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Socialist Review Index (1993–1996) | Socialist Review 177 Contents
From Socialist Review, No. 177, July/August 1994.
Copyright © Socialist Review.
Copied with thanks from the Socialist Review Archive.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
The History of Doing: An Illustrated Account of the Movement
for Women’s Rights and Feminism in India, 1800–1990
Radha Kumar
Verso £12.95
Radha Kumar’s interesting book on the history of feminism in India shows how fundamental political arguments – the nature of the system we live in, reform versus revolution, class versus sex – cover the globe.
And it inadvertently shows how the movement for women’s liberation is tied to the mass movements of all the oppressed.
She divides her book between movements for reform of the position of women during the period of the empire, and the period after India’s independence. The first reformers were solidly middle class, often male, and sought legal reform. But Kumar shows how, as mass struggles against the British – and against Indian landlords and employers – developed, they often raised the question of women’s oppression.
Thousands of women were active in the strikes and demonstrations of the sharecroppers’ movement in Telengana, Andhra Pradesh, in the late 1940s for example. Around 2,500 villages were ‘liberated’, sharecroppers’ debts were cancelled, rent payments suspended and land was redistributed. Within the fight, questions like wife beating were raised and fought against. Women joined the guerilla armies.
Similarly she shows how battles against a number of issues, from price rises to environmental destruction, have involved thousands of poor and working class women.
But rather than being seen as acting as members of a class, their battles are always placed in the context of the need to build a broader, stronger alliance of women.
Yet as the 1970s and 1980s saw the birth of a whole number of women’s organisations in India, the divisions between women became clear.
To hear the descriptions of the first all India feminist conference can only remind you of reports of the first similar event in this country – the participants’ relief and joy that it had happened combined with a realisation of the massive differences, social and political, that existed between them.
Kumar describes the shock of facing a fundamentalist Hindu demonstration – with many women on it – in favour of sati (the burning of widows). It should be no surprise – the fascist Shiv Sena in Bombay has its own women’s wing whose primary activity is to put out anti-Muslim propaganda.
What makes the book more intriguing is the way it is broken up with copies of leaflets, reprints of posters, boxes with the life histories of some of the women involved and lots of pictures of activities.
Just to see the women workers from Bhopal demonstrate, in saris, with their fists in the air following the disaster at the Union Carbide plant in 1984 tells a story in itself.
They are inspiring glimpses of what the liberating power of mass activity means.
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