Chapter No.

4
FEMINIST MOVEMENTS

First wave feminism

‘Right to vote’

 First wave feminism was critical in the late 19th and early 20th centuries in giving women
the right to vote and basic rights such as in property.
 While the roots of this feminism are not clear, new movements from the Enlightenment
and industrialization began to focus on female rights and individuality.
 The 19th century was a time where people questioned basic rights and who had access
to them.
 It emerged that both sexes, as well as different races, should have basic given rights
such as emancipation (liberation) rights to vote, and rights to own property, even though
the battles for equality continued into the 20th century.
 First-wave feminism promoted equal contract and property rights for women, opposing
ownership of married women by their husbands.
 Achieving the right to vote was generally seen as the major achievement for first wave
feminists.
 The first wave had marginalized black women, who faced discrimination based on race
as well as gender.
 First-wave feminism ended with passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution
in 1919, granting women voting rights.

Second-wave feminism

“Socio-cultural rights”

 Second-wave feminism of the 1960s-1980s focused on issues of equality and

discrimination.
 The second-wave slogan, “The Personal is Political,” identified women’s cultural and
political inequalities as inextricably linked and encouraged women to understand how
their personal lives reflected sexist power structures.
 Betty Friedan was a key player in second-wave feminism; in 1963, her book “The
Feminine Mystique” criticized the idea that women could find fulfillment only through
childrearing and homemaking.
 Friedan hypothesizes that women are victims of false beliefs requiring them to find
identity in their lives through husbands and children. This causes women to lose their
own identities in that of their family.
 Ultimately, the second wave feminist movement gave women the opportunity to start
conversations about how social inequality and begin to think about gender, identity,
sexuality, race, and class as all equally important factors.

Third Wave Feminism

 The “micropolitics” of gender equality

 The third wave of feminism began in the mid - 90's and was informed by post-colonial
and post-modern thinking.
 In this phase many constructs were destabilized, including the notions of "universal
womanhood," body, gender, sexuality and heteronormativity.
 One of third-wave feminism's primary goals was to demonstrate that access to
contraception and abortion are women's reproductive rights.
 It is not feminism's goal to control any woman's fertility, only to free each woman to
control her own.
 Third-wave ideology focused on a more post-structuralist interpretation of gender and
sexuality. Post-structuralist feminists saw binaries such as male–female as an artificial
construct created to maintain the power of the dominant group
 An aspect of third wave feminism that mystified (confused) the mothers of the earlier
feminist movement was the read option by young feminists of the very lip-stick, high-
heels, and cleavage proudly exposed by low cut necklines that the first two phases of
the movement identified with male oppression.
 Pink floor expressed this new position when said that it's possible to have a push-up bra
and a brain at the same time.
 The "girls" of the third wave stepped onto the stage as strong and empowered, avoiding
victimization and defining feminine beauty for themselves as subjects, not as objects of a
sexist patriarchy.
 They developed rhetoric of mimicry (reproduction), which appropriated derogatory terms
like "slut" and "bitch" in order to subvert sexist culture and deprive it of verbal weapons.

Issue

 Violence against women

 Reproductive rights
 Reclaiming derogatory terms
 Sexual liberation
 Third-wave feminism regarded race, social class, and transgender rights as central
issues.
 It also paid attention to workplace matters such as the glass ceiling, unfair maternity-
leave policies, motherhood support for single mothers by means of welfare and child
care, respect for working mothers, and the rights of mothers who decide to leave their
careers to raise their children full-time.

World Conferences on Women

The United Nations has organized four world conferences on women. These took place in
Mexico City in 1975, Copenhagen in 1980, Nairobi in 1985 and Beijing in 1995. The last was
followed by a series of five-year reviews.

Mexico Conference 1975

 The Commission on the Status of Women called for the organization of the first world
conference on women to coincide with International Women’s Year. The World Conference of
the International Women's Year was subsequently held in Mexico City; 133 governments
participated, while 6,000 NGO representatives attended a parallel forum, the International
Women’s Year Tribune. The conference defined a World Plan of Action for the Implementation
of the Objectives of the International Women’s Year, which offered a comprehensive set of
guidelines for the advancement of women.

