26 Gender debate in India

Anindita Chakravarthy

Introduction

Gender is present everywhere, although it ’s presence remains largely unnoticed. We take gender for granted in our daily life. Gender roles are internalized to such an extent that their apparent ‘normality’ or ‘naturalness’ is never questioned but taken for granted. As a result, many gendered processes in the social order are viewed as ‘natural’ rather than oppressive. For example, a large majority of girl children are denied an education due to the notion that women’s primary position is within the household and therefore they don’t require to be educated. Such a view takes for granted the notion that women’s only roles are those of the mother and wife, and denies them an existence as individuals with their own aspirations and desires. Likewise, the belief that men have to be the breadwinners and are solely responsible for their families is so internalized that anyone who does not conform this to idea is ridiculed to a great extent. Are these roles really a part of human nature or are they culturally learned? If they are culturally learned, can they be unlearned? What exactly does gender pertain to? Is it the biological characteristics of a male and female person or is it something more than that? What does gender inequality mean and what are the various ideologies that challenge gender inequality?

This module seeks to introduce some of the basic concepts related to gender and some of the theories that challenge gender inequality in society-namely feminist theories. Through an understanding of the various strands of feminist theories, this module seeks to reveal how these theories have affected the understanding of gender relations within the Indian society. Some major social institutions such as family, caste system and the state have been chosen to analyze how the dynamics of gender are at work and how these dynamics benefit one gender at the cost of the other. The module seeks to familiarize the reader with the multiple ways that gender dynamics are at work in our everyday lives, and gendered relations are an everyday reality rather than a theoretical abstraction. In doing so, the module intends to give the reader a deeper understanding of power and authority in relation to gender and how they intersect with other strongholds of power such as caste and class and create the reality of the Indian society.

1.  Sex and Gender

According to Ann Oakley, the term ‘sex’ generally refers to the biological characteristics by which human beings are characterized as ‘male’ or ‘female’, gender refers to the social and socio-psychological attributes by which human beings are characterized as ‘ masculine’ or ‘ feminine’. However, in recent years, this view of seeing sex as strictly biologically determined and gender as culturally learned has been criticized by queer theorists such as Judith Butler, who argue instead that we should view both sex and gender as socially constructed products (Butler 1990). Not only is gender a purely social construction that lacks a fixed ‘essence’, but the human body itself is subject to social forces which shape and alter it in various ways (Giddens 2009). Individuals may often choose to construct and reconstruct their bodies as they please- ranging from exercise and dieting to plastic surgeries and sex-change operations.

2.  Gender Roles and Socialization

From the moment a child is born, when the sex of the child is ascertained, a process of gender socialization begins. The girl child is dressed in pink and the boy child in blue; Barbie dolls are gifted to the girls while toy guns are reserved for the boys; girls are taught to cook and boys to drive vehicles; the list is endless. As the child grows up, ideas about male traits and female traits are grasped and imbibed through various agencies of socialization, the important ones being the immediate family, school, peer group and media. Notions of femininity and masculinity become central to the ways in which they form their identities. The girl learns that her top priorities are to get married and rear children, while the boy learns from a young age that the responsibility of fending for a family will fall upon him and thus makes decisions about education/career with this in mind. The girl learns that the preferred feminine traits are those of beauty, patience, obedience, chastity, and a generally passive demeanor. The boy learns that preferred macho behavior includes aggression, power, unrestrained sexual behavior and a general demeanor of assertiveness. Thus the roles they play are usually in regard to these expected norms of behavior. In other words, a gender role refers to the social expectations arising from conceptions surrounding gender and the behavioral expression of these, including forms of speech, mannerisms, conduct and gesture. Gender roles are predominantly considered within a family context as well as within society in general and may collectively be referred to as gender stereotypes. Gender stereotypes represent society’s collective knowledge of customs, myths, ideas, religions, and art, and it is from this framework of knowledge that they form beliefs about individuals and groups.

