Abha Shukla Kaushik
Feminism: An Overview
Feminism as a socio-cultural movement began in Europe; got strengthened with the help of Marxism; found its full echoes in the USA and like many other similar concepts spread to the countries of the third world. It is originally and essentially a sociological movement encompassing many areas of familial and societal life and as such has received much attention from the writers.
The Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary defines the word feminism as “Belief in the principle that woman should have the same rights and opportunities as man.”
Feminism is also defined as the awareness of women’s position in society as one of disadvantage and inequality compared with that of men and also the desire to remove these disadvantages.
Feminism does not imply any dogma or rigidity of stand point: on the contrary it is a ratification of the truth, beauty and intensity of the woman’s world as an integral and important part of the world at large. Women’s issues are social issues and literature is an honest document of social and national life.
Human experience, for centuries, has been synonymous with masculine experience with the result that the collective image of humanity has been one sided and incomplete. Systematic subject deprivation of woman has been a fact as much in life as in literature. As a philosophy of life, feminism seeks to discover and change the subtle and deep seated causes of women’s oppression. Thus the very basis of feminism is reformist. It analyses women’s subordination for the purpose of figuring out how to change it. As a literary discourse it is part of the modernist search for new modes of conceptuality to change the existing pattern of gender relationships. Feminism is committed to the struggle for equality of women. Alice Jardine defines feminism as a “movement from the point of view of, by and for women.” (15)
Casual concern about this age old subjugation of woman, assigning her a secondary position in the social structure and raising a voice for her emancipation from the bondage of man can be traced to as early as in the writings of Plato. This concern also manifests itself in the overall message of the French Revolution and the American Declaration of human rights though at that time it could not be very vocal.
Although feminism as a major movement came into notice only in the 1960s and 70s, its roots can be traced back to the theory of liberalism in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. The major concern of liberalism was the ‘rights of man’ expressed through the writings of Locke, Rousseau and others. These were the doctrines that formed the basis of the democratic goals of ‘liberty, equality and fraternity’ of the French and American revolutions. Together the two revolutions reminded both the ruling class and the intellectual class that old hierarchies were inexorably disintegrating. The new conceptions of human rights dramatized and espoused by the French and American revolutions contested the divine rights of monarchs and aristocrats and sought to legitimize the political participation of all male members of society. Thus initially, liberalism was essentially concerned with the rights of the citizens before the law and to participate in public life, especially to vote. However, subsequently, it was followed by equivalent claims about the ‘rights of women’ and as a result nineteenth century saw unprecedented changes in the conditions of women’s life as well as the emergence and consolidation of a powerful female literary tradition. Fighting for the right to vote, demanding the right to own property and retain custody of their children after divorce, entering institutions of higher education, studying to become physicians and nurses, lawyers and journalists; forming trade unions; establishing businesses and writing bestsellers, women both at home and abroad had become so dramatically visible that by the end of the century the ‘Woman Question’ – the issue of just what the woman’s place ought to be in society - had begun to be an obsession.
The Feminist Theory was further influenced by the socialist ideology of Karl Marx. From being a movement identifying the inequalities and injustice caused to women in a society highlighting the disabilities and disadvantages of women and asserting their political rights, feminists now combined the study of class with that of gender. The celebrated treatise of Marx and Engels’s ‘The Communist Manifesto 1948’ takes into account the status of women in family and society from an entirely new angle and the bourgeois attitude towards women stands exposed in the book. After examining the change in the status of women from the barbarian society to modern society Engel sums up his views on the entire man - woman relationship in his long essay ‘The Origin of Family, Private Property and State’ in the following words:
“The first-class antagonism which appears in history coincides with the development of antagonism between man and woman in monogamian marriage, and the first class oppression with that of female sex by male.” (495)
The Marxist –socialist theory grew from the realization that political liberalism was hollow without economic equality. Thus economic equality as a right was added to the political ones. Marx and Engels argued that a woman can never find her status based on dignity, equality and freedom in a bourgeois society; neither can any reform movement aimed at improving the condition of women alter the status of women in such a society unless they are given equal economic rights.
