environments. NGOs working with women‟s issues such as Women Work & Health
Initiative, India, Sampark and Jagori have tried to build cyber communities amongst the
women, as a first step to providing knowledge access and thus empowerment.

3.9.5 Cyber Feminism Challenges And The Future

The goals of cyber feminist are many as there is no one „feminism but rather many
feminisms‟. „Cyber feminists face myriad challenges, such as: how to work for a feminist

The National Women‟s Museum

The National Women‟s History Museum researches, collects and exhibits the
contributions of women to the social, cultural, economic and political life of our
nation in a context of world history. The museum will use innovative and engaging
means including permanent and online exhibits, educational programs, and outreach
efforts to communicate the breadth of women's experiences and accomplishments to
the widest possible audience. The sharing of this knowledge will illuminate and
encourage women and men, people of all classes, races and cultures to move into the
future with respect, equal confidence, greater partnership, and opportunity. The
NWHM Board is bound together by the aspiration to honour the women who came
before us and to ensure that their many traditional and non-traditional roles are
systematically explored and acknowledged and brought into the mainstream
culture.14
political and cultural environment on the Net? What are various areas of feminist research
and net activity that are already beginning to emerge as cyber feminist practice? Faith
Wilding gives the
example of The 1st Cyber feminist International during Documenta X in Kassel, which can
be the prototype cell of feminist Net organis(m)ation . She describes how a varying and
diverse group of more than thirty women-- worked and lived together during the CI .The
areas that were considered important for more research and further work included Creating a
list of cyberfeminist artists, theorists and speakers to be sent to media festivals, presenting
institutions, museums, and other public venues. Creating and publishing cyberfeminist
theory, net criticism, position papers, bibliographies, data bases, image banks. Creating a
feminist search engine which could link cyberfeminist websites; feminist lists, country by
country reports of netactivity and cyberorganization for women. Creating coalitions with
female technologists, programmers, scientists and hackers, to link feminist Net theory,
content and practice with technological research and invention. Cyberfeminist education
projects (for both men and women) in technology, programming, and software and hardware
design, which address traditional gender constructions and biases built into technology. A
translational cyber feminist action alert site. Creating new avatars, databodies, new self (ves)
representations which disrupt and recode the gender biases usual in current commercially
available ones. Cyberfeminist meetings at all media festivals, activist conferences,
exhibitions, and on other occasions whenever possible.

Despite the many contributions made by women to the invention and development of
computing technology, the Internet, which has its origins as a system to serve war
technologies, is today a part of masculine institutions. While the net poses great promise and
possibilities, feminists recognize that these can be realised only by recognising the thought
processes that guided its origin and the political conditions. This being so, it can be seen as a
radical act to insert the word feminism into cyber space, to interrupt the flow of masculine
codes by boldly declaring the intention to bastardize, hybridize, provoke, and infect the male
order of things by politicizing the environment of the Net. Cyberfeminism will work to bring
in the feminist view point by dismantling the patriarchal conditions which produce the codes,
languages, images, and structures that define the net.

Check Your Progress 1

Note: i) Use the space given below for your answers
 ii) Check your answers with those given at the end of the Unit.
Q.1. What is cyberfeminism?
Q.2. What is the meaning of 100 anti-theses?
Q.3. What is the origin of cyberfeminism?
Q.4. What structures inform cyberfeminism?
________________________________________________________________________
UNIT 4: SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION OF GENDER

Structure
4.1 Introduction

4.2 Objectives

4.3 Introducing the Topic

4.4 What is Social Construction?

4.5 Social Construction and Gender

4.6 Construction of a Girl Child

4.7 Sex Segregation

4.8 Division of Labour and the Sphere of Work

4.9 Summing Up

4.10 Glossary

4.11 Answer to Check Your Progress Exercises

4.12 Questions for Reflections and Practice

4.1 INTRODUCTION
 As the title of the unit goes, our main aim is to develop familiarity with the meaning,

various dimensions of social construction of gender for women in development through case

studies and citing examples. Sociologically, the social construction of gender speaks about

the relationship of gender with various institutions like caste, kinship, marriage and so on.

From the perspective of gender and development, the process of gender construction can be

explained in relation to the aspects of women‟s life like work, decision-making, honour

killing, and the notion of autonomy and freedom. The gender construction operates both at

the macro and micro level and very much embedded in the institutional arrangements of the

society. In this course, the gender construction will be explained from both sociological and

development perspectives to understand the complex phenomenon of women‟s

discrimination and inequality face by women on the account of sex.