The Mexico City Conference was called for by the United Nations General Assembly to
focus international attention on the need to develop future oriented goals, effective strategies
and plans of action for the advancement of women. To this end, the General Assembly
identified three key objectives that would become the basis for the work of the United Nations
on behalf of women:

 Full gender equality and the elimination of gender discrimination;

 The integration and full participation of women in development;
 An increased contribution by women in the strengthening of world peace

The World Conference of the International Women's Year, Recognizing that women of
the entire world, whatever differences exist between them, share the painful experience of
receiving or having received unequal treatment, and that as their awareness of this
phenomenon increases they will become natural allies in the struggle against any form of
oppression, such as is practiced under colonialism, neo-colonialism, zionism, racial
discrimination and apartheid, thereby constituting an enormous revolutionary potential for
economic and social change in the world today.

Copenhagen Conference 1980

145 Member States gathered for the mid-decade World Conference of the United
Nations Decade for Women in Copenhagen. It aimed to review progress in implementing the
goals of the first world conference, focusing on employment, health and education. A
Programme of Action called for stronger national measures to ensure women’s ownership and
control of property, as well as improvements in protecting women’s rights to inheritance, child
custody and nationality.

This Conference recognized that there was a disparity between women's guaranteed
rights and their capacity to exercise them. Participants identified three spheres in which
measures for equality, development and peace were needed:

 Equal access to education;

 Equal access to employment opportunities;
 Equal access to adequate health care services.

Nairobi Conference 1985

The World Conference to Review and Appraise the Achievements of the UN Decade for
Women took place in Nairobi. The conference’s mandate was to establish concrete measures to
overcome obstacles to achieving the Decade’s goals. Participants included 1,900 delegates
from 157 Member States; a parallel NGO Forum attracted around 12,000 participants.
Governments adopted the Nairobi Forward-Looking Strategies for the Advancement of Women,
which outlined measures for achieving gender equality at the national level and for promoting
women’s participation in peace and development efforts.

The Nairobi Conference was mandated to seek new ways of overcoming obstacles for
achieving the objectives of the Decade: equality, development and peace.

Three basic categories were established to measure the progress achieved:

 Constitutional and legal measures;

 Equality in social participation;
 Equality in political participation and decision-making.

The Nairobi Conference recognized that gender equality was not an isolated issue, but
encompassed all areas of human activity. It was necessary for women to participate in all
spheres, not only in those relating to gender.

Beijing Conference 1995

The 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing marked a significant turning
point for the global agenda for gender equality. The Beijing Declaration and the Platform for
Action, adopted unanimously by 189 countries, is an agenda for women’s empowerment and
considered the key global policy document on gender equality. It sets strategic objectives and
actions for the advancement of women and the achievement of gender equality in 12 critical
areas of concern:

 Women and poverty

 Education and training of women
 Women and health
 Violence against women
 Women and armed conflict
 Women and the economy
 Women in power and decision-making
 Institutional mechanism for the advancement of women
 Human rights of women
 Women and the media
 Women and the environment
 The girl-child

The Beijing conference built on political agreements reached at the three previous global
conferences on women, and consolidated five decades of legal advances aimed at securing the
equality of women with men in law and in practice. More than 17,000 participants attended,
including 6,000 government delegates at the negotiations, along with more than 4,000
accredited NGO representatives, a host of international civil servants and around 4,000 media
representatives. A parallel NGO Forum held in Huairou near Beijing also drew some 30,000
participants.

Follow-up to Beijing

2000: The General Assembly decided to hold a 23rd special session to conduct a five-
year review and appraisal of the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action, and to
consider future actions and initiatives. “Women 2000: Gender Equality, Development, and
Peace for the Twenty-First Century” took place in New York, and resulted in a political
declaration and further actions and initiatives to implement the Beijing commitments.

2005: A 10-year review and appraisal of the Beijing Platform for Action was conducted
as part of the 49th session of the Commission on the Status of Women. Delegates adopted a
declaration emphasizing that the full and effective implementation of the Beijing Declaration and
Platform for Action is essential to achieving the internationally agreed development goals,
including those contained in the Millennium Declaration.

2010: The 15-year review of the Beijing Platform for Action took place during the
Commission’s 54th session in 2010. Member States adopted a declaration that welcomed the
progress made towards achieving gender equality, and pledged to undertake further action to
ensure the full and accelerated implementation of the Beijing Declaration and Platform for
Action.

