Understanding Feminism: Waves, Scopes and Challenges #feminism

a few days back one of my students on facebook he wrote a comment in one of the posts i forgot exactly what he wrote against which i made a reply and then he made a comment to my reply saying that ma'am i was saying in a casual way i know you are a feminist but um it was only plain fun and i wrote to him that well dear you have been for three years in my classroom you are definitely a feminist then and then i was wondering that it's very important i guess to discuss with you what feminist is and how to look at the word feminism because it's often the most misunderstood word in the world [Music] welcome to our channel and today in this video we are going to talk about some of the things which we should know about feminism feminist movements and what is so special about today the 8th of march which we are celebrating as international women's day [Music] there are countless definitions of feminism available in google baffling you get so confused which is the right definition what does it mean when we use the expression feminist criticism feminist theory well take it in this way feminism or rather i should say any ism it's like spectacles eyeglasses or even better looking glass magnifying glass when we look at something with our naked eyes we often miss many things but when we take a magnifying glass and well look through it we get aware of different shades different particles different aspects of that same thing ism is like that there is nothing in this world which we can brand as a feminist text there is only something called feminist reading of a text that is when you are wearing those glasses of feminism when you are looking through that magnifying glass of feminism to look at the same text which has been there for like forever so for a feminist reading you don't need a text which is written after the emergence of the so-called feminist movement you can make a feminist reading of the mahabharata and that is the beauty of any ism it doesn't care about when something was written but when we talk about feminist movement that is a technical term and usually people try to classify movements according to stages or historical sequence now usually it is customary to see the different moments important moments in feminist movement as waves many of you are familiar with the terms first wave feminism second wave feminism third wave feminism and often the differences between these waves they might appear confusing now when we talk about these waves do not assume that there was no women's voice before these waves started as early as 1792 we have mary wollstonecraft writing this book called a vindication of the rights of women we have books by men books by john stuart mill on the subjection of women so voices of women voices speaking in favor of women they were always there but when we talk about movement that means there has to be a mass effect or it has to be something which involves more than one individual mary wilson craft was an individual although a very powerful voice she was the mother of mary shelley mary shelley who wrote frankenstein now before going into the details about when the first wave started when the second wave started let me first talk about uh this word wave when and why was this word first used in 1968 a person called martha winman she wrote in one of her columns in the new york times an article and the headline was the second feminist wave nobody before her used the expression first feminist wave so she straight away started talking about the second feminist wave before anybody talked about any fast wave why did she do this because in around 1968 she was getting aware that women were talking about things in a different way than what the women were talking about earlier during the time which we now call the first wave historically we can say that the period between 1848 to 1920 is approximately the timeline for the first wave of feminism why 1848 what happened then it was the year of the seneca falls convention 200 women they gathered at a church and they started talking about different kinds of rights that women should have and they passed something around 12 resolutions out of which a very important resolution after much debate that was passed was the right to vote women during that time did not have the right to vote like men did the two prominent leaders among those 200 women were lucretia mott and elizabeth stanton now incidentally these two women were also very prominent faces of the abolitionist movement what is abolitionist movement the anti-slave movement during the time in america there were slaves there were colored people who were enslaved made to work for white men and they had no rights at all so these two women who i mentioned earlier they were not only the prominent figures of women movement or women-centric movement but also movement that involved the plea or the revolt against enslavement of colored people so there was kind of an integration of these two movements they were working hand in hand because both talked against discrimination in a way and there was a friendly parallel marriage of movements that was going on till 1870. what happened in 1870 in 1870 black men who were urged while slaves they were granted the right to vote now these white women who were like very prominent faces of women's rights to vote they thought excuse us what are you thinking and they actually made statements like field workers can decide who the government will be and cultured women like us don't have any clue how we can participate in it that's racist so it's a very fine line which the white women crossed and a rift developed okay their anger was legitimate but their expressions cannot be justified under any circumstances especially because the way they behaved with their fellow black women colored women that is plain injustice because the black men were granted the right to vote the white women ostracized the black women even in their marches these colored women or these black women they were asked to walk behind the white women so this is what a movement looks like this is what any kind of idea looks like it always progresses at the cost of something else so while we celebrate feminism we cannot celebrate this virtue of feminism nonetheless this movement was effective in a way it took quite a long time you know it was not until uh early 20th century that voting rights were granted to women yes to