4.2 OBJECTIVES
After studying this Unit you should be able to

 Explain the processes of gender construction in relation to the culture and ordering of

the society.

 Examine the implications of gender construction in relation to development indicators

like sex segregation, division of labour, decision-making, and socialization.

 Examine the relationship between gender and the structural arrangements of the

society.

 Analyse the necessary features of the universal position of gender construction

4.3 INTRODUCTING THE TOPIC

The unit discusses the meaning of social construction of gender. It starts with

explaining the meaning of social construction and understanding gender in relation to culture,
sex segregation, work – force participation, decision-making, honour killing , and notion of

autonomy and freedom. To begin with, the section on the gender construction focuses

broadly on the culture and various structures like work, sex segregation and division of

labour, which are perpetuating the existing gender divisions on the basis of sex difference.

Similarly, in the section on work and the sexual division of labour, we discuss gender as an

analytical tool to understand the inequalities thoses are reflected in ways of hierarchization of

tasks, unequal distribution of resources, invisibility of women‟s work in agriculture and

informal economy, and the sex segregation in sphere of work within the household.

4.4 WHAT IS SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION?

It is very often said that there is no such thing as a social reality and what are „social

constructions‟. Similarly in reality there is nothing intrinsically „good‟ or „bad‟, theses are but

social constructions. In other words, morality is the acquired vision of a society. How is the

vision of a society or its social construction shaped? Is it shaped automatically? Is it culture

specific? Let us examine this process of social construction. Everyday we observe various

objects, experience a lot of events and related with various social interactions. These entire

phenomenon those are experienced individually help to develop an image of the society or

the world. Indeed we filter everything that happens to us everyday through the lens or screen

of our understanding of our world. This everyday sense of the world or thing forms the basis

of social reality or construction of social reality (IGNOU material p: 6).

Social construction is a social process in which both individual and other social

processes are intrinsically related. Every construction or image of the world is influenced by

the individual‟s experience of the society and his/her interaction with various social
processes. Therefore, many often it is argued that the social construction itself carries

subjective biases as it is shaped by individual experience. Social construction is also

influenced and dominated by the interests of a particular group or class of people. For

instance, in Pakistan power and education rest with a few elite who don‟t take interest in the

development of the human resources of the majority. In this sense, the culture, norms,

ideologies, and values of the dominant group are used to justify and sustain a particular form

of social construction. Hence social constructions through which we understand the everyday

life try to classify people on the basis of caste, class, religion, community, kinship, gender

and so on. The classification of people is the product of social construction and also forms an

integral part of the social processes. Social processes such as primary socialization and the

presence of social institutions help to produce an accepted kind of social construction. Hence,

gender is the product of such social construction.

Check Your Progress Exercise: 1

Note: i. Use the space given below to answer the questions.

ii. Compare your answer with the one given at the end of this unit.

1. What is social construction?

4.5 SOCIAL CONSTRUCTION AND GENDER

Sex and Gender

Understanding of the social construction of gender starts with explaining the two

concepts, i.e., gender and sex. Often these two terms have used interchangeably; however,

they bear different meanings as concepts. Gender refers to differences, hierarchies, rankings

which exist between two sexes. Gender explains cultural constructions of various roles that

are played by women and men in the society. Further, gender analyses the aspect of shaping

women‟s behaviour according to the normative order of the society. Gender as a conceptual

tool is used to analyses the structural relationships of inequality exist between women and

men, as it reflected in various aspects of life such as household, labour market, education and

political institutions. Sex on the other hand, refers to the biological differences between

female and male which are same across time and place. Gender can therefore be defined as a

notion that offers a set of frameworks within which the social and ideological construction

and representation of differences between the sexes are explained (IGNOU p: 7). For

instance, gender explains the structured relations between women and men within the society.

In Singapore, housework continues to be understood as a gender-based issue, as it is

intrinsically linked to women‟s role and activities. The gender-specificity of domestic work

remains central to Singapore‟s social life and its state policy making (Phua and Yeoh 2008).

