How has the independence movement affected the role of women in southern and eastern Asia? What factors are involved? Explain with examples.

 

The women's liberation movement was a collective struggle for equality that was most active during the 1960s and 1970s. It was about women free from oppression and male supremacy. The movement consisted of women's liberation groups, advocacy, protests, fund awareness, feminist theory, and a variety of various individual and collective actions on behalf of women and freedom. The term was created as a parallel to other liberation movements and freedom of time. The root of the idea was a rebellion against the colonial powers or a repressive national government to win the independence of a national group and put an end to oppression.

Parts of the racial justice movement of the time had started calling themselves "black liberation." The term "liberation" does not resonate with the independence of male oppression and supremacy for individual women, but with solidarity among women seeking independence and the elimination of the oppression of women as a whole. It was often carried out in contrast to individualistic feminism. Individuals and groups were tied together loosely by common ideas, although there were also significant differences between groups and conflicts within the movement.

The term "women's liberation movement" is often used synonymously with "women's movement" or "second wave of feminism", although there were actually many different types of feminist groups. Even within the women's liberation movement, women's groups hold different beliefs about organizing tactics and working within the patriarchal establishment could effectively bring about the desired change.

The women's liberation movement is also sometimes seen as synonymous with radical feminism because both were concerned with the liberation of members of society from the oppressive social structure. Both times they have been characterized as a threat to men, particularly when the rhetorical movements about "struggle" and "revolution" are used. However, feminist theorists in general are really concerned with how society can eliminate abusive sex roles. There is more to liberating women from the anti-feminist fantasy than feminists are women who want to eliminate men.

The desire to break free from the oppressive social structure in many women's liberation groups led to infighting with the structure and leadership. The idea of ??full equality and partnership expressed in a lack of structure is credited by many with the weakening power and influence of the movement. Later self-examination and experimentation with leadership models and organization participation was carried out.

The connection to a black liberation movement is important because many of those involved in creating the women's liberation movement had been active in the civil rights movement and the rising black power and black liberation movements. They had experienced loss of power and oppression there as women. The "rap group" as a strategy for awareness within the black liberation movement developed into awareness groups within the women's liberation movement. The Combahee River collectively formed around the intersection of the two movements in the 1970s.

Many feminists and historians trace the roots of the women's liberation movement to the New Left and the civil rights movement of the 1950s and early 1960s. Women who worked in these movements often find that they were not treated equally, even within liberal or radical groups that claimed to fight for freedom and equality. The feminists of the 1960s had something in common with the feminists of the 19th century in this regard: Early women's rights advocates such as Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were inspired to organize for women's rights after having been excluded from men's antislavery societies and abolitionist meetings.

Women have written fiction, non-fiction and poetry about women's liberation movement ideas of the 1960s and 1970s. Some of these feminist writers were Frances M. Beal, Simone de Beauvoir, Shulamith Firestone, Carol Hanisch, Audre Lorde, Kate Millet, Robin Morgan, Marge Piercy, Adrienne Rich, and Gloria Steinem.

In her classic essay on the liberation of women, Jo Freeman observed the tension between the ethics of liberation and Equality of Ethics, "To seek only equality, given the current masculine bias of social values, is to assume that women want to be like men or that men are worthy of to emulate... it is so dangerous to fall into the trap of seeking liberation without due concern for equality ".

The challenge of radicalism versus reformism creating tensions within the women's movement, Freeman goes on to say, "This is a situation that politicians frequently encountered themselves during the early days of the movement. They found the possibility of carrying out the reformists' problems "disgusting," which could be accomplished without altering the basic nature of the system, and therefore, they felt, only strengthened the system. however, the search for action and / or sufficiently radical emission came to nothing and they found themselves unable to do anything for fear that it could be counterrevolutionary. Inactive revolutionaries are far more innocuous than active 'reformists'.

The Women's Liberation Movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminist intellectualism that emerged in the late 1960s and lasted until the 1980s especially in industrialized countries. of the Western world, and that influenced a great transformation (political, intellectual, cultural) throughout the world. The WLM branch of radical feminism, based on contemporary philosophy, was composed of women from racially and culturally diverse backgrounds who argued that, for women to stop being second-class citizens in their respective societies, their economic and psychological freedom was necessary. And social.

In order to make women's equality possible, the WLM questioned the cultural and legal validity of patriarchy and the practical validity of the social and sexual hierarchies that are used to control and limit the physical and legal independence of women in the society. Women's liberationists asserted that sexism — legal discrimination based on sex, formal and informal, with its foundations in the existence of the social construction of gender — was the most important political problem in the power dynamics of their respective societies. . In general, the WLM proposed socioeconomic changes from the political left, rejected the idea that non-systematic equality, within and according to social class, would eliminate sexual discrimination against women, and promoted the principles of humanism, especially the respect for the human rights of all people. In the decades that the Women's Liberation Movement flourished, liberationists successfully changed the way women were perceived in their respective cultures, redefined the political and socioeconomic role of women in society, and transformed the society as a whole.