Meanwhile a third important stream of thought that influenced modern feminism of late nineteenth and early twentieth century was the examination of sexuality and sexual behaviour caused by social and political contexts. This school of thought emerged as a result of the tremendous developments in the field of psychology changing the whole perceptions. Freud, Jung and later Lacan played roles of tremendous significance in channelling modern feminist thought to unexplored new regions. These psychological theories offered new insights and resulted in a widespread rethinking and emergence of a new group of Feminist theorists who were relatively militant and quite radical in their attitudes and views about the marginalization of women. Unlike the liberal feminists or the socialist feminist this group does not ignore woman’s biology. They attribute the origin of sex-class system to the biologically determined reproductive roles of women and develop a comprehensive theory of the origin of women’s oppression. Shulamith Firestone, one of the major radical Feminists, says – “Women bear and nurse children, unlike economic class, sex class sprung directly from a biological reality: men and women were created different and equally privileged.” (8)
The radical feminists tend to see the roots of women’s oppression in women’s biological capacity for motherhood and alternatively in the innate biologically determined male aggression as it manifests itself in various sexual harassments of women by men. These radical feminists believe that it is biology that makes women dependent on males for their physical survival. According to them mere abolition of capitalism and establishing a socialist economy are not sufficient, though they acknowledge its necessity. What they aim for is total restructuring of society. Firestone writes, “The end goal of Feminist Revolution must be … not just the elimination of male privileges but of sex distinction itself: genital difference between human beings would no longer matter culturally.” (11) Thus according to radical Feminist abolition of all sex stereotyping is a prerequisite for restructuring of society.
Closely associated with this group of radical Feminists is another group that talks about lesbian sexuality. Lesbian Feminist rejects heterosexuality as the only valid sexuality for free women. The emphasis here has been shifted to imaginative identification of all women. It is based on the notion that only a woman can understand another woman perfectly. They advocate social, political and psychological experimentation in order to usher in a new order of equal opportunity to everybody. Their views transcend the civil rights and political rights of women and talk about sexual freedom of women. This theory, however, is somewhat deconstructive in nature and hence very few people adhere to it.
Early feminist theories were based on the belief that women’s experience was different from that of men because of their long oppression. But in the late twentieth century a paradoxical shift in the terms of debate can be perceived. The exponents of this new changed perspective refuse to consider women’s difference from men as a form of inadequacy and look at this difference as a source of pride and confidence. Some of them go to the extent of advocating a movement to establish femaleness as normative and maleness as derivation of it, thereby attempting a direct reversal of Freudian perspective. The mother-centered theories of Jacques Lacan led this change in perspective to new horizons.
This relatively new philosophical branch of feminism celebrates the intellect and temperament inherent in women’s nature as essentially different from men’s nature. They concern themselves mainly with a hidden female power that has great social relevance, and believe that women have a greater concern and respect for human life as compared to men.
The moderate feminists are less rigid and less militant in their ideas about social and patriarchal system. They are optimistic about the emergence of a non sexist society even while working through the present system.
The significant theorists of modern feminism have now engaged themselves in several well defined groups such as Marxist-Socialist Feminist, Radical and Lesbian Feminist, Liberal Feminist etc. Despite divergence in their perspectives they are all united by a common belief that women are oppressed – culturally, politically and psychologically and exploited economically. They prescribe different solutions to the same problem depending upon the line of thought they believe in.
Elaine Showalter identifies three phases in the growth of feminist tradition in literature - ‘Imitation (feminine), protest (feminist) and self discovery’ (female) in her essay ‘A Literature of Their Own’. In her view, the development of this tradition in literature is similar to the development of any other literary subculture.
As feminism is primarily a revolution in social consciousness, it has affected literature and literary criticism from its earliest days. Feminist criticism has now become a fully established branch of literary studies.
Feminist literary criticism offers new insights and readings of literature, re-evaluating literary expressions both by women and men, documenting the impact of sexist assumptions on writers, challenging literary judgments that deny the female voice an equal role with the male. It has caused a major reorientation of values in literary studies by challenging the long held beliefs and practices.
Feminist literary criticism primarily responds to the way woman is presented in literature. It is essentially a new way of reading and thinking about literature. It has been accepted inside the critical canon as a valuable approach to literature. The evolution and development of feminist criticism can be traced back to the evolution and development of feminism as a movement.
Feminist criticism emerged as an off shoot of the Women’s Liberation Movement. Its central hypothesis is that gender is a crucial detriment in production, circulation and consumption of literary discourse. Literary discourse, literary criticism as well as literary theory have traditionally been guarded male dominated areas. It was taken for granted that the representative reader, writer or critic of literature was male. Feminist criticism revolted against this exclusion of women, this misogyny and the movement provided the impetus.