Therefore, women‟s association with housework and men‟s proximity with public work are

the products of socio-cultural contexts, further, this notion of separation/difference brings

discrimination between two sexed persons. Social expectations of women as natural mothers,
wives, daughters, and homemakers are not only exist at the ideological level, but also operate

at the material environment. Some feminist‟s geographers have argued that space and gender

are socially constructed and women‟s body, their activities, and socialization process are

limited to certain physical territory and structure. Sex on the other hand connects the

individual with her/his sex categorization and eventually restricts the individual with the

social notion of feminity and masculinity.

Cultural Construction of Gender

Gender is being the complex phenomena is socially constructed and culturally

determined. Culture describes as a web of relationships that expresses the meaning, pattern of

living, and values of the institutions. Culture covers almost every aspects of life ranging from

organization of production, structure of family and institutions, ideologies and normative

patterns of the society and forms of interactions or relations. Cultural construction of gender

talks about the construction of masculinity and feminity in the context of socialization, i.e.,

the individual acquires the gendered bodies of being feminine or masculine in the course of

social development. The construction of feminity and masculinity plays an important role in

shaping the institutions of family, economic organisation, political, and religious. The

understanding of gender in relation to culture reflects the structure of stratification, existing

power relations between women and men, and the process of acquiring the accepted roles and

behaviour. Gender construction in relation to culture can be explained through the following

points;

 Gender Construction support the system of dominance: The gender categories are

never neutral nor they are equal. This construction of gender perpetuates the system of
 dominance across the society. Gender as a system of unequal relations provides a

range of choices to women and men in spheres of work, production process, access to

resources and power, accepting the specific gender roles, and sex segregation in the

work and labour market.

 Gender construction vis-a-vis Individual Expression of Gender: Feminist psycho-

analysis assess that gender can not be seen as exclusively cultural, linguistic, and

political constructions, therefore, we need to make distinction between prescriptive

construction of gender and individual reflections of these constructions. Prescriptive

construction of gender are those images which are socially, historically, culturally

determined. For example, the socialization of a girl child like a housewife by

internalizing some of the socially accepted behaviour ranging from dress code and

good conduct to care and nurture. In addition to the socio-cultural construction of

gender behaviour according to the sex identity there is individual‟s notion of

expressing gender behaviour. Individual inflections are made by the interaction of an

individual psyche with socio-political or cultural or historical norms. For example, if a

boy/girl undergoes sex transformation, there are couple of questions such as how do

societies respond to variations in individual‟s expression of gender identity, to what

extent societies internalize various gender roles and behaviours. This point brings us

the discussion of doing gender as the concept within the social construction of gender.

Doing gender involves a complex set of socially governed perceptual, interactional

and micro-political activities that cast particular action as expression of masculine or

feminine nature (West and Zimmerman 1991). Gender is an achieved action that is

located in a particular social situation. Therefore, it is an observed feature of social

situation, i.e., gender outcome of and produced social arrangements. For example, the
newborn only carries the sex identity that is imposed upon the individual by the

society. Eventually, through continuous interaction with the parents or primary

caretakers, the infant accomplishes gender identity. Often, the unequal treatment of

parents towards boys‟ vis-à-vis girls creates gender difference and turned into gender

discrimination. Doing gender is process that legitimizes the fundamental division of

the society.

Box: 1 The case of Agnes: A transsexual boy

West and Zimmerman discuss the three analytical categories such as sex, sex

category, and gender to understand the notion of doing gender. Garfinkel‟s case

study of Agnes, a transsexual boy would be an apt example for understanding

gender construction. Agnes adopted a female identity at the age of seventeen and

underwent sex reassignment surgery some years later to understand the gender

construction. She possessed male genital and required to project herself as a

woman. She was obliged to learn the feminine features and analysing the

conception of feminity within the socially structured situation. She did not posses

the socially agreed of the biological category to be classified herself as the female

sex. More central to this argument is Kessler and McKenna‟s position, i.e.,

Biological criteria (sex) is hidden from the public perception and individual

continues to behave according to the socially agreed criteria of male or female.

Male or female are the products of gender attribution process and form an

important part of gender accomplishment/activities. For example, if a child sees a

picture of a person with suit and tie, immediately the child connects the picture
 with the image of a man. The sex category is socially situated and acquired by the

individual through everyday interaction. People perceive the activity of an

individual and deduce the category of sex. In this context, gender is understood to

be the product of culture and society.

