Hi Shan, Stephanae and Karen,
Reading Shan's position, I would just like to say a few things. I must
however state right at the outset  that I look at it more from an Indian
perspective and how all of this has affected the woman here in India.

While you say that woman needed to be 'one of the boys' or better than them,
it is very important to take stock now to see where we are heading and
whether that is really where we want to go.
I can understand the situation you faced earlier and even your mother. That
IS the situation in India at present. Women , and even educated ones at
that, do not have much rights. Female feotus' are being killed, just because
they are female. ( I know of 2 ladies within my extended family who were
given ultimatums by their husbands that they had to go in for a sex
determination test at 3 months pregnancy and abort if its a girl. Ironically
these are "educated ' men who said this, and their mothers fully endorsed
it). Sex detemination tests are banned in the country but that has not made
much of a difference. The girl child , the woman are routinely treated as
second class citizens.
Now for the emancipated urban woman, so to say. There are routine
matrimonial advertisements that now not only ask for " fair, beautiful
homely, convent educated females' but also holding jobs. A number of
advertisements will also specify the kind of professional qualifications the
woman should hold. ( you got to read these to believe these).
So the sad part is that while women are thinking they are independent , they
actually are not.
When women meet, the routine question is "Are you working." Meaning are you
working outside the home. So while my mother or grandmother 's self worth
was tied up to the home and hearth, I , or all the "free' women sense of
self worth is tied with the jobs. is this not similar to 2 men meeting who
try to size each other up by the jobs they hold. Is this now also not true
of women ?Family work has no dignity today for the woman.
For me feminism should be choices. For the worth of a woman being in who she
is herself. She should have choices, choices SHE makes herself and where she
is valued for it. Where she doesn't have to defend her stand of staying at
home or working.
A lot of this also depends on the culture we come from. When women start
thinking that they are "worth it', that will be a victory. Today's urban
male who might not find jobs will still look for a working woman as a
spouse, not because he loves her but that is a meal ticket. The Indian
society will still support the male. Divorce is prevalent but the pressures
that a divorced or a single woman faces in this culture is inhuman.
Karen, I think you raised important questions. I think the importance lies
in the mental sense of freedom and the importance of self worth in it all.
As long as we go around asking for worth we will not get it or we will
continue playig the games by rules somebody else makes. I need to find value
in myself and to reach out and affirm the other simply because they are who
they are.
As for me, I find my worth comes from my Christian faith which tells me that
BOTH man and woman were created in God's image and that there are facets of
the image of God that the woman has, that men don't and vice-versa. BOTH man
and woman demonstrate different charecteristics/ nature of God .NO ONE is
any more or any less . they are differently made and are of EQUAL value and
DIGNITY. It was the reason why I changed my religion. My parents are
orthodox conservative Hindus.I find the source of my strength in Jesus
Christ and the fact that I broke from the "faith of my fathers' has now
given me the freedom to raise and ask questions that are uncomfortable and
at times painful.. These questions however need to be answered.

Let us hope to be able to make a difference in our world.

Best wishes,
Geeta

-----Original Message-----
From: Shan <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Sunday, November 19, 2000 12:49 PM
Subject: Re: machismo