3. Feminism

Feminist theory is a generalized, wide-ranging system of ideas that seek to challenge the traditional conceptions of femininity and gender. Theorizing about gender as such does not require a feminist perspective. While many 19 th and 20th Century founding fathers of sociology had something to say about gender, most of it can hardly be called feminist. In order to be considered a feminist theory, in addition to or instead of a focus on gender as difference, a theory must recognize gender as a system of inequality; assume that it is a changeable rather than necessary feature of human societies, and full-heartedly advocate a commitment to a gender equitable system (Chafetz 2006). Feminist theories in relation to gender inequality contrast markedly with one another. They each seek to explain this inequality through a wide range of social processes which include sexism, patriarchy and capitalism. While the distinction between various strands of feminism have never been definite, this distinction is important as the political demands made by each strand vary to quite an extent.

3.1 Liberal Feminism

Liberal feminism holds the view that if society is to achieve gender equality, then it must provide women with the same political rights and economic opportunities as well as the same education that men enjoy. Two important proponents of this doctrine, John Stuart Mill and his partner Harriet Taylor argued that society’s double standards hurt women. They believed that the intellectual difference between men and women was the result of men ’s higher social position and education. While Taylor did not contest predominant assumptions of male and female roles in society, she pushed women to earn income outside the home. She advised women to hire servants to do all the housework. Taylor ’s argument pushed women’s entrance into the public sphere. However, paradoxically, Mill argued that despite education, women would choose child and family over career.

Liberal feminists argued for the formation of a society in which each individual can act as a free and responsible agent and be able to live the life that is most suitable for him or her. Liberal feminism’s emphasis on freedom of choice and equality between the sexes, while pushing for change, is more reformist in its agenda than revolutionary, as it does not question the basic roots of inequality and challenge the present sex/gender system itself.

3.2 Radical Feminism

The basic argument of radical feminism is that men are responsible for and benefit from the exploitation of women (Giddens 2009). The analysis of patriarchy-the systematic domination of women by men- is of central concern to this branch of feminism. Patriarchy is perceived to be a universal phenomenon that has existed trans- historically and trans-culturally. The basis of radical feminism is their analyses of the interlinkages between sex and power. While ‘sex’ had always been discussed, either overtly or covertly, it was not until radical feminism’s outrageous declaration that “the personal is political”, that women’s sexuality became the subject of much political analyses. The main tenets of radical feminism can be stated thus:

• That, women were, historically, the first oppressed group.
• That women’s oppression is the most widespread, existing nearly in every society.
• That women’s oppression is the deepest and hardest form of oppression to eradicate and cannot be removed by other social changes such as the abolition of class society (Tong 2009).

Unlike the liberal feminists, radical feminists demand an overthrow of the system of patriarchy rather than demanding reformatory changes within the system. They believe this can happen through a basic consciousness raising among women which will lead to each woman recognizing her own value and strength, thereby rejecting patriarchal ideals of womanhood (submissive, dependant, chaste) and instead establish ties with other women, strengthening sisterhood of trust, support, appreciation, etc. Once such a sisterhood is established, it would make it easier for women to confront any aspect of patriarchy that they come across. Furthermore, they encourage a level of separatism, with women withdrawing into women-run businesses, households, communities and so on.

3.3 Marxist/Socialist Feminism

The argument made by classical Marxist feminists is that the unequal class structure is the basis of women’s oppression rather than sexism per se. They claim that in order to understand women’s oppression, one needs to analyze the links between women ’s work status and women’s self-image. When the initial site of production was the family, women were in control of their lives. However, when there was a shift in the site of production to private property and inheritance, power shifted from the hands of women to men. Contemporary Marxist feminists also focus on women’s work related concerns. Central to their analysis is the way in which the institution of family is connected to capitalism. Since the emergence of industrialization and the capitalist mode of production, the notion of productive work (paid labour) is regarded as much more important than unproductive work (unpaid, domestic labour). Women’s work was trivialized as not real work and thus given very low salaries and low status on the job hierarchies.