2015: In mid-2013, the UN Economic and Social Council requested the Commission on
the Status of Women to review and appraise implementation of the Platform for Action in 2015,
in a session known as Beijing+20. To inform deliberations, the Council also called on UN
Member States to perform comprehensive national reviews, and encouraged regional
commissions to undertake regional reviews.

Feminist Movements in Pakistan

 Feminism in Pakistan is a set of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and

defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women
in Pakistan.
 It is the pursuit of women's rights within the society of Pakistan. Like their feminist
counterparts all over the world, feminists in Pakistan are supposed to seek gender
equality: the right to work for equal wages, the right to equal access to health and
education, and equal political rights.
 Feminist and women's rights consciousness in Pakistan has historically been shaped in
response to national and global reconfiguration of power including colonialism,
nationalism, dictatorship, democracy and the Global War on Terror.
 The relationship between the women's movement and the Pakistani state has
undergone significant shifts, from mutual accommodation and a complementary ethos to
confrontation and conflict.

History of Feminist movements in Pakistan

  After independence, elite Muslim women in Pakistan continued to advocate women's
political empowerment through legal reforms.
 They mobilized support that led to passage of the Muslim Personal Law of Sharia in
1948, which recognized a woman's right to inherit all forms of property.
 They were also behind the futile attempt to have the government include a Charter of
Women's Rights in the 1956 constitution.
 The 1961 Muslim Family Laws Ordinance covering marriage and divorce, the most
important socio-legal reform that they supported, is still widely regarded as empowering
to women.
 In 1947, Muslim women did not have it easy; they were some of the worst victims of the
traumatic events that took place in the South Asian region in the mid-20th century.
 It's reported that 75,000 women were abducted and raped during the partition, sooner
after Pakistan's Independence Fatima Jinnah took part in refugee relief work and formed
the Women's Relief Committee during the transfer of power, which evolved into the All
Pakistan Women s Association.
 Later on Fatima Jinnah set up a secret radio station to running for president when it was
perceived to be a man's role.
 Begum Ra'na Liaquat Ali Khan helped the refugees who fled India during partition and
also organized the All Pakistan Women's Association in 1949, two years after the
creation of her country.
 Noticing that there were not many nurses in Karachi, Khan requested the army to train
women to give injections and first aid. This resulted in the para-military forces for
women.
 Nursing also became a career path for many girls.
 She continued her mission, even after her husband was assassinated in 1951, and
became the first Muslim woman delegate to the United Nations in 1952.

Second Phase

 End of 1970's started a new wave of political Islamization in many Muslim majority
countries. In Pakistan a military dictatorial regime of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq came into
power and introduced several laws for more Islamization of Pakistan called Hudood
Ordinances It replaced parts of the British-era Pakistan Penal Code, adding new criminal
offences of adultery and fornication, and new punishments of whipping, amputation, and
stoning to death.
 (After much controversy and criticism only parts of the law were considerably revised in
2006 by the Women's Protection Bill.)
 As a reaction to patriarchal rigid form of Zia's Islamization, many Pakistani women from
diverse fields like writers, academics, performers became active to oppose women
denigrating policies of General Zia.
 Younger generation of 1980's women activist were more feminist in their outlook and
approach on one hand; Women's Action Forum used "progressive interpretations of
Islam" to counter the state's patriarchal version of religion and morality, and in doing so,
succeeded in getting unexpected support of right wing Islamic women's organizations,
too.
  The WAF and its associates mass demonstrated against a number of laws and issues
throughout the early 1980s. They campaigned through various outreach approaches like
newspaper articles, art, poetry, and songs in schools and universities.
 Feminist work in Pakistan cuts across all sectors of civil society: education, health,
poverty, domestic violence, rape, denial of rights and legal/ political reform through
range of women's movements.

Third Phase 1988–1999

 Post General Zia period, While Pakistan got its first woman prime minister in form
Benazir Bhutto, that helped create some positive image for Pakistan, and she made
some small efforts here and there like all women police station & appointing women
judges first time; she could not succeed in repealing anti women laws of General Zia era.
 Post-Zia era (1988-1999), activists produced research that focused on increasing
women's political voice and strengthening inclusive democratic governance.
 They have also produced some of the first research and awareness-raising material on
sexual and reproductive rights,5 environmental issues, and citizen-based initiatives for
peace between India and Pakistan.

