subject: Push Further Movement In India [print this page] Fellow journalist and activist Rajashri Dasgupta agrees, pointing out that, while the status of the majority of
women remains dismal, nobody can deny or ignore the situation today.
For example, every political party feels compelled to include a chapter on women in its manifesto, even if that
amounts to nothing more thank tokenism.
According to her, no other social group has been as successful in pressing for new laws and amendments to old
ones.
The challenge now, she says, is to push further and wider so that the benefits are shared by our poorer and more
disadvantaged sisters'.
Everyone agrees that feminism has come to mean different things to different people.
Even so, the ingredients of a possible common minimum platform are highlighted by scholar and activist Srilatha
Batliwala ina recent publications.
To begin with, she says, feminists now stand not only for gender equality, but for the transformation of all
social relations of power that oppress, exploit, or marginalize any set of people, women and men, on the basis of
their gender, age, sexual orientation, ability, race, religion, nationality, location, class, caste, or ethnicity.
We do not seek simplistic parity with men that would give us the damaging privileges and power that men have
enjoyed, and end in losing many of the so-called feminine' strengths and capacities that women have been
socialized to embody.
But we seek a transformation that would create gender equality within an entirely new social order-one in which
both men and women can individually and collectively live as human beings in societies built on social and
economic equality, enjoy the full range of rights, live in harmony with the natural world, and are liberated from