The above-mentioned example shows that the categories of masculinity and

feminity are socially constructed and the gender identity can only be established in

conformation with the biological identity. Feminity and masculinity is nothing but

accepting and showing conformity with socially accepted gender behaviours and

roles. Gender identity is subjective in nature, therefore, these categories do not stay

static in the history and culture of the society.

 Socialization

Socialization is the process by which the child transforms into the social being by

adhering social values, norms, and socially desired behaviour. Many feminists see

socialization process to be a self-perpetuating system and have shown concern in the

aspect of sex role socialization. Sex role socialization is a means to women‟s

oppression at the larger context. Stanley and Wise argue that sex role is often

understood as gender role, i.e., expressing attributes of feminity or masculinity. The

moment you perceive socialization to be a system, we understand the process as a

system of patriarchy, which only perpetuate the expected values and norms. Family as

an institution helps in internalizing two concepts such as socialization and gender

roles. Mother or primary caretaker responds differently to the child on the basis of the

sex categorization. The differential attitude includes touching, caring, and ideas about

autonomy of boys and absence of autonomy of girls. The more parents display

differential behaviour like exposing children to specific types of toys, more the child

will express gender stereotypes. Parents are seen as channels through which gender

stereotypes are communicated to the children and later the children internalize the

multiple stereotypes (Stanley and Sue Wise).

Check Your Progress Exercise: 2

Note: i. Use the space given below to answer the questions.

ii. Compare your answer with the one given at the end of this unit.

2. What is cultural construction of gender?

4.6 CONSTRUCTION OF A GIRL CHILD

The construction of a girl child discusses the processes of growing a girl into a

female in the patrilineal and patriarchal societies like India. It will reflect on the issue

of constraints that a girl faces in the process of socializing herself as a female,

adhering to differential values attached with the male vis-à-vis female child, how does

she acquire appropriate roles to her gender identity, and what are the mechanisms

which help her in internalizing cultural values and visualizing the image of her future.

Dube (2000) refers the process of socialization as female as how women are produced

as gendered subjects. She further discusses the process to create gendered subjects

through the medium of language, rituals, ceremonies and practices. The construction

of a gender subject, i.e., carrying the identity of feminity or masculinity is both

socially and culturally produced. For example, in every culture the notion of gender

difference is thought to be rooted in biology or preordained nature. In Indian Hindu

families, the notion of gender difference begins with the sphere of reproduction – both

mother and father share different role in relation to procreation. It is culturally

considered that father is the provider of seeds and mother provides the platform to

receive the seeds and nurture it further. Theses role differences are culturally

imagined, and get reflected in other social institutions like family, marriage, and

kinship. The social construction of gender questions the preconceived idea to assign

unequal roles to male and female, and to analyse how other gender roles are learnt

within the complex of relationships and institutions. It is evident that gender identity

is created through learning gender roles and therefore, it becomes essential to

understand the process of gender construction in the wider context of family and

kinship structure. Family and kinship are central to the understanding of socialization.

In the process of socialization, family plays two major roles such as 1. rules of

recruitment of members in the family and 2. configuration of roles on the basis of

gender and age divisions and providing training in acquisition of future roles. These

roles of family have become agencies in imparting the characters of growing up

female in Indian society.

 Girl child and the Natal Home

The construction of feminity is a continuous and complex process and is

conveyed through language, proverbs, and rituals. The context of natal home for both

married and unmarried daughters is widely used in form of proverbs in the process of

socialization. The desire for a boy child is explicit in day today conversation in forms

of saying. For instance, parents who are having only daughters often commented as

„future is black as they are not having any support‟ (Dube 2000: 90). Similarly, in

regions like Maharastra, girls are honoured with accomplishments as girls are always

associated with home and the household works. In the process of acquiring feminity,

the parental home is always refereed to be temporary shelter, therefore, girls grow up

with the notion of having their own house in future. Girls grow up with the desire to

have own house evaluate and instruct their lives to learning socially appropriate

behaviors. Proverbs and rituals give the realization of this inevitable fact of

transferring the girl‟s membership from her natal home to the home of the husband.

