The Feminism Learning Curve - We’re all struggling
‘Did you see what she was wearing?’
‘She’s too busy working to care for her children.’
It was comments like these, made by educated, urban women that pushed me into thinking about how it is that the same women who complain about gender-defined roles in their homes, are also so quick to fall into the trap of defining what and who a woman should be. While these women are at times indignant about the inherent patriarchy in our society, they are also reluctant to call themselves feminists. Perhaps the F-word confuses even the best of us.
The truth is - we are all on the brink of a wave that we are still learning to ride. The journey from a conditioned mind to true emancipation is bound to be on a steep learning curve.
The primary image of feminism is that of angry women waging a war against men. The world has come to mistakenly identify feminism with misandry. And while radical feminism does have occasional skirmishes around that line, the truest definition of feminism is gender equality - a belief that both men and women should have equal rights.
There exist people who believe either that gender equality is not a worthy goal, or that we have already arrived at it. There also exist people who think that equality is still a long way off and either join the movement, or refrain. Whichever category one might fall into, one is always learning.
There are various reasons why the plane of feminism remains sketchy. The first being - feminism as a movement, has hit the world in waves, albeit very powerful waves. What started with the suffragette movement in the 1900s has now evolved into something much larger.
While our predecessors fought for tangible and measurable things like the right to vote, right to abortion, equal representation and political, legal and professional equity, we modern-day feminists fight for social, cultural and systemic equity.
And how does one really measure these things? While it’s easy to quantify the outcome of things like getting a bill passed or advocating for equal rights, it really comes down to individual discernment for struggles with a social inclination. Hence, while first and second wave feminists sought tangible outcomes, their comrades today are opposing much more nuanced behaviour. How must someone gauge whether a man is misogynistic or fair in promoting a male over a female for a particular role? The horizon on this remains foggy and must be tackled on an ad hoc basis and evaluating the available facts.
The second issue is one which not just our country, but the entire world grapples with - intersectionality. Originally coined by American Professor, Kimberle Crenshaw, the term intersectional feminism is defined as
“A prism for seeing the way in which various forms of inequality often operate together and exacerbate each other.”
Intersectionality is the study of intersecting social identities such as caste, class, race, ability, gender etc. and the related systems of oppression. Oppression is a multilayered evil, one that overlaps and intersects based on one’s identity and cannot be treated as a sum of the parts that make it up. For instance, disabled women not only face the brunt of their gender, but also the problems in lieu of being disabled. As they face three times the likelihood of being sexually assaulted in their lives, their battles seem to remain consigned to oblivion.
As Audre Lorde said -
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives.”
Feminism in India, much like most other movements, has become a representation of the struggles of the urban and the upper-class (moving more towards nuanced discriminations) and not the masses. The predicaments of the underprivileged, who still face much graver challenges are conveniently overlooked. To be a feminist is to not exclusively address the issues of the upper-class and the privileged, as has historically been the case in the country. We must also account for struggles that may look nothing like our own, situations where we might actually discover that we are a part of the problem. Intersectionality brings to light a powerful realization, as Shiri Eisner aptly states -
“It means understanding that different kinds of oppression are interlinked, and that one can't liberate only one group without the others. It means acknowledging kyriarchy and intersectionality - the fact that along different axes, we're all both oppressed and oppressors, privileged and disprivileged.”
A shift is required from fighting just patriarchy to fighting all kinds of tyranny - even those that may not affect us personally.
The third and perhaps largest challenge proves to be that of a deep-rooted patriarchal conditioning in the minds of not just men, but also women. Aptly termed internalised misogyny i.e. an inherent prejudice that women bear towards themselves or other women, it is a phenomenon dangerous to feminism. Growing up in and around patriarchal families, institutions and even the Government, has resulted in many women believing that there exists the perfect archetype of the woman. More often than not, having seen males assume the role of deciding, acting and even thinking in their families, while women took the back seat by default, has been impeding the cause of feminism. The world asks for empirical evidence to prove that women are as competent as men in professional fields, while conveniently ignoring to account for the generations of conditioning that has percolated into the female DNA.
Subsequently, while many women today realize that maybe they aren’t the weaker sex, that maybe they do not need to be told what to do, how to dress or conduct themselves, accepting feminism whole-heartedly remains a challenge because of its unfamiliarity. However uncomfortable patriarchy might be, it feels familiar, and human beings tend to avoid crossing over to the other side, however green the grass may seem. Feminism and true emancipation thus remains a path that they only step on hesitantly, and possibly not comprehensively.
As a large part of the country still fights for basic gender equality, the journey that this movement must take is from cultural and social emancipation to personal and individualistic freedom of expression, inclusive of the struggles of those not as privileged as us. On This journey, we battle many issues - from overcoming our personal biases to mustering up the strength to actually go out and be the change. What is clear though, is that there exists no defined manifesto of feminism - it is simply a victory over inequitable thoughts that must manifest in actions.
We’ll get there, slowly and maybe not at the same collective pace, but the least that the world around us can do is acknowledge the fact that we’re all still familiarising ourselves with these uncharted territories while unlearning what we’ve been taught for generations. Until we summit that learning curve, we need everyone, male or female, to stop denouncing the movement and instead, passionately embrace it, learn with us and hope for a day that the concept of gender inequality becomes truly archaic.
A good place to start understanding feminism is Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We should all be feminists or Nivedita Menon’s Seeing like a feminist.