Catherin Mackinnon asked the question ‘Are Women Human?’ as a reaction to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. It is difficult to answer this question as a ‘Yes’ or a ‘No’ after reading the twelve narratives of women compiled in this book. Women have always been and will continue to be human in spirit but when we place them in the discourse of human rights and analyse their lives, it is difficult to understand them as humans. While some women have continuously struggled against the dominant patriarchal paradigms, others have protected the existing system and perpetrated the dominance. While some have broken away from the heritage of oppression others have operationalised the ‘culture of silence’. While some have wrecked the chain of violence, others have played the power game and supported the status quo. The book takes the reader into a journey of self exploration wherein one is compelled to delve deep into one’s understanding of women’s rights. Should there be separate rights for women? Who made the existing rights? Does the human rights discourse actually address the day to day struggle of a woman (which actually begins from the very moment she is conceived in the womb of her mother)?
The book brings into light lives of many women which are interwoven into one another, thereby making patterns of love and hate, freedom and bondage, expression and suppression. Is woman born or made? This question is asked whenever there is a conflict between nature and culture. Woman is understood as the nurturing force of a family who needs to operate within the male oriented culture and face violations of human rights through traditional practices executed as a part of the civilization. Culture has been philosophised, formalised, institutionalised and practiced with the understanding of the male members of the society. It gets entrenched into the system to such an extent that many times a woman is criticised if she chooses to move away form it in order to find her own path. Nabaneeta Dev Sen talks about her mother who was rebuked that she had voluntarily courted widowhood as she read books and gained knowledge.
Society has always treated woman with the bias- whether it is definitional, procedural or normative. Man is seen as the ‘Self’ whereas the woman is projected as the ‘Other’ who has to either live like his shadow , be put to submission , or incorporated into the system which places her at the ‘periphery’ as against the man who occupies the ‘centre’. This gets reflected in Nabaneeta Sen’s story which describes how Amartya Sen was supportive of her scholarly endeavours but never encouraged her to take up a job. Neither did he engage with her in her creative activities but expected her to maintain an establishment for him in different parts of the world
Justice, equality, liberty, autonomy – all are visualized from male’s point of view. Spike Peterson says that inequalities at various levels in social relations have their origin in physical inequality between the man and the woman resulting in the andocentric nature of the rights. Not only do they cater to the needs and position of male members but also relegate women to a position of a receiver or a follower. This is reflected in the life of Hema Sundaram’s mother who was silenced by a stinging slap across her face whenever she tried to assert herself.
J.S. Mill in his work ‘Subjugation of Women’ says, ‘for everyone who desires power, desires it most over those who are nearest to him, with whom his life is passed, with whom he has most concerns in common and in whom any independence of his authority is oftenest likely to interfere with his individual preferences’ ( Mill, 1975). He also adds ‘Men do not want solely the obedience of women, they want their sentiments… They have therefore put everything in practice to enslave their minds.’
Human Rights have always been a mechanism to build a relationship between the individual and the collective. It is about how freedom gets mediated between the members of the society. Liberal theory goes deep into this issue of freedom. Rousseau said that it was through ‘social contract’ that the individual submitted a part of his freedom to the collective for general goodwill. He also adds that curtailing a part of individual’s freedom was actually favourable for the individual’s interest because he gained security which he didn’t have in State of Nature. The word ‘he’ is deliberately used here because this contract was not made with consent of woman. She was never ‘born free’ and has continuously been in chains. When Paine says that amongst the four basic rights human being has given up on resistance to oppression, it can be clearly seen in lives of many women because most of them silently surrender to subjugation.
Liberal theory treats human being as atomistic individual. This analogy fails to describe women’s lives which are multi-layered and multi-dimensional. It is seen in some narratives that women were indoctrinated into the system to such an extent that they started justifying it and felt liberated by surrendering to it. Vina Mazumdar narrates that when her grandfather’s grandfather died his wife decided to become sati against the wishes of her family members who tried to dissuade her. Hema Sundaram’s grandmother endured the frustrations of her husband by consoling herself that it was her ‘karma’- a belief accepted by women across different strata of society justifying the existence of all kinds of inequalities and unjust practices. Were they liberated in real sense or were they imprisoned by their own mental inhibitions? Priti Desai remembers how her mother in spite of having an emotionally distressing marriage stood by her husband in tough times as she believed in the law of karma.