all women but in reality it was seen that black women had more trouble when they exercised their right to vote a very important book which we associate with this first wave is a room of once owned by virginia woolf it was published in 1929 and here virginia wolf talks about economic independence as the true empowering factor for women to get their rights now this was in line with the marxist way of thinking virginia wolf also talked about language being something very gendered you know controlled by man patriarchy and this idea was developed later by other writers virginia woolf's point is practically seen in case of especially in case of the revolutions that were going on around russia during the time and it was also very interesting time period no 1918s and 19s what was happening to the world during the time the first world war and what happened during the first world war men were asked to leave their jobs and go to fight for the nations able-bodied men men who were working in the factories the men were gone but the demand for the goods that are produced in the industry especially in heavy metal industries in clothing industries in food industries the demand was not reduced rather it increased during wartime so how was that deficit of labor you know now that the men were gone to fight there was a deficit created so how was the deficit addressed the women were employed in the industries so far so good virginia woolf uh later on talked about economic independence so you might think that good women are now asked to work outside homes so they must be very happy well they could have been happy if they were paid same as men but they were denied equal pay what was the ground why were they denied equal pay they were given this peculiar reason that men are physically stronger so for a certain duration of time that is duty hours they could produce more goods so they could be paid more while women being weaker uh they cannot have that kind of output so we are paying less justified according to the strange kind of logic this was the discrimination at workplace which definitely was countered by revolting voices and it was also the time of the russian revolution and in february revolution when there was this massive socialist upsurge of sentiments in russia going on you know people were striking against the authorities it was during that time in 1917 to be specific a russian woman marfa vasileva working in a factory decided to stop working in support of the revolters and the authorities they you know said fine it's okay you don't have to work and they offered her a loaf of bread she accepted the bread but did not go back to work she said that what about the other women workers in the factory and then her movement or her revolt kind of spread like wildfire other women they stopped working and then the men working in the factory they stopped working so it was like one stone dropping in a silent pond causing that grand ripple so while this first wave uh helped women gain things like you know voting rights right to property earlier women did not have right to their father's property right to education and employment well that again led to those cases of injustice where they were employed but the payment was far far less than men employees and very importantly it also made women get at least some access to reproductive rights in 1916 a woman called margaret sanger she opened a birth clinic and during the time use of contraceptive was severely banned rather you can see it was socially unacceptable why because motherhood was considered to be the most glorified point of being a woman for most people it still is if you are from india you know how the concept of mother india you know made people of india unite as if it is their duty to protect the mother a woman's life is considered still even today is considered to be complete when she creates another human being the nurturing nourishing aspect of woman which is ironically considered to be an asset becomes a liability when that glorification becomes a handicap so while the first wave created a space for woman politically there were issues and challenges that were kept hanging above everything else we are left with the question what about that rift between the rich and the poor between the white and the black in the second wave was this rift reduced was this gap diminished what do we call the starting point of the second wave in 1949 the book by de beauvoir the second sex was published very dense academic book the gist of the book is one is not born a woman one becomes one this means that being a female is a biological reality your body makes you a male or a female and yes of course a third gender but a society that makes you a woman now simon de beauvoir was french dense hard to understand and therefore not instantly popular it was in 1963 that the book the feminine mystic by betty frieden that had that massive reach it went viral three billion copies sold that started to have a great impact what was that book about it was about the problem that has no name yes she wrote those words the problem that has no name the problem of the woman who lives in the domestic sphere it's about the difference in the way a woman lives her life and a man lives his life the political outside relevant world of the man and the docile domestic submissive world of the woman where if the woman is feeling unhappy she is made to feel that either you are mad or you are guilty three million readers reading this started to look at themselves this was not simon de beauvoir this was not going above their heads this was about them this was about them wiping the floors making the dish and they realized that they were angry so this book had an unifying effect the effect which led to this popularization of the concept that personal is political you can go outside on a march rallying against something grand but the real battles are fought inside the doors of your bedroom of your kitchen interestingly this was not something new in 1879 we have henry gibson's book a doll's house nora leaving her household dashing out ibsen throwing at us an incident and asking us to question this not making any value judgment but the reception of a doll's house was not what it should have been people did not look at nora as a rebel they looked at nora as a doll the expression personal is political it was i don't know who made it first there's no written record but the person who popularized it was