Dube in her book documented some of the proverbs spoken in various parts of India

like in Orissa, there is a saying that “equates daughter with ghee”. The meaning of the

proverb is both the things are valuable, however both start to stink if not disposed of

on time. Similarly, there are festivals like Durga puja and Gauri puja which reiterates

the idea of „home coming‟ in the context of goddess. These festivals are full of rituals

which convey the message to young girls of their reality to leave mother‟s home and

will be invited to the natal home in these festivals. In this context, the girls

socialization takes place through rituals, proverbs and festivities that emphasis the

need to learn adequate feminine behaviour of obedience, submissiveness,

accommodative and so on. The construction of a girl child begins with the feeling of

getting temporary membership at the parental place, and the inevitability of learning

some of ideal feminine characters.

The process of socialization of girl child involves the inherent steps of

construction of feminity at the pre-pubertal and post-pubertal phases. In the pre-

pubertal phase there is differential value attached to the son vis-à-vis daughters. Sons

are preferred for continuation of descent and daughters are valued to maintaining the

sense of pre-pubertal purity in the society. The importance of pre-pubertal purity

amongst the girls has given special recognition in rituals of various region of India

like Maharastra, West-Bengal, Karnataka and North-India. In these regions, a little

girl is associated with different customs like marriage, name giving ceremony,

observing seclusion during menstruation and celebrating Navaratra by feeding pre-

pubertal girls. These celebrations implicitly emphasis the auspiciousness and purity of

the girl child or virgin woman.

Box 2: Case Analysis

In Navaratri, the customs of worshiping and feeding virgin girls are widely practice

across India. On the eightieth day of the festival, pre-pubertal girls are invited for

worship and food. The girls represent Mother Goddess and they were worshiped and

offered food along with other gifts as part of the ritual. Two points can be inferred

from this analysis, 1. In this festival the forms assigned to the girls are essentially

feminine in nature, 2. The consciousness of femininity is constructed through their

dressing style and from the gifts offered to them, and 3. a sharp distinction can be
made between the phases of pre-puberty and post-puberty, and consequently, there is

a sense of purity and sacredness is associated with the pre-pubertal phase of women‟s

life. The construction of femininity is symbolized in these rituals and the sense of

feminine features is systematically built into the minds of the girl child.

The onset of puberty is the phase, which is marked by changes and

transformation in women‟s life. This phase is associated with several pubertal rituals,

dietary prescriptions and seclusion of girls for a certain days and these are practiced

widely across India in various forms. Theses pubertal rituals are expressing the

significance of sexuality and motherhood for a girl child and the notion of controlled

sexuality in this phase of women‟s vulnerability and adulthood. Marriage and

motherhood as two goals are highly valued for the girls in this age and often made

obvious to them through allocating specific roles to young girls, observance of

complete seclusion and imposing food restrictions during menstruation and so on. The

construction of a girl in Hindu family is indicative of the fact of learning feminine

behaviour and socialize by adopting the structured role of an imaginary wife and

mother.

4.7 SEX SEGREGATION

There is a linear relationship between economic structure and sex segregation.

The notion of sex segregation has become apparent with the advancement of

industrialization and capitalist economy. Sex segregation is mostly observed and

studied within occupation and economic structure, which reflects women‟s entering
into a particular kind of profession in the regime of any economic reform. Purdah or

the practice of female seclusion is widely followed across countries and communities

and it prescribes obvious gender segregation in rural tasks and activities. In

Bangladesh, the practice of female seclusion operated according to the inside/outside

divide (Kabeer 1990). The author says that the poor women in Bangladesh are

subjected to the twofold process of stereotyping. On the one hand, poor women are

perceived to be passive and vulnerable, and on the other hand, they regarded as the

target groups of policy makers and development practitioners. These images of

women have been reinenforced through cultural constructions like women have

always in need of male protection for their survival. The social norms and practices

have portrayed women to be passive and dependant in the larger context of society.

For example, the notion of inside/outside divide has curtailed women‟s freedom to

move beyond the premises of household. Therefore, they perform activities within the

sphere of domesticity. In the agricultural process, the activities located near to the

homestead by performed and governed by women exclusively. Women‟s engagement

with specific nature of activities are shaped by the culture and society at large.

