By Sukalpa Bhattacharjee
Although the celebrations centred around International Women’s Day every year often get reduced to tokenism of sorts, (including something like the writing of this article) ,it has its own symbolic value considering the history of The International Women’s Day. We owe our tribute to the German Socialist Luise Zietz who was inspired largely by the American socialists and who proposed the establishment of an annual International Woman’s Day. She was also the first woman to occupy a leading party post in Germany. Her position was endorsed by fellow socialist and later communist leader Clara Zetkin who pioneered the cause of equal opportunities and women’s suffrage and developed the social-democratic women’s movement in Germany from 1891 to 1917. What is significant is that both came from humble backgrounds and both belonged to the in-between phase of the First Wave and the Second wave of the Feminist movement which sought to address the issue of women’s rights and participation in the political sphere as well as an understanding of the personal as political. The strict demarcation of women’s lives into the private (home) and the public (world), which fixed women to gender roles and stereotypes actually became the sites for women’s social and sexual exploitation. However, the first two waves of the Feminist movement have been able to redeem the position of women from the nexus of the private and the public, showing how the acquiring of rights in the public spaces inform and condition the plight of women in the private space as well.
I have been wondering over the theme of The International Women’s Day 2017, “Be Bold For Change: Take Action to Make a Difference”. We know that women cannot be classified into a homogenous category. Just as other categories of identity constructions, a woman’s identity is also complicated by its intersections with class, caste race and ethnicities. Therefore we need to examine the (im)possibilities of realizing the themes of The International Women’s Day 2017 (or theme of other years for that matter) by contextualizing it in the light of various shades of womanhood. Women and boldness is an oxymoron, which is to say that historically womanhood has been conceptualized as that which is essentially opposed to boldness. Being bold through speaking and writing in the public sphere just as being expressive of one’s own wants and desires in the private or domestic space, has been considered to be blasphemous by patriarchal societal norms. However, such a construction of womanhood through a denial of boldness has been appropriated through the long struggle of women’s movements inspired by radical ideologies. Women since the 19th century started appropriating the space of speaking and writing indicating an autonomous space for the celebration of female creativity. As available in Feminist Studies women have also recreated the space of language by appropriating male models of writing and theorizing. So many of our mothers and grandmothers in their own times have been bold and have affected change. Virginia Woolf A Room Of One’s Own (1929) therefore says, “All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn …for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
In the 18th century Mary Wollstonecraft, British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women’s rights and the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects(1792) had argued that women are not naturally inferior to men, but appear to be only because they lack education. In India the self-educated Rassundari Devi in 1876 wrote the first formal autobiography (in Bengali) when autobiographical writing was primarily a male genre. In Assam Chandraprava Saikiani (born on 16 March 1901) who was founder of The All Assam Pradeshik Mahila Samiti, a non -governmental organization is one of the boldest of the women of her times. She was engaged to Dandinath Kalita, an Assamese writer and eventually she conceived. She was ostracized for being a unmarried mother but she continued to fight for her rights and took her son along with her to public meetings. Unrecorded stories of the lives of many bold women are available in popular narratives in other states of Northeast as well.
However it is imperative to problematize the notion of boldness in the light of contemporary discourses. The Fashion industry has popularized the alliterative usage, ‘The Bold and the Beautiful’ drawing on the popular soap opera with the same name. So boldness in the context of corporatized culture industry refers to uninhibited attire and body language demonstrated by women on stage and screen. While the popular gazing spectators before the silver/computer screens would look at these women as bold (and also beautiful by implication), research on the psychological state of women in cinema and porn industries show that they pay a huge price psychologically and on medical grounds for confusing commodification with boldness. How many among them actually feel empowered in celebrating boldness of this kind is a question that needs to be asked. Or is the notion of boldness being re-appropriated by a capitalist culture industry that feeds on the fetishized projection of women?
Again in urban private and public spaces a lot of politics is being played around the notion of boldness (as far as women are concerned) affecting change in society. While women have come a long way in claiming their space in profession and public life contesting and competing with men boldly, in the private sphere of home (or community) and family there is still a self imposed silence on issues of equal sharing of unpaid domestic labour and domestic violence. Most educated women pretend and live in denial of unequal power structures in the domestic space brushing the dust under the carpet. Being bold in the truest sense refers to taking strong social and ideological positions and articulating it through performative actions such as what Meitei women did in Manipur In July 2004. Despite revised structures of the Rape Laws in India one is not bold enough to report incidents of rape(marital or otherwise).
While teachers in the institutional spaces of Schools, colleges and Universities deliver lectures on Feminism, Women’s Rights and Empowerment, when actual cases of molestation and sexual harassment happen how many teachers stand by the victims? Just as some parents at home, teachers also prevent the girls from filing their complaints or live in denial when witnesses are needed. Most institutions and campuses of higher learning exhibit a collaboration of masculinist agenda to use protective machineries in favour of perpetrators. Will we be ever bold enough for change then?
The author teaches English at North Eastern Hill University Shillong. [email protected]