>Reading Geeta's position I felt strong agreement but I think the
>current problems are best viewed in historical context if we are
>not to despair..
>My own research has outlined how the many forms of 70s early 80s
>feminism (which I was part of) narrowed to two major efforts.
>These were
>1) respecting women's diversity of 'race' class sexuality etc - a
>crucially necessary development, but one that sacrificed much of
>the primary thrust in the unifying idea of "we are all women and
>as such, oppressed, and can work together for our common needs"
>which had sparked the 2nd wave of feminism. I think we are now
>absorbing diversity and beginning to refocus our unity.
>2) breaking down the barriers to public voice, participation and
>ownership by women, so that we could use these resources to
>create better social justice.
>
>As I see it there was no alternative to fighting the lads at
>their own game. Most women were then firmly held in home based
>work with little or no power in their communities. Women who had
>to either get the consent of their men to attend a women's
>meeting!!! or deceive him on what they were doing!!! or lived in
>constant strife designed to exhaust and subordinate them in the
>home - such women were the majority and had pathetically little
>power to change anything in public society. Not least we had to
>fight the insidious idea that "women can't ..." - not so much for
>the benefit of showing men that women CAN, as to show *women*.
>We just *had* to get our own money, control over our bodies, and
>learn how to handle committees and other public organisational
>roles.
>
>Well, we have come a long way - no sarcasm here. I'm not denying
>a lot is still to be done and that new complex problems have
>arisen.
>But as a middle aged woman I look back on a girlhood in a world
>where NO ONE had safe reliable birth control, NO ONE had legal
>safe abortions, where women were dying for lack of these things
>not only in the Majority World but in the richest most civilised
>nations in existence too.
>(When I was little my own mother lay dying of an illegal abortion
>and if her own brother had not risked being struck off as a
>doctor to treat her she would have.) When she was then defined as
>risking her life if she got pregnant she could not have a
>sterilisation without her husband's signature.
>There were NO women's refuges and if a wife asked for police
>support against a violent husband they didn't even bother to come
>out to her house. I was among the first young UK women to buy my
>own home without the cosignature of a male guardian, with my own
>mortgage. A married woman could only hold a job if she did very
>lowpaid menial work like cleaning, or of she could keep it a
>secret that she had married. Men routinely interrupted a woman's
>speaking and expected to continue talking. A man doing housework
>was not just rare, but unheard of (my father did some secretly
>which was never mentioned outside the family so as not to shame
>him)
>Etc etc.
>
>We HAD to get a presence in the world outside the home and family
>in order to effect change. It is not surprising that 30 years
>effort to achieve this has involved a narrowing of feminist
>outlook to a mere "equal rights" feminism many of us never
>intended. Achievement means focusing effort, which has a
>narrowing effect.
>
>Now it's well time WITH the power and influence we undoubtedly
>have, to widen our aims once again. Like Geeta I have pride in my
>gender and have no wish to be a male lookalike or functional,
>clone.
>
>Recently I attended a large international academic conference at
>Leeds and observed the sleek well dressed women from all the
>continents meeting, dining together in considerable luxury, and
>commanding the best conference facilities the university had. It
>lasted several days and involved about 50 talks. These were
>mature women used to handling public status and authority, and
>they were comparing notes on how it worked.
>Through it I kept remembering the other time I attended a
>conference in Leeds. Two days of struggling on cheap buses,
>walking miles in the rain, eating jam sandwiches and drinking
>mugs of tea. All of us were UK, all under 35, mostly students,
>keenly aware of how powerless we were. A small stuffy hall with
>splinters in the floor and one microphone.
>Both had their problems. Both threw up fear and sensitivities.
>The recent one was glaringly as much about individual power as it
>was about women. But there is no denying that a lot of those
>women held power and were creating change with it.
>
>Karen I'm not at all sure if there is a significant abdication of
>responsibility by men. A large sector of men are comnparatively
>worse off than women on getting paid work. Employers prefer women
>because we are cheap docile labour (we don't unionise or talk
>back so much) and we're far more willing to take menial work,
>part time work, and short term contract work. There is also the
>growth in the service sector economy, which women are trained/
>socialised to and men are not.
>
>In some areas of Britain there are more women in employment than
>men, for these reasons. Men also lose confidence much faster than
>women because they are so dependent on the breadwinner self
>respect and without it they have no other avenue to self
>confidence. Family work just doesn't signify a vital dignity to
>them as it can to women. Once these men give up any effort
>appears pointless so they become more and more unproductive.
>There is also a great deal more support now for women wanting to
>divorce, or run a family alone from the start. So men lose access
>to families (either deservedly or not).
>Finally there was always a sector of men who dumped their
>fathering duties when it got inconvenient. I don't know any
>research at present that shows this sector has increased.
>