Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

8 SUMI KRISHNA
She says further that: ‘Within the logics of biological and cultural racism,
indigenous people, other people of color and illiterate meztiso (mixedrace)
campesinoes (peasants) have been considered unfit to take on rights
and responsibilities of citizenship’. Until the mid-twentieth century, full
citizenship and formal decision-making was restricted to elite, educated
white men who owned property.
In late nineteenth-century Europe and North America, the struggle
for suffrage, the right to vote and stand for election was at the centre of
the ‘first wave’ of the modern women’s movement. The suffrage movement
gained ground as women took on new roles, erasing some of the conventional
gendered demarcations of separate spheres of work during and
after World War I (1914–18) and following the Russian Revolution (1917).
In 1918, the British Parliament granted a conditional right to vote to
women over the age of 30 who were householders, wives of householders,
occupiers of property with an annual rent of five British pounds and
graduates of British universities. A decade later in 1928, women’s suffrage
was granted on equal terms as men. During the ‘second wave’ of
women’s struggles for liberation and equality in the 1970s, feminists
argued that the very concept of citizenship was gendered and, furthermore,
that the exclusion of women was central to the processes of nationbuilding,
indeed to the very conception of the nation (see Yuval-Davis
1997a, 1997b).
In British India, the struggle for women’s rights emerged in the context
of self-governance for India within the Empire (Forbes 1998; see also
Chatterjee 1989; Sangari and Vaid 1989). In 1918, Sarojini Naidu attempted
to persuade the Indian National Congress of the scientific and political
rationality of extending the franchise to women, arguing that political participation
was a human right, while proffering the assurance that it would
‘never’ affect women’s traditional roles and femininity. She said:
We ask for the vote, not that that we might interfere with you in your
official functions, your civic duties, your public place and power, but rather
that we might lay the foundation of national character in the souls of the
children that we hold upon our laps, and instil into them the ideals of
national life. (Cited in Forbes 1998: 94)
When the women’s organisations emerged to articulate the demand for
franchise and legal reforms (as in the Hindu law on property rights), the