carol hanish the whole point of this second wave is that while the first wave was more you know politically motivated they wanted something political like you know right to vote and some legislative changes including these rights to properties and stuff something which they wanted the authority to sanction them so in a way first way feminists or first wave women voices they were appealing to men because women were not in a position to make any changes so they had to depend on men benevolent men in the second wave it was more cultural it was more about your home your relationship your dynamics more interiorized yes there were legal changes or legal achievements too it's not just uh you know cultural sphere that we see the effect of second wave in so far as the legal battles that were won during this time uh important ones include equal pay the equal pay act was passed in 1963 i'm talking about america but it kind of had a ripple effect throughout the world this equal pay act we have right to birth control because women are not bp machines motherhood is a very good thing fine but that is not the only point of being alive and a very important thing educational equality the right to education another very important work written during this time came out in 1969 it was by kate millet and it's called the sexual politics although we call this phase a cultural phase the idea that political identity goes hand in hand with personal identity this idea was the you can say main usp of the second wave feminist movement kate millet in her book she actually writes about the ways in which you know this patriarchal system it manipulates power and how that leads to subjugation of women but what was the question we were asking ourselves before we started talking about second wave was the rift reduced the difference between rich and the poor the difference between black and white what was betty frieden's book about or on it was about white privileged housewives what about the working women they had no problem with you know being stuck at home they were never stuck at home they were forced to work they were never asked to give birth after birth because they were forced to sterilize themselves it's never a single agendum that makes a movement successful so while the second wave feminism brought a lot of changes it did not address the basic problem of discrimination when the english men were ruling india they were deliberately making use of this divide and rule concept make a division between the hindus and the muslims and you know they'll just keep fighting with each other and never talk against us because they will lose all their energy fighting each other so this divide between white women and black women it did not help in empowerment of women it helped in sustaining of patriarchy and is kind of a strategy i'm using this word strategy deliberately because this was a time when michel was writing and he was talking about the way power works he was talking of history of sexuality he was talking about imprisonment madness and he was showing us how history is nothing but figment of imaginations of historiographers who wants you to believe what they write history is never a single truth it is a combination of versions different people writing from different points of view the problem with second wave is that it not only kept that gap intact between the privileged and the you can say proletariats but it also created this this magnified image of the feminist woman as almost a medusa figure a monster a man hater you know lonely depressed angry all the time aggressive woman and that image was kind of a deterrent deterrent means something which keeps people away oh you're a feminist so you want to kill men so let me be away from you many women even now they begin talking in this way you know i am not a feminist but as if being a feminist is a taboo and this image is responsible for that taboo and that is why the third wave emerged to to work against this taboo to make this gap reduce if not disappear so you see the three waves they are not watertight compartments they flow into each other questions raised in the first wave are addressed in the second wave questions raised in the second wave are addressed in the third wave and so on when you call something a wave you imagine it as a monolithic structure as if it doesn't have different shades different dimensions as if it only is made of same kind of water molecules but no that is the biggest strategy of patriarchy to give you the illusion that feminism is a monolithic concept a two feminists are monsters and this whole idea of discussing about women is something which we do on 8th march and all these three things they help patriarchy to continue the third wave feminism is not feminism at all it is rather feminism's plural because the first and the foremost thing the most important character of the third wave feminism or rather the third wave feminism is the plurality the celebration of plurality that being different is something to celebrate agenda wise it focused mostly on workplace harassment so you see it's like a like a sequence earlier they didn't have this access to workplace then they got that access when they went there they see that we don't have equal p and then they get equal p and then they see that i'm getting equal p but i'm getting harassed and not just sexual harassment it's like a strange kind of harassment what kind of harassment if you look at the situation of academia even in 2022 you will see that so far as the profession of teaching is concerned more women are employed than men so we can say we can assume that it's a women-dominated uh area of work career option but so little involvement is seen women's involvement is seen when it comes to the governing positions policy making positions of education sector how many women are working at the top rung of the ugc at the top rung of the higher education department of the states that is not dominated by women so this is how you know one kind of achievement leads to the awareness of the next kind of non-achievement and that is what we call progress and you might see it in this way that okay we have given you right to work now you complain about payment we have given you equal payment now you want to be the ceo of the office yes we want to be because we are not asking you to make us ceos because we are women we are asking you to make a ceos because we deserve it all the women whose voices