Feminists claim that literature is a powerful tool in the hands of creative writers to modulate and change the societal framework. They believe that literature and literary criticism, like all other spheres of human activity bear the stamp of male domination. They claim that literary history presents mainly His Story, the man story and so they want to rewrite it as Her Story. Feminist literary criticism is a mode of literary analysis that tries to reinterpret literature from the point of view of woman. Feminists believe that in order to understand woman’s position in the world, one has to understand the system of patriarchy. Men all over the world have presented woman from their own point of view, women have been taught and even been forced to look at themselves from the male point of view. Man is traditionally seen as the self, woman as the other, not merely different, but inferior and lacking. Women become “The Second Sex” in Simone de Beauvoir’s telling phrase.
Feminism as an ideology seeks not only to understand the world but to change it to the advantage of women.
Feminist writers refuse to accept the images of women as portrayed by male writers. They are of the view that women characters portrayed by men in literature are not authentic. In the opinion of feminists men have portrayed women not as ‘women’ but as they would like to perceive them. In other words woman in literature has been portrayed from the point of view of man, from the outside, not from the point of view of woman herself as she actually is. This attitude of men towards women in literature prompted Carol Christ to say that “Women have not experienced their own experience”. (5)
Feminist critics and writers felt very strongly about this complete negation of the female experience in literature. The image of women projected in literature written by men has been limited to a few acceptable or stereotyped roles. Women are usually cast into a narrow range of characterizations comprising basically of two broad types of images: positive roles depicting women as independent, intelligent and even heroic but docile, subservient and motherly and the negative roles commonly identified as the bitch, the witch or the vamp.
Elaine Showalter in ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ (1981) says that if the Feminist approach is to be more effective it must be more structured to compete with the antifeminist approach. She also draws a distinction between feminist critique and gynocriticism. According to her the invigorating encounter with literature which she calls feminist reading or ‘feminist critiques’, “is in essence a mode of interpretation, one of many which any complex text will accommodate and permit” (310)
Unlike feminist critique gynocriticism offers many theoretical opportunities by looking at women’s writings as primary subject. Thus, in gynocriticism there is a gradual shift from revisionary readings to a sustained investigation of literature by women. It is a study of women as writers and “its subjects are history, styles, themes, genres, and structures of writing by women; the trajectory of individual or collective female career; and evolution and laws of a female literary tradition.” (Showalter, 311)
Feminist literary criticism therefore, has two basic premises: one, ‘woman’ presented in literature by male writers from their own point of view and two, ‘woman’ presented in the writings of female writers from their own point of view. Feminists claim that literature and literary criticism, like all other spheres of human activity bear the stamp of male domination. Feminist literary criticism is a mode of literary analysis which tries to reinterpret literature from the woman’s point of view and introduces the notion of sexual difference into the study of literature. Using the self / other dichotomy discussed in Simone de Beauvoir’s ‘The Second Sex’, Dorin Schumacher suggests “To the masculinist critics applying this model, male would be self, female other; to the feminist critic applying this model, female would be self and male other.”(32)
Feminist literary criticism may appear to be over stating the case by underlining the sex difference in studying literature. Ideally speaking, literature by men and women should be studied as a single unit. Beyond a point, it is absurd to press feminism, but that point is yet to be reached. Feminist criticism looks to the past to anatomize the pains inflicted on women down history, to the present in a passionate affirmation of female identity and experience and to future with the hope of achieving cultural androgyny.
Going back to the history of feminist writing in India, we observe that with the impact of European literary and cultural association during the British regime there emerged a new awareness among Indian women especially in the class which had access to English education and which was influenced by the western culture. These women especially the city dwellers responded with sensitivity to the contemporary social and cultural evils. The zeal for reform and change in the prevailing social and cultural conditions has been an essential part of Indian writing in English.
The status and predicament of women in Indian society has been yet another motivating force for the Indian writers. Despite the fact that women can contribute to social regeneration as much as the cause of family welfare, she often becomes a victim of social prejudices and male chauvinism. Gandhi’s call to the Indian women to participate actively in the freedom movement made them conscious of the much needed liberation and equality of opportunity in personal, social and political life. Recognizing the potential of women to join the counterparts in the struggle against ignorance, superstition and backwardness, Indian English writers in general and women writers in particular began to treat women as legitimate subjects for their purposeful social writings. The early women novelists tried to convey the grim realities of woman’s life through their writings. Krupa Sattianda (1862-1894) Rockey Sakhwat Hossain (1880-1932) and pandita Ramabai Saraswati (1858-1922) who wrote in English were caustic about the then prevailing conditions of society. Krupa Sattianda portrays a very bold young Protagonist in ‘Saguna’ who has an encounter with women missionaries of ‘Zenana School’, Rockey Sakhawat Hossain, a Feminist, portrays a tipsy turvey fantasy world in her novel ‘Sultana’s Dream’ in which men are kept behind ‘purdah’ and they take the same status of women and the narrator has a caustic laugh at them.