Socialist feminism developed due to the dissatisfaction with the gender-blind character of Marxist thought. Socialist feminists argue that although Marxists feminists explained how capitalism caused the separation of the workplace from homestead, they failed to explain why capitalism assigned women to the homestead and men to the workplace. They emphasized on the need to analyze how capitalism interacts with patriarchy to oppress women. According to Alison Jaggar, capitalism oppresses women as workers, but patriarchy oppresses women as women. In this way, oppression affects both her activity and her identity. She theorized that women were constantly alienated in ways that men were not. According to her, women faced alienation in three broad spheres-sexuality, motherhood, and intellectuality. In the first, she becomes alienated from herself, i.e., her body is merely an object for men to enjoy and behold. Jaggar also suggested that motherhood can be an alienating experience for women, especially because more often than not, questions regarding when to have a child, how many children to have, how to raise them and so on are not decided by the women themselves, but by the family and the larger societal pressures. Finally, Jaggar explains how women are alientated in the intellectual sphere as well. Women are constantly made to feel unsure of themselves, unworthy of expressing their opinions and ideas in public because their place they are told is in the domestic sphere. This is due to the fact that it is men and not women who have set the thought and discourse.

3.4  Postmodern Feminism

Postmodernist feminism incorporates ideas from two distinct sets of perspectives- postmodernism and feminism. Postmodern feminists reject enlightenment notions, especially universalism, human nature, and sociopolitical progress and build their argument by problematizing the very notion ‘women’. They argue that there is no single female nature any more than there is a single, unitary human nature throughout human history and across human history. They also critique the exaggerated claims of modernist scholars on issues of objectivity and generalizability. In its stead, they offer techniques such as deconstruction, decentering and a focus on difference and multiplicity of truths rather than a unitary notion of truth which erases out marginal identities. Drawing heavily from Foucault’s works on knowledge and power, Judith Butler suggests that there is a need to deconstruct what we know to be ‘truth’ about gender and see it for the social construction that it actually is.

3.5 Black Feminism

Black feminism grew out of the dissatisfaction arising out of the commonly held view that women all over the world share a common, universal experience of oppression. Those who proposed this idea were generally middle-class, urban, white feminists writing about the problems of ‘women’ as a homogenous, universal category. They began writing and theorizing about women’s experience of subordination by patriarchy, from their own subjective experience. But this essentialism of oppression as a universal category, which these feminists imposed on all women across the world, itself was problematic. They largely ignored the different and layered subjective experiences of oppression by different women, in terms of class, race, region and ethnicity. Black feminists argue that while all women potentially experience oppression on the basis of gender, women are, however, differentially oppressed by the varied intersections of other social arrangements such as race, sexuality, class, etc. bell hooks argues that while white feminists like Susan Brown Miller do write about sexual exploitation and violation of black women, they treat it merely as a result of the ongoing socio-historical context of slavery. They neglect the fact that it led to the devaluation of black women even in post-slavery America; that sexism and racism act hand in hand in the sexual exploitation of black women.

3.6 Dalit Feminism

The women’s movement in India initially concerned itself with tackling violence against women, but their focus was on the ways violence affected the lives of middle class, upper-caste women, because most of the early Indian feminists came from this section of society. These early feminists ignored intersections of caste and religion and prioritized the identity of woman above other categories. As in the Western feminist movement which largely ignored the issue of race and thereby left out black women from the movement, the early Indian women’s movement by ignoring the intersections of caste and class, neglected the majority of dalit women whose experience of oppression differed vastly from those of upper caste women. For example, because of their caste background, dalit women were oppressed by men and upper-caste women. As in the case with white feminism, the problem with early Indian feminism was the universalization of the category of women. According to Dr. B.R. Ambedkar, the champion of the dalit movement in India, as long as the caste system remains, women will continue to be subordinated as the system of caste is inextricably linked to gender oppression. He sees an organic link between the struggle against the caste system and the struggle for the liberation of women (Pardeshi 1998). Thus the dalit feminist movement is a struggle for the annihilation of the caste system as much as it is a struggle for the annihilation of patriarchal system.

4.  Gender in Indian Society

This section specifically looks at how gender plays a role in different social institutions in India, namely the caste system, the family, occupational setting and finally the state. These institutions were chosen to demonstrate the wide range of institutions that both shape and are shaped by the category of gender. It ends with a brief note on the Women’s Movement in India and how it contributed to improving conditions of gender relations in various spheres of social life.