2000–2010

 While it is still more time i.e. 2006 to water down General Zia's some of ordinances and
quite a long time to effect any social change; after September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks
in USA & subsequent global war on terrorism, obviously along with global political Islam,
Afghanistan, Pakistan's socio-political structures also came under global attention.

Aurat March 2019

 Aurat March 2019 was one of the most exciting feminist events in recent years. Its
sheer scale, magnitude, diversity and inclusivity were unprecedented.
 Women belonging to different social classes, regions, religions, ethnicities and sects
came together on a common platform to protest the multiple patriarchies that control,
limit and constrain their self-expression and basic rights.
 From home-based workers to teachers, from transgender to queer all protested in their
unique and innovative ways. Men and boys in tow, carrying supportive placards, and the
marchers reflected unity within diversity, seldom seen in Pakistan’s polarised and
divisive social landscape.
 Aurat March 2019 also marks a tectonic shift from the previous articulations of feminism
in Pakistan. It would not be far-fetched to say that it has inaugurated a new phase in
feminism, qualitatively different from the earlier movements for women rights.
 While the past expressions of feminism laid the foundation for what we see today, the
radical shift of feminist politics from a focus on the public sphere to the private one from
the state and the society to home and family manifests nothing short of a revolutionary
impulse.
  Feminism in Pakistan has come of age as it unabashedly asserts that the personal is
political and that the patriarchal divide between the public and the private is ultimately
false.

The new wave of feminism includes people from all classes, genders, religions, cultures
and sects without any discrimination or prejudice.
 The young feminists are diverse, yet inclusive, multiple yet one. There are no leaders or
followers they are all leaders and followers.
 The collective non-hierarchical manner of working and the refusal to take any funding is
similar to the functioning practised by WAF and represents continuity with the past.
 But the entire framing of the narrative around the body, sexuality, personal choices and
rights is new.
 The young groups of women say openly what their grandmothers could not dare to think
and their mothers could not dare to speak.

Feminism through art and literature

 Some of early twentieth century Urdu feminist writer were common to south Asia i.e.
India and Pakistan. Rashid Jahan (1905–1952) was an Indian writer who inaugurated a
new era of Urdu literature written by women with her short-stories and plays specially
she was well remembered for her groundbreaking and unconventional short stories
depicting sexual agency of women in collection Angaaray (1931).
 The book railed against social inequity, hypocritical maulvis and the exploitation of
women in a deeply patriarchal society. Of the two pieces that Jahan contributed to
Angaaray, one was a short story barely three pages long Dilli ki Sair is a little narrative
about a burqa-clad women watching life on a railway platform waiting for her husband to
turn up and take her home.
 The story is a brief but penetrating meditation on life behind the 'veil' and the blindness
of male privilege towards the experience of women behind the purdah. The other piece,
Parde Ke Peeche, is a conversation between two women from affluent, sharif
(respectable) families.
 Since then Muslim orthodox clergy in the united India opposed publishers had to
withdraw the book & then British government too preferred to ban for its own political
convenience.
 Ismat Chughtai Beginning in the 1930s, she wrote extensively on themes including
female sexuality and femininity, middle-class gentility, and class conflict, often from a
Marxist perspective.
 According to S.S.Sirajuddin in Encyclopedia of Post-Colonial Literatures in English
expresses reservations about availability of free space for feminism in Pakistan & feels
that nation space is much affected by religious fervor. Still it admits that awareness of
feminist concerns & changing role of women & their identity do exist in Pakistan, and
these concerns get reflected in Pakistan's English literature.
 Perception & intervention of major female character can be observed in novels like Bapsi
Sidhwa, Sara Suleri's Meatless Days. Whereas Pakistani poets like Maki Kureishi, Hina
Imam, Alamgir Hashmi, Taufiq Rafat are sensitive but restrained in their portrayal.
 One of the pioneers of women's liberation in Pakistan was actually a man from
Lollywood (Pakistan's film industry). The first feminist film was called Aurat Raj
(Women's Rule). It was released in 1979. It was a huge droop at the box-office despite
the fact that it was made and released in an era when the Pakistan film industry was
dotted by thousands of cinemas and a huge cinema-going audience.