How have the women’s movements made the presence of women in every moment felt and more women participation in various fields? Discuss. (2026, 20 Marks)
Alain Touraine reads new social movements as struggles over identity, recognition and the direction a society gives itself rather than over the distribution of goods alone. The Indian women’s movement fits that description: its central achievement has been to change what counts as a public matter, turning women from objects of reform into visible political subjects, and then prising open fields of activity previously closed to them.
Making the private public: how women’s presence came to be felt
- The nineteenth-century reform phase spoke for women — sati, widow remarriage, age of consent. Kumari Jayawardena (Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World, 1986) showed that across Asia the “woman question” was annexed to nationalist self-definition; the reformed woman was proof of civilisational worth.
- The nationalist phase brought women into public space in numbers through Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi‘s mass campaigns, yet Govind Kelkar judged their part to be that of helpers rather than comrades.
- The rupture came with Towards Equality (1974), the report of the Committee on the Status of Women in India, whose member-secretary was Vina Mazumdar. Its evidence of a falling sex ratio and shrinking work participation destroyed the assumption that constitutional equality had settled the matter, and it founded women’s studies as a field.
- The Mathura custodial rape judgment (1979) and the open letter by Upendra Baxi, Lotika Sarkar, Vasudha Dhagamwar and Raghunath Kelkar produced the Forum Against Oppression of Women, Saheli and a nationwide anti-rape campaign. Rape, dowry death and wife-beating moved from family secret to public offence. Radha Kumar (The History of Doing, 1993) reads this as the moment the movement acquired its own voice.
Widening the fields of participation
| Field | Movement demand converted into institution |
|---|---|
| Body and law | Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 1983 — custodial rape, and s.114A of the Evidence Act presuming absence of consent; Criminal Law (Amendment) Act 2013 after the Justice Verma Committee |
| Work | Self Employed Women’s Association (1972) unionised informal workers; Vishaka (1997) guidelines became the Sexual Harassment of Women at Workplace Act, 2013 |
| Property | Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005, and Vineeta Sharma v. Rakesh Sharma (2020) making the daughter a coparcener by birth — the statutory form of Bina Agarwal‘s claim in A Field of One’s Own (1994) that land, not wages, secures bargaining power |
| Politics | 73rd and 74th Amendments (1992): 1.4 million elected women, about 46% of panchayat representatives (2024); the 106th Amendment, 2023 |
| Knowledge | Manushi (1978), Kali for Women (1984) and university women’s studies centres made women producers of knowledge, not only its subject |
| Uniformed service | Secretary, Ministry of Defence v. Babita Puniya (2020) secured permanent commission for women army officers |
Where presence has not yet become power
- Visibility has outrun economic participation. Female labour force participation (age 15+) stood at 40.0% in the Periodic Labour Force Survey, January–December 2025, far below male rates, and much of the recent rise is unpaid family labour.
- One-third reservation under the 106th Amendment is conditional on a census and delimitation; the 18th Lok Sabha (2024) has 74 women members, 13.6%.
- Sharmila Rege‘s Dalit feminist standpoint and Uma Chakravarti‘s account of brahmanical patriarchy (1993) caution that “women’s presence” often means savarna, urban presence, while Dalit and Adivasi women remain spoken about rather than heard.
Conclusion
The movement’s real accomplishment is discursive before it is distributive: it made gender an unavoidable category in law, policy, scholarship and everyday speech, so that women’s absence from any field now requires justification. Converting that presence into power, however, needs what Nancy Fraser calls recognition joined to redistribution — care work counted, land titled, and representation guaranteed rather than promised.