Why we cannot stop being feminists

The 1970s were the days when men had their “locker room jokes” and casual misogyny was dismissed as “boys being boys”. When consent was an unknown word. When film heroes stalked and harassed women on the street and it was called “eve teasing”. When comedians made jokes about their mothers and people laughed. When “eve teasers” could harass women with impunity because their clothing meant they were “asking for it”.

Those were the days when films lauded patriarchal fathers who punished their daughters for falling out of line and beat up their wives for not bringing up their daughters well. When dowry demands were considered traditional and correct. When women were either killed or married off to their rapists to protect their “honour”.

Those were the days when most jobs were closed to women and pregnant women were sacked. When offices were unaware that women might need toilets. When male journalists told me that women could not be allowed into newsrooms because it was a male space where they made jokes about women’s bodies. When serious young men asked me if they should “allow” their wives to work.

Those were the days when my cabin crew friends were sacked if they got married. When two old policewomen cried as they told me they had never got married because it was not allowed by the law. When misogynistic remarks were passed off as jokes and a pat on the rear was meant to be a compliment.

We fought, we wrote, we pressurised governments to pass laws. Society woke up slowly to understand that the woman’s perspective was important in every aspect of life if gender equality was to be something more than a dream.

It was also the era when feminist activists and journalists fought and wrote against dowry and sati. When feminist lawyers fought for women’s safety in the workplace and their right to equal wages.

By the 1980s and ’90s, Indian women had accomplished what we early feminists had worked for. The newsrooms were full of women, the hospitals had many women doctors. Women had gained footholds in places we had never imagined… the armed forces, in companies, in courtrooms.

In the 1990s, journalist Susan Faludi’s book Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women was published. It surprised and unsettled me—until I thought it through. The media, she wrote, had, by reporting statistically unsupported ideas of feminism’s negative impact on women, helped create a “backlash” that encouraged women to reject the gains of the early struggle for real equality. She pointed out that backlash was a historical trend, recurring when women made substantial gains in their efforts to obtain equal rights. Because women had to be put back in their place.

Soon I could see that what I thought of as an American trend was actually unfolding all around me. It was not identical to the backlash American women faced, but it was a backlash all the same. Society at large was frightened by the shaking of its foundations by independent women with careers and jobs and more importantly, voices that they could call their own. False media reporting with fake statistics about women grabbing jobs and throwing men out of work, about framing men in fake dowry cases and reporting consensual sex as rape have all fed this backlash. So much so that today some young women hesitate to say they are “feminists”, and use cautious terms like “pro-women” or “humanist”.

Most of these women are unaware of those “prehistoric” days when we fought for those very rights which they now take for granted!

The next wave of conscious feminism, when women become aware of the role they play in their own freedom, will be different from the first one because the concerns now are different. We live in a different social era. But the problems still exist.

Women who were once herded into mass sterilisation camps in the 70s are now being asked to produce more children as they are blamed for the fall in fertility rates. Women are still being eliminated even before they are born because they are blamed for the dowry which often kills them. The “asking for it” mentality still exists for condemning women, especially working women who face sexual harassment. Technology has been turned into a double-edged sword that enables stalking, trolling and elimination of females still in the womb. It enables sexual assaulters to blackmail their victims more easily. The list could go on. We cannot stop being feminists as the battle for equality is far from won. Hopefully we will once more push back this era of backlash.