4.1 Caste and Gender

In India, gender has to be located and understood within a class-caste framework. . Uma Chakravarti contends that class, caste and gender are systems which are inextricably linked together. The caste system, which is the traditional system of stratification in Indian society, is based on notions of purity and pollution. It functions on the premise that it is through women that caste purity is ensured and maintained and therefore women’ s sexuality is strictly controlled and regulated through the institution of marriage. Women were the crucial elements for maintaining the boundaries of these closed groups. Chakravarty describes this interlinkage of caste and gender as brahminical patriarchy, wherein patriarchal codes govern the caste system which shapes, and is in turn shaped by gender practices. The set of codes for women differ according to the status of the caste group in the hierarchy of castes, although all women were controlled with the most stringent control over their sexuality. “The safe-guarding of the caste structure is achieved through the highly restricted movement of women… Women are regarded as gateways-literally points of entrance into the caste system.” (Chakravarti 1993). The purity of women is essential for maintaining the purity of the caste group and therefore women’s sexuality is strictly channelized into the acceptable institutions of marriage and motherhood; wherein both, caste purity is maintained and patrilineal succession is ensured. If these traditional structures break down and miscegeny (the mixing of castes) takes place, the brahminical texts view this to be Kaliyuga, a period of great moral degradation characterized by broken families, corrupt women and mixing of castes. To prevent this from occurring, women’s subordination was institutionalized in a variety of ways. One the one hand, coercion was exercised by her family, the state and religious authorities. On the other hand, an ideology of consent was propagated. This included spreading ideas such as pativrata or the chaste wife; and women’s duty to their husbands (stridharma) as opposed to giving in to their innate nature (striswabhava) which was promiscuous and fickle minded. By creating an ideological hegemony of consent, brahminical patriarchy could ensure that women remain closely guarded and therefore maintain the caste system.

4.2 Gender and Family

The family has been typically regarded as an institution central to women ’s lives and as a site of production of gender inequality. Several schools of thought have analyzed gender relations within the family in different ways. The functionalist approach views the family as essential for the stability of society by socializing children and stabilizing adult personalities. According to Talcott Parsons, the man played the instrumental role while the wife played the expressive role. He believed that it is essential to keep these roles separate to ensure the stability of the occupational structure and of kinship organization (Walby 1990). According to feminist approaches, the institution of family is directly responsible for the subordination of women due to unequal power relations stemming from the sexual division of labour, coupled with the emphasis on motherhood as the singular priority in a woman’s life. The Marxist feminist approach argued that women’s relegation to the domestic sphere is essential for the capitalist system to prosper as the creation of surplus value would not be possible were it not for women taking care of the household and rearing the children.

In Indian society, the socio-cultural importance of the institutions of marriage and family cannot be overemphasized. Often viewed as the marker of a stable and traditional society, the falling apart of a family is immediately juxtaposed to ‘modern’ society with no value system. In recent years, feminists have seriously challenged the imagination of family as a safe place for women by calling out the highly unequal power dynamics within the family. In a patriarchal system, which unquestioningly places men in positions of authority; the women in the household often have to battle for some amount of power, which is gained with respect to their positions with men. Thus, is the classic example of mother -in-law/daughter-in-law conflicts where they both attempt to gain the approval of their son/husband relatively in order to gain a certain advantage over the other. Because of the strong preference for the male child in society, women with sons carry a higher status in the family hierarchy than women with daughters. While there has been a lot of sociological enquiry into the family, as constituted by the husband, wife and children with rules of behavior and role allocations, the term household, although often used interchangeably, is mostly used in economic and statistical analyses (Jain and Banerjee 2008). By using household as the unit of analysis, Jain and Banerjee explain how economic relations also play an important role within the private sphere and reveal how the household essentially is a microcosm of the larger society in terms of unequal distribution of economic power, benefits related to access to resources, capital and gender.

4.3 Women and Work

Three main questions are asked when understanding gendered processes of work: Why do women engage in paid work less than men do? Why do women get paid less? Why do women engage in different jobs from men? (Walby 1990)

Several schools of thought approach these questions differently. The functionalist analyses of work attribute the lesser number of women entering the labour force to their primary position within the family. As they are viewed primarily as caretakers of children and the elderly, they are expected to stay within the confines of the household and take care of domestic work. Here, the notions of productive work (paid labour) and unproductive work (unpaid, domestic labour) must be looked at critically and challenged. There is a need to recognize that language is an important component of ideological structures. The notion has lead to a process of ‘devaluation’ of women’s work within the household which includes cooking, cleaning, nurturing and child-rearing.