mattered in any feminist movement or women's movement all these voices were not about celebrating being a woman they did not want any advantage from society that see i'm a woman so give me this advantage they wanted to be not a woman they wanted to be treated as a non-gendered entity they were not asking for ladies compartments they were asking for the ability to voice if any male passenger harassed them so what is what is the woman's day all about is it about rejection of womanhood or is it about celebrating womanhood you see the third wave it integrates in it it puts in combination with its own theories the theories of marxism psychoanalysis and then so many other theories like post-structuralism post-colonialism deconstruction why why does gayathri chakra with this pivak she puts in the theories of darida in a text by mahashitadevi on a woman's condition a woman who belongs to the margins of a society because she knows this is how any ism grows by accommodating other isms so you cannot look at feminism without seeing it in empathy with other kinds of magnifying glasses or isms and therefore now that we are talking about feminisms we have different other kinds of classifications we have different other kinds of ways to look at this progress of feminism you know sometimes it is said that there are three phases called the biological female phase then we have the feminist phase and then we have the feminine phase so this is one way of seeing the phases then we have this concept of liberal feminism then radical feminism we actually literally want to kill men according to many people we have cultural feminism we have black feminism who prefer to use the term womanism why because the word feminism somehow sounds very french and french sounds very well privileged and then of course there is this neo-marxist feminism because how can feminism survive without being socialist or connected to socialism so what emerges from the concept of third wave feminism is that it celebrates plurality now because it celebrates plurality no matter how many different kinds of movements or shades or variations come it will always fall inside the radius of the third wave and maybe that's why many people say that the third wave is still continuing although some people say that you know this me too movement this has brought in a whole new dimension to it and this has kind of generated the phase of the fourth wave uh it's a phase where we don't celebrate just being a woman we celebrate sexual identity and the freedom to choose one's sexual identity so that's what today is about celebration of identity today being the 8th march of 2022 the theme is break the bias whose bias who is biased against whom bias means when you have a prejudgment of somebody you you are not impartial that is you're biased so who is biased against who men biased against women women biased against women why not women biased against the third gender the bias of feminists against non-feminists and conformists my point is i think the best way to celebrate today is to give absolute freedom to everybody if you have the right to be a feminist you also have the right to be a conformist to enjoy the pleasures of patriarchy unless and until you are hurting somebody else's freedom of course then that is objectionable and the question of choice there is a lot of controversy going on about uh you know this wearing a hijab is good or not the point is if we are demanding freedom for ourselves we should be ready to accept and acknowledge the freedom of others if that wearing of hijab burka whatever sari and then we bengalis we wear these conch bangles chaka paula unless it is forced on somebody if it's just a choice then questioning that choice calling it something uh that needs to be you know deep brainwashed that is against today's feminism because today's feminism is about plurality the problem the root cause of the problem is i think defining feminism the moment you define feminism you limit it you restrict it you put conditions on it and you create that medusa figure definition leads to branding and you brand somebody that you are a feminist and then you exclude that person as a no fun person leave it undefined and you can celebrate its plurality that's why i started to define feminism in the very beginning of the video but i didn't define it at all i only talked about the stages in which it has emerged in history if we call this a fourth wave period with that medium movement and women coming so much more now in politics not just for voting rights but for being candidates for whom men are voting although we do not have yet any woman president in the great united states of america but we proudly as indians can say that yes we have had a very remarkable woman as our prime minister and such uh you can say accomplishment is there for sri lanka for bangladesh so called third world countries we are celebrating woman's day as a celebration of plurality but personally i believe that unless the day comes when women shareholders they grab a considerable proportion that run the economy of a nation unless that day comes we will have to keep celebrating 8th march 8th march happens to be a national holiday for russia we should give credit where credit is due and in every socialist country and every communist state this day is celebrated but unless that day comes we will keep uploading videos every eighth march speaking about women's issues women's voices women's resistance what it means to be a feminist and why unknowingly you are a very big supporter already so this is all for today this is munami mukherjee signing off thank you and i wish everybody irrespective of your genders a very happy international women's day because as i've said this is about we men's day thank you once again see you all in my next video till then stay happy stay safe [Music] you

Channel: Nibble Pop

Views: 19,621

Keywords: what is feminism, 8th march, third wave, scopes of feminism, three waves of feminist movement, nibblepop, monami mukherjee, feminism nibblepop, feminism monami mukherjee, sociology feminism, second wave feminism, third wave feminism, first wave feminism, monami mukherjee video lecture, waves of feminism, english honours, cbcs, ugc net, simone de beauvoir, ugc, the second sex, esl, ugc net english literature classes, ugc net english literature, nibble pop

Id: oL7Gz219eD4

Length: 39min 33sec (2373 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 08 2022