On International Women’s Day: Come Free Us From That Cage In Your Mind
Among the talking heads on television the other day, I chanced upon a visage from long ago. A quick consultation with the school fraternity convinces me that shorn of that teenage croak in the throat and factoring in a middle-aged girth, the apparition on the screen was indeed the debater who had trounced me in an inter-school competition. The home team losing the motion was not the only irony of the evening. The real irony was that a panel of judges, comprising mostly women (and independent, working women, teaching other women-in-the making) had thwarted – nay dismissed - ardent speeches for the Women’s Liberation Movement!
Way back in 1975, a year the United Nations had declared as the International Women’s Year – women were won over by little adults-in-the-making, who argued that the feminist surge around the globe had little or no relevance in India. Women, the boys’ school representatives argued, always had equal rights as men in India. The Indian Constitution guaranteed it. Indeed, women in India never had to agitate for the right to vote or the right to work. There were also some stray arguments about the plight of children in nuclear homes that had “working mothers”. Most of all though, the little men of the day (who have now inherited the earth) were appalled at the reports streaming in from the Western World of women burning their inner-wear!
To be fair to our opponents of the day, the Women’s Liberation Movement, the first flickers of which were probably ignited at a garment workers’ strike in a New York factory in 1908, had indeed risen to a crescendo of rabid feminism by the mid-1970s. Somewhere along the road, the protests of women workers against discrimination at the workplace gathered steam. By 1911, women were also demanding the right to vote, hold public office and to have vocational training. International Women’s Day was celebrated on March 19 that year in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland, when a million men (yes, them too) and women took to the streets.
The 1960s saw sporadic eruptions of Civil Rights Movements in the Western World, where the post - World War II woman was already firmly ensconced at the workplace. Along with equal pay, women were demanding maternity leave and protection from sexual harassment and domestic violence. By the 1970s Women’s Libbers had descended or risen (depending on your preferred angle of the prism) to rabid feminism. French philosopher, author and activist Simone De Beauvoir, whose 1949 book, The Second Sex, had raised enough dust to mandate a mellowed reprint in later years, was in the thick of the Women’s Liberation Movement. So was Australian feminist, Germaine Greer, who also managed to rake up a storm in 1970 with her book, The Female Eunuch.
Children of the 1970s in India, accustomed to “women’s compartments” in trains, seats reserved for women in public places and knowledge of universal suffrage, could scarcely have emoted with a woman’s need for self-expression and right to social choices along with equal pay at the workplace. The wild-eyed “Bra-Burners” of the West, must have come through as Banshees in the black-and-white photographs in newspapers and magazines to boys who were just about growing a down on the upper lip.
Even though I did not win a trophy that evening, a school senior who heard me, referred me to a larger forum. I had to represent my age-group at a debate on the status of women, where speakers would include college-goers and adults, including some of my own school-teachers. The debate had been organised by a women’s group that was known to send tinned food to Indian soldiers at the war front and teach skills like stitching and embroidery to women they identified as destitute. I remember my mother returning home from some of these missions, flushed from that unaccustomed walk in the sun and that sense of purpose. Her last engagement was the day her commitment kept her away from home beyond her children’s school hours.
My mother could not hear me speak that day. She stayed home to make dinner. I did see my father in the audience, though, and so veered miles away from the Western woman’s ardour for self-expression and her compulsions thereof, to send symbols of feminism like lingerie up in flames. I chose another tack. True liberation of the woman, I remember saying, would depend on the “emancipation of the mind”. I think I did see my father’s eyes roll and some of the adults who spoke after me did refer to the phrase and wonder about it.
It was, I think obvious even then, that I was canvassing for the emancipation of the mind of the man and not the woman. I was cowering behind rhetorics because the forum did not quite seem right to express the anguish of teenagers witness every day to women being weighed as commodities on the streets. Even in the mega-metropolises, the only women who ventured out alone were those compelled to do menial work at factory or construction sites and homes.
Women or adolescents who did dare to traverse the thoroughfares of India in the 1970s were subject to wolf whistles, cat-calls, snippets of Hindi film ditties, or simply lusty baying of names of cine divas of the day, like Hema Malini and Leena Chandravarkar. A colleague back in New Delhi after a sojourn in London tells me that in the year 2018, she had a similar experience walking through Southhall. Only this time, the diva being evoked was Madhuri Dixit.
Four decades later, universal suffrage is universal and women do get equal pay for equal work almost everywhere. In India, the “working mother”, or the woman colleague is no longer an aberration, but the rule. Women still have reserved compartments in trains and Metro Rail services, but do not baulk at occupying seats elsewhere. The ranks of women have swelled in engineering and medical colleges and women’s associations reaching out to deprived segments of society take on far more than needlework.
I think women have got where they have because the men in their homes and in their lives have let them. Women today, as then, are about as free as the other half of the population (the bearded and moustachioed half) let them be. Women are still subject to harassment at the workplace or violence at home, where minds of the men have remained unevolved.
On March 5 a thousand women and men, of varied religions and political alignments walked shoulder to shoulder through central London to congregate on Trafalgar Square to celebrate the centenary of universal suffrage in England. The marchers, who were also celebrating the International Women’s Day and calling for gender equality, included both women and men. So on the International Women’s Day, what we really need, are more men on our bandwagon. Come free us from that cage in your mind and the world will be a better place tomorrow.
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