In the labour market, there is a wide division between men and women in

terms of differential wage, access to MGNREGS job card, nature of work and the

amount of work. Traditionally, women have perceived to be dependent as far as

employment is concerned. For instance, within the family women have access to

resources through the male counter part, similarly women in the labour market go

through the male channels in accessing wage and other job opportunities. The

employment figures of Census 1991 shows severe male-female disparities in

accessing the available opportunities. In the labour market, predominant number of

women are non-workers and out of 89.77 of women workforce, substantial percentage

of women belong to marginal workers. Further, majority of women are concentrated

in the unorganized sector as compared to male workforce. The ratio of female to male

workers in the unorganized sectors seems unfavorable to women. In the unorganized

sector, 95.79 per cent of females concentrated as compared to 89.77 per cent of male

workers. In the organized sector, there is larger concentration of women in the public

sector as compared to the private sector. There is segregation on the basis of gender

within the labour market and this division has led to rising socio-economic

insecurities for women working in unorganized and private sectors (Seth 2001). The

author indicated that the states having low female status are into low paid and

hazardous employment. The proportion of women in the central government services

is extremely low as compared to men. Having an understanding of women‟s

employment in all sectors of labour market, it can be argued that women are mostly

concentrated in low paid jobs and they are low in status hierarchies. Similarly,

women‟s participation in the field of political and technical employments is very low.

In the agricultural sector, women‟s have substantial contribution; however they are

mostly employed as marginal workers. With the agriculture, there is sex segregation

with regard to nature of work assigned to women and men. In most of the states in

India, men are engaged in ploughing and irrigation related activities and women have

exclusively engaged in works like sowing, nurturing of plants, and harvesting. It is

seen that men are mostly associated with marketing operations of the agricultural

produce, and the control of resource and surplus is considered to be the domain of

man. Therefore, the benefits of the new government scheme and the new improvised

farming practices do not percolate down to women. Women‟s having less

accessibility to monetary resources and new schemes are led them to resort to low
wages and deprived of any labour benefits. The structure of patriarchy of private

domain gets reflected in the structures of public domain. The social construction of

gender reveals the discrimination and inequality existing in the domain of family,

work and employment.

Over the past 20 years, globalization has led to an export oriented economy in

countries like India, which in turn created number of manufacturing jobs and brought

majority of women into the paid workforce. Women engaged in manufacturing jobs to

some extent have increased their quality of life and have received higher authority by

earning money. However, in developing countries like India, the sex segregation

within the labour market has remained to be the sole determinant in the process of

women‟s decision making and wage negotiation. In the developing countries, women

are less educated compared to the men, therefore, the women have always gone for

temporary, part-time, and risk prone jobs without having labour and health benefits.

Within the unorganized sector, women are resorting to the jobs which are low in

hierarchy as compared to the male. For instance, in Bangladesh and Cambodia, 85

percent and 90 percent of factory jobs are hold by the women, particularly in the

garment industry. In Colombia and Zimbabwe, 65 percent and 87 percent of jobs in

the cut flower industry are hold by women, respectively. In the fruit industry of South

Africa, women comprise 69 percent of temporary and seasonal workers. The data

shows that women substantially concentrated in the unorganized workforce, however,

they have no formal contract as employees and exposed to poor safety conditions and

other vulnerabilities. Women as the workforce are primary important to global

economy and at the same time devoid of health and labour protection.
Check Your Progress Exercise: 3

Note: i. Use the space given below to answer the questions.

ii. Compare your answer with the one given at the end of this unit.

3. How does sex segregation help to understand gender construction?

4.8 DIVISION OF LABOUR AND THE SPHERE OF WORK

Gender relations are situated within the sexual division of labour and often

create gender conflict. African agriculture is often perceived to be the female system

of farming. African women carry out agricultural work independent of their

household and family. Within the agriculture, the sphere of work is divided along the

gender lines. Women and men‟s work was located within the sexual division of labour

that is the product of existing domestic and kinship arrangements. In Africa, the

separation of the sphere of work between women and men implies the social

exchange of labour between women and men. However, women‟s sphere of work is

surrounded by a complex set of claims and obligations. As Whitehead argued, two

different kinds of social environment govern the women‟s economic activity in

Africa. In women‟s sphere of work, they have access to resources like land and the

produce was shared with her children, husband, and other family members. On the

contrary, women have the obligation to work for their husband and other family

members, but there is no direct return for the women‟s labour. Here, women‟s sphere

of work is independent of the domesticity, at the same time women‟s labour is

constructed within the social climate of rights and obligations. Women‟s work in the

husband‟s field is conceptualised under her general rights to welfare and maintenance

as the household member. In the African female system of farming, women have the

autonomy in contributing their labour, however, with other activities related to

production like disposal of food crops and access to land are embedded in the social

environment and structural arrangements.

