Women’s Study - necessary or not

What comes to mind when someone mentions women’s studies? Perhaps a course on child nutrition, or a programme on employment generation. Otherwise it invites dismissive responses - isn’t women’s studies quite out of date, with gender studies now the only serious discipline globally? The subject of women’s studies is, thus, invariably surrounded by confusion, condescension or worse.

Few are aware of the unique history of women’s studies in India, which emerged in the 1970s and early 1980s, during years of political and social turmoil. A founding generation of teachers, students, young women in the IAS, and activists from different social movements came together in SNDT Women’s University in Mumbai in 1981 for the first-ever conference on women’s studies in India.

Over 300 participants hotly debated how women’s lives and struggles needed to become the focus of new knowledge and interventions, whether by autonomous women’s groups, by the state or within higher education. Interestingly, whatever their differences, they all agreed on one thing - women’s studies should not become a separate discipline in colleges and universities. Rather, questions about women’s status and oppression in society should become a perspective within all subjects, a force of change for education overall.

This was not just an extremely ambitious mandate but also inclusive in scope. Thus, for instance, while new `women-only’ organizations were creating waves in many cities and towns - fighting dowry and rape, working among the rural poor, demanding better wages for women workers and so on, women’s studies was never intended to be for women alone. Male scholars were called upon to share the responsibility of opening up their respective disciplines, and some of them made pioneering contributions like discovering the skewed sex ratio, or analyzing dowry as a modern phenomenon. Teachers hoped to attract men as much as women to discuss new topics in the classroom.

Women ’s studies has traveled almost 30 years since those formative years. What we have today is a vast field of work that has been the creation of many - scholars from history, economics, sociology, literature, psychology, health and so on; activist-intellectuals outside the university system; and bureaucrat-researchers committed to changing public policies. Because this work was often done outside the few women’s studies centers that existed in the early years, its range and scope has not been visible to most of us. It is only too obvious that our institutions of higher education have not been fundamentally transformed by principles of gender justice. Yet, we can point to many changes small and big. Undergraduate and postgraduate courses in all major universities in India have seen syllabi revisions that now include papers on women and gender issues. The University Grants Commission (UGC) has been expanding the number of women’s studies centres across the country by leaps and bounds, and more and more women are claiming new futures through higher education, including from less privileged backgrounds.

A number of university based women’s studies centers have started full fledged degrees in women’s studies at the MA or M Phil level. Others offer special courses and foundational or optional papers to general students. The other interesting development is that though the name "women’s studies" continues to be used in most institutional contexts, what we effectively mean by this is much broader. Not only do we debate the role of men and women in society along with notions of masculinity and femininity, but equally crucially -`women’ is a very complex category as well.

A women’s studies classroom must make room for questions like the following: How did nationalism and, later, the paradigms of development create normative notions of `the Indian woman,’ and how inclusive or exclusive were these norms? How do questions of class affect women’s lives? How do the hierarchies of both caste and gender work simultaneously to shape society, and how do they mould institutions such as family and marriage? How should we respond to questions of sexuality and to the power of the media in our everyday lives?

There are, thus, very different institutional sites for doing women’s studies today. Expanding women’s studies centers will be vital, but also critical are negotiations with conventional disciplines as well as emergent fields like cultural studies, dalit and minority studies. Last, but not least, the unexpected spaces of politics beyond the classroom must be explored. If women ’s studies is to be a live force for questioning gender oppression, then it is absolutely vital that all such spaces continue to proliferate. Only then will we recognize the role that women’s studies has to play in addressing the major issues of our time. Examples could include the long-standing demand for reservations for women in Parliament, and the contradictory forces of globalization. It could be the pink chaddi’ campaign and new protests against patriarchal connections between women and culture. Above all else, whatever it might call itself, women’s studies must always be on the move.

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