By the 1970s, the movement had already spread to Asia, with the formation of Women's Liberation organizations in Japan in 1970. The Yom Kippur war raised awareness of the subordinate situation in which Israeli women found themselves , fostering the growth of WLMs. In India, 1974 was a crucial year for the feminist movement, as activists in the Navnirman movement, against corruption and the economic crisis, encouraged women to organize direct action to stand up to traditional leadership.In 1975, Yi Hyo-jae, a professor at Ewha Women's University, introduced the ideas of liberationists to South Korea after reading Western works on the movement, which were first translated He turned to Korean in 1973. Similarly, Hsiu-lien Annette Lu, who had completed her postgraduate courses in the United States, brought liberationist ideas to Taiwan when she returned to the country and began publishing in the mid-1970s.

In Singapore and other Asian countries, great efforts were made to differentiate their movement from the decadent ideals of "free sex" of Western feminism, while also tackling the problems faced by women around the world. In India, the struggle for women's autonomy was almost always linked to the struggle against the caste system, and in Israel, even though their movement was more like the WLMs in the US and Europe, focused more on the oppression of Palestinian women. In Japan, the movement focused on liberating women from societal perceptions that women were limited by their sex, rather than advocating equality. In Korea In the South, the demands of women workers were combined with liberationist ideas in the context of a broader struggle against the dictatorship, while in Taiwan theories of respecting women and eliminating double standards were promoted, intertwining them with Confucian philosophy.

The philosophy of the liberationists took for granted that there was a supportive global sisterhood that was trying to eliminate inequality, and did not take into account that women were not united; There were other factors, such as age, social class, ethnic origin and the opportunities they had (or lack of opportunities), which created different circles in which women had different interests, and therefore some women felt less represented by the WLM.204 Although many women became aware of how sexism was present in their lives, they were not radicalized and were not interested in overthrowing society. They made changes in their lives to address their individual needs and social situations, but were unwilling to take action on matters that could threaten their socioeconomic status. The liberationist theory also failed to identify a difference Fundamental in the fight against oppression: The fight against sexism had an internal component, whereby basic power structures within family units and personal circles could be changed to eliminate inequality. The class struggle and against racism were only external challenges, which needed public measures to eradicate inequality.

The Women's Liberation Movement caused global awareness of patriarchy and sexism, by bringing to light issues that had long been considered private, and by bringing them together to better understand how the systematic repression of women's rights interrelated. women in society, liberationists contributed in an innovative way to feminist theory. Liberationists, wanting to learn about the historical contributions of women, but feeling frustrated in their quest due to centuries of censorship and obstacles to women's intellectual work. Women incorporated the study of power relations, including those on sex and diversity, into the social sciences. They launched women's studies programs and publishing houses to ensure that a more culturally comprehensive study of the history of the complex nature of society was developed.

In order to distance themselves from the policies and ideas of the women of the Liberation Movement, as well as the personal politics that emerged, many second wave feminists distanced themselves from the primitive movement. Meaghan Morris, an Australian scholar studying popular culture, claimed that later feminists could not associate with the ideas and policies of the early period and retain their respect at the same time. But even so, the liberationists managed to make the liberal feminists mainstreams veered much further to the left in their original goals and forced them to include goals to address sex discrimination. Jean Curthoys argued that, in the rush to distance herself from the liberationists, an involuntary amnesia rewrote the history of her movement, and it failed to understand the achievement that, even without having a religious connotation, this movement created an "irreducible ethic of value.

A little over 20 years ago, in 1995, Asia was the scene of one of those moments considered historic for women's rights. In September of that year, representatives of 189 governments along with 30,000 activists and 17,000 other participants met in the capital of China to sign the Beijing Declaration that laid the foundations of the standards to be followed in gender equality, fight against violence against women. gender or equal access to rights such as education or politics, among others.

Two decades later, no country has managed to complete the ambitious goals of the agreement, says the UN, but the continent that gave birth to that declaration has been, for the most part, a worthy representative. "The region has made progress towards gender equality with laws and policies that respond to the specific needs of women and girls," says the United Nations Agency for Women (UNWomen) in its latest report on Asia. "Most of the countries have achieved parity in secondary school and several have a higher attendance rate for girls [...] Maternal and infant mortality have been reduced in most of them and life expectancy has increased. "

But Asia is not an easy region for women. Despite the great economic growth that has been experienced