“We are still not enlightened but we are living in the age of enlightenment.” These are the words of the Renaissance philosopher Immanuel Kant. It is a fact that Renaissance was self-conscious and was a new dawn in the history of Europe that resulted in the liberation of reason from the tyranny of medieval scholasticism. With the dawn of the 20th century, feminist movements swept across the new industrialised Europe, demanding equal social, political and economic rights for women. In this regard, feminist movements via women rebellion against patriarchy marked itself as one of the inherited legacies of the age of enlightenment.
Basically, it was the consciousness of modernity among women who opposed traditions. It was the modernity of bourgeoisie civilisation, and presented itself as a new form of modernity that gave birth to mass feminist movements. Today, we are experiencing the ‘Third Wave’ of feminism, which is also known as neo-liberal or hyper-modern feminism, whose demands superseded from the base to superstructure. Sociologists like Daniel Bell predicted this crisis two years earlier before the dawn of the post-feminist discourse. In his famous book The Cultural Contradiction of Feminism, Bell asserts: “The popular bourgeoisie culture across the world is on the brink of collapse. So the contemporary scene presents some signs of possible revolutions.”
Then the question arises: why crisis not revolution? The context of crisis is very clear across the global south where feminists are not targeting the colonial indulged patriarchy but are rather targeting the agency of men. According to Frantz Fanon: “At the individual level, violence is the cleansing force, it frees the colonised subject from his inferiority complex, from despair and inaction.”
But in the global south, there is a dilemma of true consciousness of feminism, where half of the women population is still living in rural areas, striving for basic rights such as health and basic education. A small chunk of urban feminists is promoting pseudo-bourgeoisie culture instead of focusing on the formation of a mass feminist movement, which must include a sound feminist intelligentsia, strong feminist lobbying, rural-polity groups and acculturation groups. Even in a country like America, proper patterns were followed to mobilise women to challenge the conservative patriarchal norms.
It was in the 1920s when American women won the right to vote after the nineteenth amendment was passed. With the approval of women franchise, the typical American thought that the nation was done with women issues. But fifty years later, the revolt was stronger than before. In 1961, it was Eleanor Roosevelt, wife of late president Franklin D Roosevelt, and Esther Peterson of the women bureau, who urged President John Kennedy to establish the short-lived commission on women. Based on that commission’s report that evaluated the level of violence, the National Organisation for Women (NOW) was established. Thank you to Eleanor Roosevelt and Esther Peterson for establishing a political platform to promote the idea of women agency at the national level.
With the dawn of the 20th century, feminist movements swept across the new industrialised Europe, demanding equal social, political and economic rights for women
In the global south, which is still hampered with colonial based patriarchal culture and traditional orthodoxy, the consciousness of ‘women agency’ is even absent among the feminists. And hence the fact cannot be denied that in the colonial times, the images of white women were socially constructed to protect the colonial power structure from the threats of native men. In this regard, the feminists of the global south need to focus on the post-colonial social reconstruction of women that confers the belief that “women are not oppressed by being female (biologically) but by the social and cultural powers, which generate the notion of femininity.” Perhaps, the global south needs a new feminist ideology with new abolitionist and suffrage women agency that must target the power structure of patriarchy not the agency of men.
However, it was the surge of the concept of cosmopolitan modernity (one of the dormant legacies of the colonial rule) that gave birth to the existential crisis of feminism across the global south. Likewise, if we further deconstruct the feminism of the global south in the Sartrean discourse, there are four major protagonists involved in the drama of feminism: the anti-patriarch, the democrat, the inauthentic woman and the authentic woman.
The anti-patriarch woman constructs a woman in the light of ruthless patriarchy. The democrat loves the women as a human being and demands the rights, but at the same time, annihilates a woman in her specification as an agency. The inauthentic woman either produces or reproduces herself through the gaze of anti-men, and this inauthenticity is the outcome of the situation that perpetuates counter-discrimination. Finally, comes the authentic woman who either rejects or accepts her situation and does not seek the avenues of flight but rather strives for the feminist praxis to generate new theories in order to challenge the power structure.
In the post-feminism age, the global south needs the anti-patriarch and authentic women, who should revisit the history of feminism to foment the feminist revolution. Therefore, the time has approached when the feminist of the global south needs to revisit the feminist literature such as The Second Sex of Simon de Beauvoir and The Feminism and Suffrage of Ellen Carol Debois. In a nutshell, the feminists of the global south must focus on the praxis to challenge the constructed colonial structure of patriarchy instead of targeting the agency of men.
The writer is a postgraduate student of Politics and International studies, and a freelance writer with a keen interest in History, Current Affairs, Geopolitics and International Political Economy. He can be reached on Twitter: @rahimabbas