Godot December 30, 2004

Tags: women , feminism

href="/tag/feminism">feminism” that applies to women all over the world irrespective of their race, culture, and milieu, a feminist Chowk interactor replied: “Feminism: a multidisciplinary system of critical interrogation, theory and social action in which the issues dealing with the political, economic, social, cultural, spiritual, intellectual, artistic, racial and sexual and hegemonic institutionalized inequity of women in phallcentric societies are addressed.”

Leaving no stone unturned and heavy on words that would baffle if not completely escape most poor women, that definition echoes more like a capitalist organization’s mission statement than the definition of an idea that seeks to help down-trodden women of the world achieve a semblance of dignity.

To the feminists who subscribe to the definition expressed above, all women of the world are “linked” in a sort of sister-hood simply because they happen to live in “phallus-centric” societies. No matter where they are in the world, women are oppressed is their thesis, the degree of subjugation of women irrelevant, no distinction made between a rock and a pebble. Following that thesis, then, only one rule of thumb applies: men by virtue of being phallus-holders are wicked, women by virtue of being women are victim, combative feminism is the solution.

The premise of the question asked, however, was not whether women, generally speaking, are suppressed in male-dominated societies; generally speaking, they are. But it is whether the idea of “feminism” as it is thought of and practiced by the Western women is applicable to South Asian women.

It is undeniable that non-Western women in mostly economically undeveloped societies face some of the same issues today as Western women did in earlier times. For example, “[a]t the end of the 19th century in France, [women] were still compelled to cover their heads in public, and, in parts of Germany, a husband still had the right to sell his wife.” And on a relatively lesser mean side, “[e]ven as late as the early 20th century, women in the United States, as in Europe, could neither vote nor hold elective office.” However, “[o]nce the crucial goal of suffrage had been achieved , the feminist movement virtually collapsed in both Europe and the United Sates. Lacking an ideology beyond the achievement of the vote, feminism fractured into a dozen splinter groups. Throughout the United States, as across Europe, Americans believed that women had achieved their liberation.”

Henceforth, notwithstanding its root and setting, the idea of Western feminism was exported to Asia, Africa, and Latin America where Western women were “horrified to discover that women in some countries were required to wear veils in public or to endure forced marriage, female infanticide, widow burning, or clitoridectomy. Many Western feminists soon perceived themselves as saviours of Third World women, little realizing that their perception of and solutions to social problems were often at odds with the real lives and concerns of women in these regions.”

Naturally, and quite ironically for the feminists, “[t]he conflict between women in developed and developing nations have played out most vividly at international conferences. After the 1980 World Conference of the United Nations Decade for Women: Equality, Development and Peace in Copenhagen, women from less-developed nations complained that the veil and female genital surgery had been chosen as conference priorities without consulting the women most concerned. It seemed that their counterparts in the West were not listening to them. During the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo, women from the Third World protested outside because they believed the agenda had been hijacked by Europeans and Americans. The protesters had expected [the conference] to talk about ways that underdevelopment was holding women back. Instead, conference organizers chose to focus on contraception and abortion. ‘[Third World women] noted that they could not very well worry about other matters when their children were dying from thirst, hunger or war,’ wrote Azizah al-Hibri, a law professor and scholar of Muslim women’s rights. ‘The conference instead centred around reducing the number of Third World babies in order to preserve the earth’s resources, despite (or is it because of) the fact that the First World consumes much of these resources.’ Even in Beijing, at the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995, Third World women criticized the priority American and European women put on reproductive rights language and issues of discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and their disinterest in the platform proposal that was most important to less-developed nations—that of restructuring international debt.”

To better appreciate the difference in thought process between the Western and South Asian women, below are some of the statistics for which there are no numbers. Both Western and South Asian women, in their respective countries, should be asked all these questions. They are, however, listed here only to illustrate a point.

Percentage of women who own cars
Percentage of women who have cell phones
Percentage of women who have white-collar jobs
Percentage of women who travel by air for business
Percentage of women who don’t cook and prefer to eat out
Percentage of women who can relate to the main characters in “Sex and the City”
Percentage of women who complain their pay is only 90% of their male counterpart
Percentage of women who worry about how their child should be picked up from day-care
Percentage of women who give birth in a spotlessly clean and hygienic hospital
Percentage of women who go shopping in a mall
Percentage of women who have no more than two outfits to wear
Percentage of women who are forced to cook every day for the entire family
Percentage of women who go hungry at least once a week because of no or little food
Percentage of women who sleep on the floor in a mud-house
Percentage of women whose dignity are not considered valuable by their males
Percentage of women who are killed because they brought “dishonor” to the family
Percentage of women who have never seen a book
Percentage of women who have never seen a school
Percentage of women who have jobs that does not pay
Percentage of women whose fate are decided by village “elders”
Percentage of women who are handed-over as compensation to grieving party to acquit the wrong done by a male

As we can safely answer some of the above questions ourselves without leaving this computer screen, Western feminism cannot, for understandable reasons, relate to the suffering of South Asian women. As the conflict between the Western women and the rest mentioned above clearly shows, apples and oranges couldn’t be compared.

Finally, it is not only the “feminists” who solely bear the torch of liberation of South Asian women from the shackles of a society deeply entrenched in time and tradition and can claim to be the only ones who can address their suffering. The suffering of South Asian women is also the concern of the phallus-wielding men of South Asia, because the intelligent ones among them know that tying women down retards the development of their own families and hence, on a larger scale, the social and economic development of their nations. However, applying Western idea of feminism to South Asian women is not unlike trying to cure severe stomachache with a pill meant for headaches. The gander that’s caught in New York cannot be cooked in Nowshehra.