Society’s hypocrisy, its brutality, its inadequacy and injustice come into fore when one sees how a woman is restricted to the private domain and how a man keeps moving in and out of the public and the private sphere. Woman has been domesticated generation after generation wherein her work was reduced to bearing children and taking care of her family. Education was inaccessible to her and her very identity was defined by her relations. Like Seetha in Ramayana if a woman decided to cross the lakshman rekha drawn by the society she was punished. Feminist critique of human rights discourse questions the very idea and construction of private as it is defined and demarcated by patriarchal norms. Making women's contribution in the private sphere invisible obscures how dependent the public sphere is on the private. Vina Mazumdar recalls how her mother ‘protected’ her father from getting entangled with the ‘anxieties’ of bringing up the five children. A wife’s suffering has been repeatedly veiled within the private sphere and kept away from the society. Hema Sundaram’s husband put her through physical abuse and when asked by his friend brushed it off by saying ‘it was something personal’. Maithreyi Krishna Raj labels her sister’s life as a classic case of ‘middle class’s woman’s oppression’ wherein she was confined to the repetitive, confining and unrewarding domesticity.
The family has been subsumed under the civil society which socialises a woman into believing that she is inferior to man. The structural functionalist reasoning given in order to maintain the hegemony of patriarchal norms has dampened the sensibilities of women time and again making them believe that there is only one way of surviving and that is through oppression. Radharani was stripped off her jewellery, her hair was chopped off, and she was made to wear the borderless white cloth when she became a widow. When Zarina Bhatty’s grandmother was widowed at the age of 18 she was forced to only wear white throughout her life and not allowed to participate in any ceremonies or rituals. Leela Gulati’s mother was pregnant at the age of 14 and by 18 she had undergone three pregnancies. Menstruating girls were treated as untouchables by the family members, says Priti Desai.
In society women were not only the followers but also agents of the patriarchal norms. Spike Peterson says that women’s lives are characterized by personal connections, attentiveness and responsibility and the ethic of care rather than ethics of rights. J.S. Mill explains ‘All the moralities tell them that it is the duty of women, and all the current sentimentalities that it is their nature, to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections. And by their affections are meant the only ones they are allowed to have — those to the men with whom they are connected, or to the children who constitute an additional and indefeasible tie between them and a man’ (Mill 1975). This can be seen in the life of Nabaneeta Sen who is blamed for not keeping her husband happy or Hema Sundaram whose siblings did not support her decision to walk out of the marriage. ‘While the elder brothers sympathized with me, they felt that ultimately I should try to adjust at least for the sake of the boys.’
There seems to be an invisible yet deeply entrenched nexus between the State and the civil society wherein different state apparatus work together to keep women disempowered. State is both the protector and violator of human rights and it changes its role depending on how well it serves the patriarchy. ‘ostensible individualism and egalitarianism of liberal theory obscures the patriarchal reality’ says, Carole Pateman (Patemen 1989) and she questions the possibility to achieve political equality without obtaining equality in private and public spheres. Female is seen as nature, personal, emotional, private, intuitional, moral, ascribed driven by love whereas male is defined as culture, political , public, achievement, who is driven by reason. When the two entities are diametrically opposed to each other and then how can there be a common set of human rights addressing their problems? There has to be a different kind of engagement within human rights discourse to identify and formulate Rights for women. And it will happen when every oppressed woman like Leela Gulati’s mother realises that the ‘mistakes’ of her life are not her own making but are the products of institutionalised discrimination against Indian women.
The book also brings together stories of women who not only were denied property rights and but also considered as property. Women across time space and cultures have been de-humanised and their individuality bartered between members of family, society and nation. Zarina Bhatty’s mother was not given any share of her dowry despite of the Islamic law in her favour. Leela Gulati informs about her rigidly patriarchal family, with lineage and property passing through the male line. Her mother was refused the house which her father had built with her gold. Mary Roy challenged the Travancore Christian Succession Act which violated her right to her father’s property.
The twelve narratives not only bring together the pain, sorrow, humiliation, suffering of women but also highlight how many of them decided to break away from the ‘culture of silence’. There have been women like Radharani’s mother-in-law and Vina Mazumdar’s Peshima who fought for the education of children especially girls and brought a change in the system which sowed the seeds of ‘critical consciousness’ in the future generations. The book salutes to the indomitable spirit of women who re-defined ‘human’. It is a dedication to all those souls who had to go through continuous cycles of suffering.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. Friere Paolo, ‘Pedagogy of the Oppressed’, London, Penguin Boooks 1998
2. Mill, J S ‘ Subjection of women’, London, OUP, 1975
3. Mackinnon, Carol ‘ Are Women Human’ in Refelctions on the Univesal Declaration of Human Rights , Martnus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, 1999
4. Peterson, Spike and Parisi Laura ‘Are women human? It’s not an academic question’ in ‘Human Rights fifty years on A reappraisal ed. by Tony Evans 1998 Manchester University Press, Manchester
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