When Women Demanded Their
Birthright
At one extreme were the American militants of the Women’s Lib burning their bras, abolishing nomenclatures like Mr and Mrs, addressing the presiding officer as ‘chairperson’, etc, and at the other were countries like Saudi Arabia…stuck to their own version of the sacred laws which sanction polygamy and require women to live in veiled segregation.
I recall that way back in 1975, over six thousand women and men gathered in Mexico City for the International Women’s Year Conference. It could be divided into two categories: those who came in their own right because of their involvement in movements for women’s emancipation, and those who came through the bedrooms of presidents, prime ministers and eminent politicians. Those who came in their own right were more numerous and did the real work. Those who came through their husbands’ bedrooms made the speeches written for them but stole the limelight.
The chief figures in the ranks of the deserving invitees were Sirimavo Bandaranaike, Ashraf Pahlevi of Iran, Mother Teresa, Gloria Steinem, Betty Frieden, Germaine Greer, Kate Millet, Angela Davis, Jane Fonda, Valentina Tereshkova (the Soviet cosmonaut) and Vilma Espir (the Cuban guerilla fighter). There were also a number of African and Latin American ministers and lady diplomats in this category.
All the Indians were deserving participants. Prabha Rao (40), M.A., Minister for Education, Maharashtra, was the leader. With her were Parvathi Krishnan (nee Kumaramangalam) and Margaret Alva (members of Parliament), Sakina Hassan of Aligarh University, Shyamala Pappu (advocate, Supreme Court), Soonu Kochar of the Council of Cultural Relations, and the vivacious Padma Ramachandran of the I.A.S. who acted as secretary. Two men were attached to the delegation: P. N. Luthra, Secretary of the Department of Social Welfare, who was the think-tank and Srinivasan from the UN office in New York.
The bed-hoppers made the headlines but little else. Why Jehan Sadat for Egypt or Nusrat Bhutto for Pakistan or Imelda Marcos for the Philippines? Why the wives of prime ministers of Guyana or Jamaica? And why Leah Rabin and not Golda Meir from Israel? Even the American delegation had the wife of Senator Jacob Javits as an adviser when her chief qualification was cohabitation with Sake. The point was of more than academic importance. Of the three items to be discussed one was the role of women in maintaining peace. Since these women did not speak independently but echoed the prejudices of their husbands, they made no womanly contribution to peace.
This was abundantly proved by two incidents that took place on the first day. Jehan Sadat was asked whether she would talk to Leah Rabin. She replied with a blunt ‘No’ and used words which her husband would have had he been asked to meet the prime minister of Israel. The other concerned Pakistan and India. Begum Nusrat Bhutto had hoped to be among the elite to address a full house. But the inauguration had been a tiresomely long tamasha with tedious speeches by President Luis Echeverria of Mexico, Kurt Waldheim, Helvi Sipila, Sirimavo Bandaranaike and Imelda Marcos.
When the plenary was reconvened after lunch, the attendance was very thin. Begum Bhutto refused to speak and asked for another time. She was billed to take the rostrum after the tea break. The attendance was even thinner. At the insistence of the Pakistani delegation a special after-dinner session was convened and an unofficial whip sent round the delegation to provide an audience for the wife of the prime minister of Pakistan. By then the Indian delegation had got wind that Begum Bhutto was going to needle India.
Finally when the Begum Sahiba mounted the rostrum to unburden herself of the speech prepared for her by the Pakistani Ministry of External Affairs, she found herself facing the Indian contingent in full force. As far as the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent are concerned, changes in the sexes of the leaders will do little to defuse the tensions that exist.
Indians usually make a good showing at conferences. They have sharp minds, a love for logic-chopping and the gift of the gab. They are at their best in wording resolutions, proposing amendments and lobbying. It is only when the time comes for action that they run out of enthusiasm.
Our delegation had obviously done its homework. Unlike most other nations, we had a commission to examine the status of women and were equipped with its findings. ‘We have our facts and figures at our finger-tips,’ said Luthra. ‘We know what we are up against and will tackle our problems with a sense of reality.’ All of the first day and most of the night Luthra and Parvathi Krishnan were busy on the speech that Prabha Rao was to deliver. What Prabha Rao said did not at first reading sound very revolutionary. But on reading it carefully one noticed that on all the three objectives, viz. Equality, Integration and Peace, she said something which had not been said before.
On Equality. India like many other countries has passed legislation giving women equal rights but, in actual fact, we do not have it because of two reasons. One: that from the time of birth different activities are marked out for boys and girls and inequality gets entrenched in our conscience from childhood. That instead of male-female confrontation there should be co-partnership between the sexes. Second: that the imperative need was to bring about a change in men’s thinking. In actual fact, [there] is truly a [need] for men to change their traditional pattern of thinking.
On Integration. The induction of women at every level and every stage of our development programmes.
On Peace. The Indian argument was not strictly factual about women suffering more in war than men nor in asserting that ‘woman, by nature, is pacifist.’
It was inevitable that attitudes of advanced nations towards the emancipation of women would be different from those of the lesser developed and more tradition-bound societies. At one extreme were the American militants of the Women’s Lib burning their bras, abolishing nomenclatures like Mr and Mrs, addressing the presiding officer as ‘chairperson’, etc, and at the other were countries like Saudi Arabia which refused to send a delegation and stuck to their own version of the sacred laws which sanction polygamy and require women to live in veiled segregation.
It was pointed out by an African delegate that women have rights which they often misuse. He gave an amusing instance from the Cameroons where schools are up against a real problem because women teachers arrange to become pregnant in time to demand maternity leave immediately after the three-month vacations – thus taking a half-year holiday on full pay.
Gloria Steinem squashed such arguments as relics of the past. If a man can get years of military leave, why can’t a woman get some months of maternity leave when she alone is saddled with the task of bringing up the children? Why reward people for training to take life and not for giving life? Bearing a child is a job she is already doing free of charge, why burden her with more?
Gloria Steinem also had a dig at women’s journals which instead of rousing women’s conscience against injustices meted out to them continue to be catalogues of things they can buy and achieve little more than stimulate consumerism. She handed me a copy of her magazine Ms dedicated to 1975 with the banner headline ‘It Is Your Year’. Ms has no ads of textiles, cosmetics or other beauty aids or recipes to reduce weight, menstrual problems, etc., which form the staple diet of women’s journals. But it had its quota of erotics in pictures and articles by Bernadette Devlin, Kate Millet, and of course Gloria Steinem. She inscribed the journal with the barbed inscription. ‘To Mr Singh who will change his opinion about women.’
Did the conference in Mexico succeed in its object of rousing the conscience of mankind against injustices done to women? Hardly. The media took little notice of it. The speeches were tedious, repetitive and added nothing new to our information on the subject. It was also a ‘paternalistic affair’ where though men were few, the male ethos machismo pervaded. And too many of the eminent delegates were wifeypoos who had no business to be there. The women also quarreled amongst themselves. Gloria Steinem was condemned by a radical group as a ‘C.I.A. agent’. One lot screamed at another: ‘bring out your chicanos’ (little girls). But then, all said and done, conferences achieve little beyond pious resolutions. Can the ‘last colony left to the male imperialists’, as Princess Ashraf Pahlevi said, be liberated?.
‘We will win. We are more than half the population of the world,’ said a lady from Nigeria. ‘lnsha Allah!’