Recasting Citizenship for Development - File UPI

Recasting Citizenship for Women’s Livelihood and Development 11
It is woman’s right to rule the home. Man is the master outside it. Man is
the earner, woman saves and spends. Woman looks after the feeding of the
child. She shapes its future. She is responsible for building its character.
She is her children’s educator and hence, Mother to the Nation. (Joshi
1988: 14–15)
Gandhi felt that this ‘scheme of Nature’ was just and that while women
should not be ‘kept in ignorance and under suppression’, they should not
have to earn their living as telegraph clerks, typists or compositors in
printing presses. After a certain age, women ‘should be taught the management
of the home, the things they should or should not do during
pregnancy and the nursing and care of children’. Gandhi’s views on women’s
social and political participation evolved over time, but his views on
women’s education remained much the same.
According to Sarkar (1984: 99), Gandhi astutely blended the ‘religious
content of nationalism’ with feminine virtues of gentility, patience and
sacrifice. Gandhian non-violence had a particularly feminine ambience,
enabling women to join the freedom struggle without upsetting the essential
structure of patriarchy. Gandhi’s patriarchal views were not critiqued
even by such stalwarts of the women’s movement as Sarojini Naidu. As
Hardiman (2004: 122) suggests, the ‘negative elements’ of Gandhi’s patriarchy
‘were outweighed by the positive social and political benefits he
helped achieve for women’. Thus, the Indian woman took ‘her place as a
worthy yet subordinate citizen of the nation’ (ibid.: 105). After independence,
government policies and programme approaches to women’s education
and work extolled women’s role in nation-building but denied them
rights as full citizens.
Unlike middle-class, upper-caste urban women, in most parts of rural
India, the traditional work of poor women, forest-dwellers, peasants and
artisans has never been confined to the domestic sphere. In the various
pre-independence struggles for resources (as for forest produce in the
Kumaon Himalayas in present-day Uttarakhand), women saw the livelihoods
of their communities at stake, but rarely raised gender-specific
issues within their campaigns, with the only exception of issues like male
drunkenness and alcoholism. In the revolutionary Tebhaga movement
(1946–47) for rights over the produce of land in pre-Partition Bengal,
women peasants participated in large numbers in the struggle, and in
some locations emerged as leaders (see Custers 1987). Peasant women