Being in the Arena- Part 2

Let us go back in time to understand the root cause, shall we?

To foreign and local capitalists in the past, women were the cheapest source of labor for agriculture and industry. To the colonial authorities & missionaries, local women had to be educated to be good (preferable Christian) wives & mothers to professional white-collar men who were running the colonial economy.

To the male reformers, women needed to be adequately westernized & educated to enhance the ‘modern’ and ‘civilized’ image of their country and themselves, increasing the demand for ‘civilized housewives’ to be a good influence on the next generation.

A concept of non-European cultures seen through the prism of European cultural, aka Orientalism.

Attempts to emulate Western economic development were associated with an appreciation of Western cultural values, especially of concepts such as natural rights, liberalism and parliamentary democracy.

It is in this context of resistance to various forms of foreign domination on one hand and monarchies & exploitative patriarchal and religious structures on the others, that the democratic movement for women’s rights emerged in East.

Importance of cheap female labor:

Under the capitalist development under colonial or semi-colonial context, women were to become available as potentially the largest and cheapest reserve army of labor. Traditions and practices which restricted women’s mobility or enforced their seclusion were detrimental to capitalism. With the growth of industries – especially those associated with textile & plantation sectors, the demand for women’s labor grew in all the countries under this context –

China for silk,

Japan for textiles and consumer goods,

Iran for carpets,

Egypt for cotton,

India for textiles,

Turkey for rugs & textiles not to mention tea, rubber, coconut, sugar plantations etc. in most of these countries. Hence, movements toward further emancipation of women were expected.

The bureaucrats, missionaries and male reformers of the local bourgeoisie were convinced that women had to be emancipated from the social abuses of a ‘savage’ past, from practices that were defined as repugnant by the prevailing norms of European society. Obvious areas of violence and oppression were highlighted, such as widow burning, veiling, polygamy, concubinage and seclusion in Egypt, Turkey, Korea, India, Vietnam, Iran and Indonesia, and foot-binding in China. But to these were added other so-called ‘barbaric practices’ that went against the Christian ideas of monogamy and sexual control that Europeans enforced upon their own women.

The nature of the resistance movements in these countries and of the feminist struggles within those movements varied with the balance of forces that resulted from capitalist expansion. The women’s struggles in this context, did not move beyond the sphere of limited and selected reforms: equality for women within the legal process, the removal of obviously discriminatory practices, the right to the vote, education and property, and the right of women to enter the professions and politics, etc.

Women’s movements do not occur in a vacuum but correspond to, and to some extents are determined by, the wider social movements of which they form part. The general consciousness of society about itself, its future, its structure and the role of men and women, entails limitations for the women’s movement; its goals and its methods of struggle are generally determined by those limits. Mention will be made in the country studies of courageous women who consciously strove to move beyond those limits in the pursuit of goals that today would be defined as feminist, but who failed because of the lower levels of general awareness.