A liberal approach towards understanding gender inequality in the workplace seeks to analyze the cultural and microstructural features of corporations and describes how the management ethic is very masculine in nature, and how different slots in the job hierarchy have gender specific meanings attached to them which are most often unfavourable towards women (Walby 1990). This phenomenon is come to be called the glass ceiling. The Federal Glass Ceiling Commission (1995) defined glass ceiling as the ‘artificial barriers to the advancement of women and minorities. These barriers reflect ‘discrimination, – ‘A deep line of demarcation between those who prosper and those left behind’. In other words, the term glass ceiling refers to the phenomenon wherein gender (or other) disadvantages are stronger at the top of the professional hierarchy than at lower levels. It is a distinctively gender, racial and caste phenomenon. It reflects a job inequality which is unexplained by a person’s past qualification or achievements. As a result of this, women are concentrated in lower earning industries and organizations and lack representation in managerial and executive positions. Since the glass ceiling phenomena is not overt but subtle, it is a challenge to address it through legislation. However, one still needs formal laws to ensure equal opportunities for both women and men.

While the class ceiling is in reference to the organized sector, women working in the unorganized sector face a different set of problems. To begin with, the difference between these two sectors is stark. The organized sector is characterized by relatively stable and safe employment, incremental wages that can meet minimum standards of living and access to basic services and welfare measures. The informal sector on the other hand, is characterized by a workforce that has little formal training and is often illiterate. Secondly, this force has no source of income apart from the earnings of their own labour. Coupled with this is the extremely low wages they receive for their laborious efforts, which renders it necessary for them to use all possible members of family to add to the income, including women and children. Lastly, due to the low wages and abysmal work conditions, informal sector labour has very low status in society. In India, this low status is particularly pronounced, due to the fact that the majority of these workers belong to the backward or dalit castes. The caste system, which is based on notions of purity and pollution, is at work here, where the labour often involves strenuous work which goes with sweat, filth and other such bodily features which are markers of inferiority and subordination in Indian society. These markers also damage the health of these workers.

An important feature of the informal sector is that the majority of workers are women and children. They continue to face discrimination and marginalization both subtle and blatant and do not share the fruits of development equally. Ignorance, traditional bound attitudes, illiteracy, seasonal nature of employment, heavy physical work of different types, lack of a comprehensive legislation to cover these workers in informal sector and competition in employment result in deprival of appropriate wages. Wages in the unorganized sector are arbitrarily fixed, often without regard to the minimum wage legislations, which adversely affect the income of the wage workers in general, and women workers in particular. In an Indian context, the intersection of class, caste and gender put these women at a very vulnerable position, at risk of physical and sexual violence every day.

4.4 Gender and State

What is the relationship between gender and state in India? According to Nivedita Menon (2009), two distinctive trajectories have been made by the term ‘gender’ in India. The first one develops from the politics of caste and sexuality and seeks to destabilize the prevalent gender norms of society. The second trajectory is linked to the state through its policies involving gender and development, wherein the concept of gender is domesticated and come to be understood as a synonym for women. Before independence, the state’s attempts to amend gender-based discrimination in society involved legislation (through the colonial government) towards banning sati, dowry, raising the age of marriage, etc. Post independence, gender issues were for the most part neglected in the face of larger issues such as development and nation building. However, in the 1970s, owing to the growing presence of the Women’s Movement and a series of land-mark events which included the report Towards Equality (1974) by the Committee on the Status of Women which highlighted the deplorable extent of existing gender inequality; the International Decade of Women; and the report Shramshakti (1988); the state was pressured into acting for the betterment of this marginalized section (Kosambi 1999).

