Comment: Basic issues in movements for Gender Justice. (2005, 20 Marks)
Movements for gender justice begin from Simone de Beauvoir’s insight in The Second Sex (1949) that one is not born but becomes a woman: hierarchy between the sexes is socially made and can be unmade. From suffrage to #MeToo they share that diagnosis but divide on causes and remedies, so their basic issues are both substantive (what is unjust) and strategic (how to change it).
Substantive issues
1. Equality or difference. Liberal feminists seek equal rights within existing institutions; critics call this “add women and stir”. Carol Gilligan’s In a Different Voice (1982) valued an ethic of care, while others fear that stressing difference revives the stereotypes used to exclude women.
2. The public/private divide. “The personal is political” carried movements into the home: domestic violence, unpaid labour, marriage and reproduction. Susan Moller Okin showed that the state already shapes the family through law, only from a male vantage point. India’s Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act, 2005 applies the principle, while the marital rape exception survives in criminal law.
3. Bodily integrity. Violence and reproductive choice are the most mobilising issues: the Cairo conference (1994) placed choice above population targets, and the Green Wave, Dobbs (2022) and Iran’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” show the contest continuing.
4. Redistribution, recognition, representation. Nancy Fraser argues that justice needs fair shares of resources (unpaid care, wages, land), equal status for women’s identities, and a voice in decision-making; movements often win one and lose another.
5. Universalism or cultural relativism. Do universal women’s rights override religious and customary law? CEDAW’s reservations cluster on family law, and India’s own declarations protect personal laws. The Shah Bano case (1985) and the triple talaq ruling in Shayara Bano (2017) show the dilemma at home.
Strategic issues
- Who is “woman”? Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality (1989) and Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s critique of the monolithic “Third World woman” deny a single female interest. In India, Gopal Guru’s “Dalit Women Talk Differently” (1995) and Sharmila Rege’s work showed caste and gender as jointly constitutive.
- The state as ally or adversary: the Towards Equality report (1974) opened the Indian movement’s second phase by documenting women’s declining status; Indian campaigns won laws after the Mathura case (1983 amendment) and the Nirbhaya protests (2013 amendment), but reliance on punishment, what Elizabeth Bernstein calls carceral feminism, can sideline prevention and welfare, and Janet Halley’s “governance feminism” asks who pays once feminists hold state power.
- Autonomy or NGO-isation: donor-funded professional bodies may displace mass organisations and depoliticise demands.
- Representation: quotas yield presence quickly, as India’s one-third reservation in panchayats shows, but presence is not power; the Nari Shakti Vandan Adhiniyam (2023) still awaits delimitation after a bill to advance it failed in the Lok Sabha (April 2026).
- Men, masculinities and the trans debate: whether men are partners or the problem, and whether rights rest on sex or gender identity, divide movements today.
The present context
Movements face an organised anti-gender counter-movement that calls equality a Western imposition, and stalled data: the 2026 Global Gender Gap Report projects about 120 years to parity. Yet mobilisation still yields law: France adopted a consent-based definition of rape (October 2025) after the Pelicot trial, and the ICC’s warrants against Taliban leaders for gender persecution (July 2025) strengthen the demand to codify gender apartheid as a crime against humanity.
Conclusion
The basic issues reduce to three questions: what justice requires (equality, difference or transformation), for whom (which women), and through what (state, law, market or autonomous mobilisation). Movements joining grassroots pressure to legal change, as in India’s 1970s–80s campaigns and Latin America’s Green Wave, show that these tensions can be managed, never settled.