Disarming Patriarchy: feminism and political action at Greenham (original) (raw)

Feminist contributions, challenges and claims

Shamim Meer (2013): Feminist contributions, challenges and claims, Agenda: Empowering women for gender equity, DOI:10.1080/10130950.2013.798958

This Article highlights key contributions of second wave feminism, arguing that these are of relevance today, as we struggle to deal with questions of social justice within a context of increasing poverty and inequality. I look at feminist understandings of expanded social justice which highlighted crucial links between the economic, political and the cultural, and which stressed that the personal was political. I look at feminist strategies which stressed women’s agency and the need for separate women’s movements even as feminist women challenged men alongside whom they worked in trade unions, liberation movements and radical social movements. I look at how feminist struggles have fragmented over the decades alongside an increasing hegemony of economic and political neoliberalism, and the demobilisation of emancipatory movements. While women made gains within state institutions and the United Nations (UN) system in the 1990s, alongside these gains was the co-option and depoliticisation of feminist concepts forged in the throes of struggle of the earlier decades. Women’s agency too came under threat and was challenged as men’s movements came to be promoted as vehicles for gender equality. I argue that while men can play a vital role in struggles for gender equality it is women’s movements that need to be advanced and supported as key actors in repoliticising feminism today.

Vol-II * Issue-XII* Women Empowerment and the Rise of Feminism

2016

Feminism is an ideology which seeks not only to understand the world but to change it to the advantages of women. It aims at defining, establishing and defending equal political, economic and social rights for women. Feminism focuses on the marginalisation of women and how they are being relegated to a secondary position. Most feminists believe that our culture is a patriarchal culture and it is organised in favour of the interests of men. Feminist literary critics try to explain how power imbalances due to gender in a given culture are reflected in or challenged by literary texts. Feminism is a movement for the empowerment of women. It is a social movement which redresses the gender imbalance in society. Aim of the Study The aim of the study is to find a connection between women empowerment and the movement of feminism. Being popularised in the early twentieth century, feminism struggles for securing women"s suffrage and the later socio-political movement for women"s eman...