Self: 5. The assumptions of post-feminism

We might assume that globalisation opens the door to a wide spectrum of rights common to women around the world being rectified: political, economic, cultural and religious. Global sharing has its hazards, however. While it adds positively to most knowledge platforms, with regard to diversity, stereotypical assumptions continue to get in the way.

The history of feminism documents women’s social has development progress occurring in three waves. These have brought to focus or addressed various issues:

1.  Women’s right to vote during nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

2.  Women’s liberation in social, cultural, legal and political equality, beginning from the 1960s.

3.  Continuation and correction of the second wave, arising from the 1980s.

The present is sometimes described as the post-feminist age. To some this means feminist movements are now irrelevant; all their goals, from women's suffrage to gender equality have been achieved.

To others post-feminism is the period of critical backlash. The monolithic ideation of the second wave, they say, was a mistake. Women in non-Western regions would agree, because the feminist ‘history’ fails to acknowledge their existence. The record chronicles the historic footsteps of “white, middle-class, and educated” women.

Due to the paucity of documents in other parts of the world, the universal past is referred to as “proto-feminism”. The term implies that before the West took charge, women’s progress has been rudimentary at best.

The point is other civilizations pre-date Western cultures by millennia, i.e., thousands of years. Their societies and people have been evolving through time, and surely, advancements do not emerge only from the West, even among women!

In fact, some evidences have been gathered that in social status, women have not always been secondary to men. Matriarchal societies were prevalent in Asia and Africa about 5,000 years ago. Then women had ascendant positioning, whether religious, social or political.

Consequent to invasions, colonization and newer cultural impositions, there was downfall. Patriarchy’s hostile domination through subsequent millennia ensured the continuance of their lowered status. More recently, racism coupled with sexism, pitted women against other women to further sink their social positions.

 

In colonial India in the 1880s, for example, the Ilbert Bill sought to bring English and Indian magistrates at par. Conflict flared when the expat English insisted on their superiority to the ‘natives’. 

As Wikipedia relates the story:

English women who opposed the bill further argued that Bengali women, who they stereotyped as "ignorant", are neglected by their men, and that Bengali babu should therefore not be given the right to judge cases involving English women. Bengali women who supported the bill responded by claiming that they were more educated than the English women opposed to the bill, and pointed out that more Indian women had academic degrees than British women did at the time, alluding to the fact that the University of Calcutta became one of the first universities to admit female graduates to its degree programmes in 1878, before any of the British universities had later done the same.

Ethnic distrusts perceived so long ago may have lessened today, but they have not been eradicated.  Tensions persistently underlie cultural specificity. Perhaps we perceive its influence in USA at present where, halfway through Obama’s presidential term, the issue of birtherism continues to occupy national attention. 

Besides, in Western regions, knowledge must base on empirical evidence to be acceptable. In its absence, all claims made are suspect. The rest of the world must toe this line of credibility. We must then also believe that women’s advancements occurred only in UK and USA, and over the last century or so. 

Notwithstanding post-feminism, is equality of gender and race at all possible? Indeed, change initiated at any one point does eventually reach distant shores. Like the impact of a stone hitting the water is not localized, but radiates the influence in ripple effects to all parts of the water-body, knowledge and practice from one part of the globe could relate to another.

One way would be to bridge the culture gaps with “humanity”. Social reformers have done so in the past with super-ordinated objectives. For example, in the reactions to the Contagious Diseases Acts passed in Britain in the 1860s. The legislations empowered police to arrest prostitutes found in ports and army towns within the country and in its colonies. The women were forced into medical examinations for sexually transmitted disease.

Quoting historians, McElroy writes:

No warrant or probable cause was needed … a man whose infamous proposals have been rejected by a girl, may inform the police against her, and on his evidence the girl may be subjected to examination and ruined. A like power would be legally vested in the hands of the brothel-keepers … If the young girl signed papers agreeing to an exam, her agreement was a de facto acknowledgement of prostitution … If the girl refused to sign the papers, she could be held in prison for months.

Men however, were never examined as possible clients. Outraged by the double standards, social reformers initiated the western world’s first feminine revolt. Josephine Butler led a 20-year crusade against this state sanction to male sexual privilege. McElroy writes:

She [Butler] declared that the C.D. Acts were contrary to the Magna Carta and to the constitutional rights of women. Her pamphlet "The Constitution Violated" accused the Acts of suspending habeas corpus for every woman in Britain. In doing so, she accomplished something remarkable: she made middle-class and upper-class women identify with their working counterparts.

The Acts were repealed in Britain in the 1880s, but not in colonial India. Butler carried on her campaign against the “moral wrongs” being perpetrated overseas. She advocated revocation of the Acts - and further, the “robbery and theft” of nations colonized. In her book published in 1887, she wrote:

Suttee, or the burning of Indian widows, has been abolished indeed, as shocking to the moral sense of humanity; but the same Government which with one hand removed these evils, imposed with the other hand the degrading, soul-and-body-murdering system of C. D. Ordinances. … It fastened them [Indian women] down in slavery, it doubled their chains, it stamped them with a deeper degradation than had ever been known before … what a blight it is to the whole womanhood of the world when such a system is allowed to prevail, and to work its deadening and corrupting fruits in the minds of men of all degrees, to sear the moral sense of the whole community, and to render men almost blind to every idea of justice. The question is not difficult to answer in regard to Indian women — whether our government has done more harm than good.

Dr Annie Besant’s social reform radicalism in books she co-authored on birth control, were denounced in Britain as “obscene libel”. She also led the London Match Girls’ Strike in 1888, to protest their appalling work conditions and wages. Thereafter, she arrived in India not as patron or missionary, but a student of religion. She realized she had as much to learn as to teach. 

The Hindu article says:

Dr. Besant studied Hindu Religion and expounded it in a manner which illuminated it and offered it as a practical way of living in modern times. … education had to be wedded to religion, and be graded according to the inner nature of each individual.

Besant’s efforts to transcend the constraints of culture enabled her to become one with the indigenous people. The social reforms she championed through the Theosophical Society in India outshone her achievements back home. 

Women social reformers of the past prove by their works of peaceful protest that it is necessary to identify with diverse groups to understand them. A hands-on approach is required to bridge the existing cultural divides. Perhaps this courage of conviction is missing today, since despite the global connectivity, social ‘revolutions’ tend to become bloody.

Modern assumptions underscore the stereotypes - that differences between cultures are insurmountable, that uniformity abides within homogeneous groups, and especially, that small groups of privileged women render post-feminism irrelevant universally.

References for this post:

   

1. “Annie Besant and India” This Day That Age dated 2^nd October, 1953: hindu.com The Hindu. Oct 02,2003. 
2. “Feminism” wikipedia.org. Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. 19 April 2011. 
3. “Ilbert Bill” wikipedia.org. Wikipedia the free encyclopedia. 10 March 2011. 
4. “Josephine Butler, from ‘Our Indian Fellow Subjects’ (1887)” wwnorton.com THE NORTON ANTHOLOGY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE. NORTON TOPICS ONLINE. 2010-2011. 
5. Lewis, Jone Johnson. “Annie Besant - Heretic” about.com About.com. Undated. 
6. McElroy, Wendy. “The Contagious Disease Acts” fff.org THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM FOUNDATION. March 2000.