Write short note with a sociological perspective: Stages of the Women’s movement in India. (2011)
Sociologically the Indian women’s movement is best read as a shift in who speaks: from reform about women, to women speaking for women, to a contest over who the collective “we” includes.
Stage one — social reform (c. 1820–1900)
Women were the object of male-led reform. Raja Rammohun Roy campaigned against sati (abolished 1829); Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar secured the Widow Remarriage Act, 1856; Jyotirao Phule and Savitribai Phule opened a school for girls in 1848; E. V. Ramasamy‘s self-respect marriages from 1928 attacked marriage as a sacrament. Kumari Jayawardena (Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, 1986) notes that reform served civilisational self-definition as much as women.
Stage two — nationalist mobilisation (1900–1947)
Women’s own organisations appeared — the Women’s Indian Association (1917) and the All India Women’s Conference (1927) — pressing for education, suffrage and legal capacity. Mass participation in Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi‘s campaigns expanded women’s public space, though Govind Kelkar judged their role to be that of helpers rather than comrades.
Stage three — accommodation (1947–early 1970s)
Constitutional equality and a welfare approach, institutionalised through bodies such as the Central Social Welfare Board (1953), absorbed the agenda; autonomous mobilisation subsided even as women joined the Shahada adivasi struggle, the anti-price-rise front in Maharashtra and Gujarat, and the Self Employed Women’s Association founded in 1972. The state treated women as beneficiaries of development rather than as a political constituency.
Stage four — the autonomous women’s movement (1975–1980s)
Towards Equality (1974) exposed a falling sex ratio and declining work participation. The Mathura judgment (1979) produced the anti-rape campaign and the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1983; campaigns followed on dowry, sati and sex-selective abortion. Radha Kumar (The History of Doing, 1993) chronicles this stage. Jana Everett‘s distinction between corporate and liberal feminism captures its two strands — upliftment and equal rights.
Stage five — fragmentation and institutionalisation (1990s onwards)
The Shah Bano controversy (1985) and Mandal broke the assumption of a single “woman”. Uma Chakravarti‘s brahmanical patriarchy (1993) and Sharmila Rege‘s Dalit feminist standpoint made caste central, while Srila Roy (2015) identifies NGOisation as professionalising activism. Gains became statutory — the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act 2013, the 106th Amendment 2023 — and protest moved partly online, as in the Me Too wave of 2018.
Conclusion
Each stage widened the subject of the movement without dissolving the previous one. The unfinished task is material: female labour force participation was 40.0% in the Periodic Labour Force Survey, January–December 2025, and women hold 13.6% of seats in the 18th Lok Sabha.