In the post-independence period, woman’s quest for an identity of her own commenced in the real sense. Further with the birth of Women’s Liberation movement in early 70s in the west, women came to realize their marginalization more intensely. Elite women confined to major cities were initially drawn in the movement to bring home to the women in the diverse sections of society how they were subjected to iniquitous and humiliating treatment. There was an awakening among women themselves and impetus was given to a woman’s aspirations. The image of the archetypal woman still loomed large on the horizon in spite of the fast growth and development of women’s education.
Feminism in Indian literature, particularly in Indian English writing is a by-product of western feminist movement. The Indian woman caught in the flux of tradition and modernity bearing the burden of the past and the aspirations of the future is the crux of feminism in Indian literature. Man - woman relationship has, on the whole, evolved through centuries on a set pattern, i.e., man to rule and woman to obey, man for the field and woman for the hearth. This centuries old, unquestioningly followed pattern of relationships now stands challenged, thanks to the feminist movement.
Indian writers present this changed perception of women in their writings. Women in their works are depicted as veering away from debasement of self-abnegation or assumption of mask of adoring subservience. The emotional and psychic consequences of the search for self-identity by women characters can be seen even in the earliest phase of Indian English writings in writers like R.K. Narayan. He deals with the theme of emancipation of women in his later novels like ‘The Dark Room’, ‘The Guide’ and ‘The Painter of Signs’. Savitri, Rosie and Daisy, the respective heroines of these novels are women who accommodate the western ideals of self-fulfilment and autonomy, daring to be different in a traditionally patriarchal society.
A shift in the sensibility of the society results in a shift in the perception of the writer hence the image of women is changing. This change is all the more prominent in the works of women writers belonging to present day India.
A study of post–independence Indian woman writings shows that women writers of modern time are seriously engaged in the task of recreating the image of woman. Through their fictional work they not only bring woman in more life –like and realistic manner but also spread an awareness among women. They believe woman is not to be taken as a “Sex object and glamour girl fed of fake dreams of perpetual youth, lulled into a passive role that requires no individual identity…..”(Sahgal, Women: Persons or Possessions, The Hindustan Times) rather she should be regarded as man’s equal and honoured partner. In fact the woman that these novelists present is not a mere imitation of western woman but she is the average Indian woman whose roots are in Indian culture and who is trying to define herself in terms of being an individual and to preserve her identity as a wife, as a mother, as a daughter and as an individual being too. Thus the Indian woman is seeking equality in domestic and intellectual spheres. The sense of being an individual is no doubt peculiar to the western thought and literature however their values lie in their own personal fulfilment and development whereas in our own literature and culture we find an individual submerged in her family and community -the family is the primary unit of an individual’s life and one of the basic units to sustain the larger social setup. Hence there is a vital difference between the urges and aspirations of women in western countries and in India. In our country a woman’s main aim is to attain dignity and respect as a human being. Our women writers are concerned with the treatment of women as a normal human being and therefore a woman must be allowed even her imperfections and should be judged in her totality. They criticize the social system that assigns roles to the sexes and then categorically label them as inferior or superior, sinful or chaste. The modern women writers are intensely preoccupied with women fighting against the female norms of life like sexuality, dichotomy between career and claims of the family etc. They want their protagonists to make decisions, perform actions, be ready to face the consequences whatever they be and to design their lives according to their own.
Works Cited
Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. trans. H. M. Parshley. Penguin Books, 1972
Christ, Carol. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980
Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex. New York: Bantam, 1970
Jardine, Alice. Gynesis : Configurations of Women and Modernity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986
Marx and Engels. The Origin of Family, Private Property and State. Moscow; Progress Publishers, 1982
Sahgal, Nayantara. “Women : Persons or Possessions”. The Hindustan Times, 19 July 1970
Showalter, Elaine. “A literature of Their Own”. British Women Novelists from Bronte to Lessing. Princeton: NJ Princeton University Press,1977
……………………”Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness” Modern Criticism and Theory. ed. David Lodge. Delhi: Pearson Education (Singapore) Pte. Ltd. 2003