Consequently, the Government of India set up the Ministry of Human Resource Development which included the Department of Women and Child Development in it. Through them, the state began schemes and programmes directed towards teaching and training of skills to women in various sectors such as agriculture, handicrafts, fisheries and poultry. Another important state intervention was the introduction of microcredit programmes to poor women in the informal sector of the economy and the promotion of self-help groups (ibid). By equating ‘gender’ with ‘women’, the state has “mainstreamed gender”, making it just another component of the development project (Menon 2009). Rather than challenge traditional conceptions of gender and gender stereotypes, the state’s narrow approach towards gender has reinforced traditional norms. Thus, the belief that women are responsible with money, leads to the ‘gender’-linked microcredit schemes. The stereotype that tribal women are good at handling natural resources makes them beneficiaries of the Joint Forest Management programmes. While these interventions do make superficial changes in the lives of these women, it does not challenge the roots of inequality which stems from sexual division of labour.

Another area of contention between the state and gender is over the question of population control and the national demographic. The steeply declining sex ratio has ensured that a lot of attention has been given towards women and prevailing conditions of gender inequality. However the attention is not on the quality of lives of these women, but on the reproductive health of these women stemming from a concern over the stability of the patriarchal family and the larger nation as a whole. Thus, one of the schemes announced by the government in 2007 was the opening of centres where people can abandon unwanted daughters instead of aborting them; clearly revealing their interest in preventing female foeticide is solely to combat a sex ratio that could be detrimental to the nation’s stability.

In addition to this, the increasingly neoliberal mode of governance finds itself caught between offering political, economic and cultural rights to women as citizens of the nation and between maintaining the traditional structure of the family and community. An inevitable gap, therefore exists between the liberal ‘state’ commitment to gender equality on the one hand and to the patriarchal family, male property rights and the free market on the other (Chaudary 1999).

4.5 Women’s Movement in India

During the colonial rule and the freedom struggle, there were an outstanding number of women who participated in the nationalist movement and through it they created awareness about their individual rights. However different streams of thought within this movement had varying, often contentious images of identities for women (Agnihotri and Mazumdar 2005). After gaining independence, the Indian constitution assured political, economic and cultural rights for women. Ironically, there soon developed a conflict between these ‘new rights’ and the traditional value system of a longstanding patriarchal social order. Due to the inferior position of women in such an order, and the state’s newfound emphasis on the development project, women gradually started fading away from the political scenario. This led to the disintegration of the women’s movement and the fading of women’s question from the public sphere.

However, this movement was revived in the 70s owing to the socio-political climate of that period which included the crisis of the state and government in the 70s resulting in the emergency. In addition to this, the post-emergency upsurge in favour of civil rights and the burgeoning of women’s organizations in the early 1980s also created conditions for the revival of the women’s movement in India (ibid). One of the first issues that the women ’s movement looked into was into gendered violence. The cry against the increasing incidence of violence against women became the rallying point for the movement. They scrutinized the structural violence in society which was perpetuated by the institutions of the state, community, family and society at large. Some of the other areas which they intervened in included communalism, education, female foeticide, food security and dowry harassment, to name a few. Although their work has made significant changes in both legislation and in creating awareness about gender inequality, there is still a long way to go. The movement has been subject to several internal conflicts centering on what women’s issues are and

References Web Links:

• ¨ Menon, Nivedita. “Sexuality, caste, governmentality: contests over ‘gender’ in India.”Feminist Review, 2009: 94 112.http://www.academia.edu/8293776/sexuality_caste_governmentality_contests_over_gender_ in_India
• ¨ Turner, Elen. Reconciling Feminist and Anti-Caste Analyses in Studies of Indian Dalit-Bahujan Women. March 2014. http://intersections.anu.edu.au/issue34/turner.htm
• ¨ Rustagi, Preet. “Significance of Gender-related Development Indicators: An Analysis of Indian States.” Indian Journal of Gender Studies, 2004: 291-343. file:///C:/Users/SAMSUNG/Downloads/significance_of_gender_development_indicators_pr eet.pdf
• ¨ Chakravarti, Uma. Of Meta-Narratives And ‘Master’ Paradigms: Sexuality And The Reification Of Women In Early India. file:///C:/Users/SAMSUNG/Downloads/GenderedTransitionsMONOGRAPH%20(1).pdf ¨ Gender Violence in India. Chennai: Prajnya, 2010. http://www.prajnya.in/gvr10.pdf

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