To celebrate this year’s International Women’s Day, BRAC University and UNESCO Society organised a half day-long event, titled “Women’s Rights in Bangladesh: Myth or Reality?” on March 9.
Being the key speaker of the event, I explained that women’s rights in Bangladesh were both a reality and a myth now, because there needs to be real progress in attaining gender equality in our society.
If we compare the first two decades after our independence, ie 1980s-90s with the following two decades, ie 2000s-2010s, we find that, in many spaces of public and political lives, women’s and young girls’ rights have been asserted.
In education, for example, women’s participation and level of success prove that attaining gender equality is possible.
Women’s increased participation, both in tertiary level education and employment, have helped them to bargain for their positions in personal matters. Women can have better positions in family-decision-making situations and can see themselves as active parts of the society.
Simultaneously, women’s rights are a myth, since inequality between men and women, and among women are on the rise in many places. The patriarchal mind-set to see and treat women as commodities has hardly shifted. The frightening “male gaze” is ubiquitous in both public and private spaces. Domestic violence is more pervasive in our society than we would like to confess, and it happens across society.
Property law is caught between the Muslim law and the constitutional law, in both cases, the right itself is easily ignored.
Many women are not aware of their rights over family property, and tend to depend on their male family members -- father, brother, and son -- to look after their property, and consequently they live on the brink of others’ mercy.
Many highly-educated women still fail to enter the job market since there is hardly any formal mechanism to help women mix career and family life in Bangladesh.
Formal child-care facilities are scarce and expensive, and child protection laws are hardly articulated anywhere. Many women, once married and pregnant, fail to join or return to the job market.
Now, the question one may ask: Why have we achieved women’s rights in a piecemeal and ad-hoc manner? This question has made contemporary feminism a living political movement in many countries with better histories of gender equality than ours. At this point, I think we need to take stock of women’s rights in a global context.
If we consider the history, we find that, from its onset, almost all major consciousness of women’s rights have been a part of, or an outcome of, some other bigger revolution towards human liberty and national identity. For example, the French Revolution of 1789-90 is the watershed event that shaped the oeuvre of modern-day state democracy both in Europe and elsewhere.
The first wave of Western women’s movement was based on the egalitarian ideology of emancipation.
In Britain, Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) and in Germany Theodore Gottlieb von Hippel published On the Civil Improvement of Women (1794) asking for equal rights for women with an anticipation that if women were given what men have taken for granted throughout history, women may attain equality in society.
This liberal notion of feminism is widely endorsed by the main body of international development organisations such as the UN and the World Bank.
The limiting side of this liberal notion is that the issue of women’s rights are subsumed under its umbrella cause, and women only get what the state thinks is legitimate to give them.
Consequently, after the French Revolution when Napoleon designed the French Civil Code, women’s issues were addressed within the framework of granting liberty and equality to every individual.
Yet in reality, women’s guardianship only shifted from church to individual men. Women were not granted their property rights -- they were not allowed to appeal for a divorce, unless the case was strongly proven.
The history of women’s movements in America also shared a similar history of being subsumed under the 19th century anti-slavery and abolitionist movement.
The end of the American Civil Rights movement in 1865 was immediately followed by voting rights for black males, whereas it was not until the 1920s that white women in the US won suffragette.
These suggest that the paths of the women’s rights movements had many detours, and had been sidetracked, both deliberately and inadvertently.
The history of women’s rights in Bangladesh started within its colonial framework. One of its striking features of the 19th century social reform movement in colonial Bengal was the centrality of women’s question to modernise Indian society.
The dream to create a modern India was intertwined with modernising the condition of Hindu women by abolishing the rites of Sati and child marriage and by legalising widow re-marriage.
The 19th century alone brought certain radical changes in women’s status in society, since it was in that century that many Hindu women had education and they, in turn, devoted themselves in expanding girls’ education.
In the 20th century, though, the women’s rights movement was largely subsumed under the anti-colonial/nationalist movement to decolonise the nation.
The turbulent first half of the 20th century saw the rise of various kinds of ideologies, including the continuation of Western liberal modernisation and the rise of both left and right-wing nationalism.
Each of these ideologies embraced questions and issues regarding gender roles from its own ideological and political perspectives, while the main focus was to free the motherland (Bharatmata) from the patriarchal control of the Empire.
By the time Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation, the issue of gender equality and women’s rights had been mainstreamed in many advanced societies and in the international body of development, such as the UN.
The governmental and non-governmental model of women’s empowerment contributed in changing women’s conditions in both urban and rural places in the 1980s-90s, though such changes need to be evaluated within the context of rising Islamic fundamentalism.
The post-1990s eras of democratic governments yielded, and continue to yield, both liberating and restraining results for women and young girls. We are yet to address violence against women in private, public, and virtual places.
This failure is enough to mar all other achievements for women.
This year’s Women’s Day in Bangladesh was dedicated to addressing violence against women in festivals, as an age-old issue surfaced nakedly after the incidents of sexual harassment in the Bangla New Year celebration last year.
As someone involved in academic feminism, I now see young women’s passionate interest to take part in both feminist academic and political engagements.
I see them get engaged in debates and discussions in alternative platforms of local feminism. I see my young students’ eyes when they can find meaning through reading women’s writings.
We forge a spoken and unspoken solidarity based on our shared experiences of being women in Bangladesh.
We believe our journey of solidarity has only started, and we will have to go a long way to make our society safe for all women.