PHILOSOPHICAL TRENDS IN THE FEMINIST MOVEMENT ANURADHA GHANDY Published by Christophe Kistler
[email protected] This document was originally published by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) in People's March Utrecht, 2016 Europe : 1st printing : 100 copies 2nd printing : 100 copies US : 1st printing : 100 copies ISBN : 9781539419976 This book is under license Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/ CONTENTS PAGE Foreward Introduction 5 13 Overview of Women’s Movement in the West 19 Liberal Feminism - Critique 31 37 Radical Feminism - Sex-Gender System and Patriarchy - Sexuality: Heterosexuality and Lesbianism - Critique 41 48 51 Anarcha-Feminism Eco-Feminism 63 68 Socialist Feminism - Socialist-Feminist strategy for women’s liberation - Critique 75 87 Post-modernism and Feminism 100 Summing up 104 55 92 FOREWORD “….BUT ANURADHA WAS DIFFERENT” ARUNDHATI ROY That is what everyone who knew Anuradha Ghandy says. That is what almost everyone whose life she touched thinks. She died in a Mumbai hospital on the morning of 12 April 2008, of malaria. She had probably picked it up in the jungles of Jharkhand where she had been teaching study classes to a group of Adivasi women. In this great democracy of ours, Anuradha Ghandy was what is known as a ‘Maoist terrorist,’ liable to be arrested, or, more likely, shot in a fake ‘encounter,’ like hundreds of her colleagues have been. When this terrorist got high fever and went to a hospital to have her blood tested, she left a false name and a dud phone number with the doctor who was treating her. So he could not get through to her to tell her that the tests showed that she had the potentially fatal malaria falciparum. Anuradha’s organs began to fail, one by one. By the time she was admitted to the hospital on 11 April, it was too late. And so, in this entirely unnecessary way, we lost her. She was 54 years old when she died, and had spent 5 more than 30 years of her life, most of them underground, as a committed revolutionary. I never had the good fortune of meeting Anuradha Ghandy, but when I attended the memorial service after she died I could tell that she was, above all, a woman who was not just greatly admired, but one who had been deeply loved. I was a little puzzled at the constant references that people who knew her made to her ‘sacrifices.’ Presumably, by this, they meant that she had sacrificed the comfort and security of a middle-class life, for radical politics. To me, however, Anuradha Ghandy comes across as someone who happily traded in tedium and banality to follow her dream. She was no saint or missionary. She lived an exhilarating life that was hard, but fulfilling. The young Anuradha, like so many others of her generation, was inspired by the Naxalite uprising in West Bengal. As a student in Elphinstone College, she was deeply affected by the famine that stalked rural Maharashtra in the 1970s. It was working with the victims of desperate hunger that set her thinking and pitch-forked her into her journey into militant politics. She began her working life as a lecturer in Wilson College in Mumbai, but by 1982 she shifted to Nagpur. Over the next few years, she worked in Nagpur, Chandrapur, Amravati, Jabalpur and 6 Yavatmal, organizing the poorest of the poor — construction workers, coal-min