Discuss the major recent social movements related to the physical rights of women in various countries of the world. (2024, 20 Marks)
Women’s physical rights mean bodily integrity: freedom from violence, reproductive control, and autonomy over dress and sexuality. John Rawls held in A Theory of Justice (1971) that natural facts are neither just nor unjust; justice lies in how institutions treat them. Recent movements apply that test to the female body, and they share a form: digital, leaderless and transnational.
Against sexual violence and femicide
- #MeToo: begun by Tarana Burke for survivors in marginalised communities, it went viral in 2017, turning individually deniable accounts into an undeniable pattern. Local variants range from China’s censorship-dodging #MiTu to Japan’s #KuToo against compulsory high heels.
- France after the Pelicot trial: Gisèle Pelicot’s insistence on a public trial (51 men convicted, December 2024) made “shame must change sides” a rallying cry; on 29 October 2025 the Senate gave final approval, 327–0, to a consent-based definition of rape.
- Ni Una Menos (“not one woman less”), Argentina, 2015, turned femicide into a public category and drove its criminalisation across Latin America; Kenya’s femicide marches (January 2024) echoed it. The need persists: UN Women and UNODC estimate about 50,000 women and girls killed by partners or relatives in 2024, some 137 a day.
- India: the 2018 #MeToo wave forced a minister’s resignation; the R. G. Kar rape and murder in Kolkata (August 2024) brought doctors’ protests nationwide and a Supreme Court task force on health-worker safety; the Justice Hema Committee report (August 2024) exposed harassment in Malayalam cinema. The marital rape exception remains under challenge.
Reproductive autonomy
- Marea Verde (Green Wave): the green-headscarf campaign won Argentina’s law legalising abortion up to 14 weeks (in force January 2021); Colombia decriminalised up to 24 weeks in 2022 and Mexico’s Supreme Court struck abortion from the federal penal code in 2023. Moving south to north, it refutes the claim that feminist gains are Western exports.
- Poland: the October 2020 Constitutional Tribunal ruling against abortion for foetal abnormality triggered the All-Poland Women’s Strike; the government later fell, yet the law was not liberalised.
- United States: Dobbs (2022) overturned Roe v. Wade; after the 2024 election some American women borrowed South Korea’s 4B refusals (of marriage, childbirth, dating and sex with men), withdrawal where institutions seem closed.
Dress and public presence
- Iran, “Woman, Life, Freedom” (2022): the death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, held over her hijab, set off the gravest challenge to the Islamic Republic since 1979. Repression crushed the street phase, but the Hijab and Chastity law was suspended in December 2024, and amid the 2026 war enforcement eased: unveiled women are now common in Tehran, though the law is unchanged.
- Afghanistan: with girls barred from school beyond primary level, activists campaign to codify “gender apartheid” as a crime against humanity; on 8 July 2025 the ICC issued warrants for Haibatullah Akhundzada and Abdul Hakim Haqqani for gender persecution.
Assessment
- Strengths: they force bodily harms onto agendas, produce law (femicide statutes, abortion and consent reforms) and build the cross-border feminist solidarity that Chandra Talpade Mohanty roots in the most marginalised women.
- Limits: strong at agenda-setting, weak at institutionalisation; defamation suits absorbed India’s #MeToo, and punitive reflexes such as West Bengal’s death-penalty Aparajita Bill (2024) substitute severity for reform. Backlash is organised too: the US reinstated the Global Gag Rule in January 2025 and widened it in 2026 to bar “gender ideology”.
Conclusion
These movements shift feminism’s centre of gravity from institutions to bodies and from treaties to streets. They won law where they allied with courts and parties, as in Latin America and France, and endure under repression in Iran and Afghanistan; lasting change needs mobilisation joined to law, education and representation.