Boserup‟s model on women‟s role in economic development was widely

acknowledged within the field of women‟s work. The model explicitly discussed the

notion of sexual division of labour in the context of modernisation. To begin with, the

author argued for a female system of farming and the relegation of women‟s

agricultural work with the wake of modernisation. African agriculture exhibited a

dualism based on gender, i.e., the cash crop sector is managed by the men folk and the

food crop sector is organised through women‟s labour and their traditional methods of

farming. This model emphasized the feminine nature of subsistence farming and

women‟s inability to participate in the modern farming sector. Though this model had

shown a clear cut sexual division of labour that exists in the agricultural sector, at the

same time was criticized on the ground that it completely neglected women‟s

contribution in modern food production. Whitehead argues, to meet the increasing

cash needs of the African households; women have significantly contributed in the

family labour for cash cropping or increased trading. Women‟s contribution towards

cash crop sector is also conceptualised according to the household arrangements. For

instance, in Africa the assumption is that the well being of women is depended on the

well being of the household. Therefore, in spite of women having an independent

domain of work, their activities, claims, and obligations are tied with the structural

arrangements.

Work is often understood to be physical and mental labour. According to

Hochschild coined the term „emotional labour‟ that reflects a particular kind of work

associated with care and nurture. The emotional labour is associated with female

occupation both at the domain of family and work sphere. Within family, women‟s

unpaid work is described as labour of love.

Box 3: Labour of Love

Have you many children? The doctor asked.

God has not been kind to me. Of fifteen born, only nine live.

Does your wife work.

No, she stays at home.

I see, how does she spend her day? Doctor asked.

Well, she gets up at four in the morning, fetches water, and wood, makes the fire and
cooks breakfast. Then she goes to the river and washes clothes. After that she goes to

town to get corn ground and buys what we need in the market. Then she cooks the

midday meal. She brings the meal to the field.

She takes care of the hens and pigs, and of course she looks after the children. Then

she prepares supper so it is ready when I come home (Mitter 2000).

The above-mentioned describes the nature of labour associated with females

and considered to be feminine in nature. Even in the context of world economy,

women continue to work in low-paid wages and bear the image of causal or

temporary labourers. The image of peripheral workers or causal workers that women

bear reflect the notion of job insecurity and women‟s inaccessibility to any other

forms benefits and career progression. Within the work sphere, women have limited

freedom and autonomy.

4.9 SUMMING UP

The unit discusses the concept of gender while making the distinction between

biological sex and social gender. The unit contributes the understanding of gender

both as social and cultural constructions. Gender as a social division has impacted

women and men differentially in the contexts of socialization, work, sex segregation,

and division of labour.

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4.10 GLOSSARY

Kinship

Honour Killing

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4.11 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS EXERCISES
Check Your Progress Exercise 1:

1. Social construction is a social process in which both individual and other social

processes are intrinsically related. Every construction or image of the world is

influenced by the individual‟s experience of the society and his/her interaction with

various social processes. Therefore, many often it is argued that the social

construction itself carries subjective biases as it is shaped by individual experience.

Social construction is also influenced and dominated by the interests of a particular

group or class of people.

Check Your Progress Exercise 2:

1. Gender is being the complex phenomena is socially constructed and culturally

determined. Culture describes as a web of relationships that expresses the meaning,

pattern of living, and values of the institutions. Culture covers almost every aspects of

life ranging from organization of production, structure of family and institutions,

ideologies and normative patterns of the society and forms of interactions or relations.

Cultural construction of gender talks about the construction of masculinity and

feminity in the context of socialization.

Check Your Progress Exercise 3:

1. There is a linear relationship between economic structure and sex segregation. The

notion of sex segregation has become apparent with the advancement of

industrialization and capitalist economy. Sex segregation is mostly observed and

studied within occupation and economic structure, which reflects women‟s entering

into a particular kind of profession in the regime of any economic reform. Purdah or

the practice of female seclusion is widely followed across countries and communities

and it prescribes obvious gender segregation in rural tasks and activities.

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4.12 QUESTIONS FOR REFLECTION AND PRACTICE

1. Is gender socially constructed? Substantiate your arguments with suitable

examples.

2. Explain, gender is a product of society and culture.

3. How do aspects like division of labour and sex segregation explain the notion of
feminity and masculinity?