Literature and varieties of history

Part6

Last week, while discussing some of the charges levelled against the Subaltern Studies Group of historians, I alluded to the absence of gender as a vital factor, at least in their early work. This leads me directly to today’s theme - feminist history. In recent times, say, during the past two decades or so, feminist history has forged ahead in the academy winning new converts and strengthening the hand of the early advocates.

Today, I wish to examine the nature and significance of feminist history as a field of inquiry and a mind-set and make some connections, if I may, with contemporary Sinhala literature.

In order to understand the true nature and significance of feminist history, we need to examine the concept of feminism. Feminist emerged as a social movement in the 1960s, although one can, in Western cultures, trace its roots as far back as the seventeenth century.

Parity

The struggle for equal rights for women, parity of status was at the heart of this social movement. Before long, it began to influence the growth of academic fields of inquiry such as sociology, politics, history, political science, literary studies and cultural studies. Indeed some of the most important developments in literary studies and film studies – two disciplines that I know best – have been shaped and guided by the theories of feminists of diverse persuasions such as Jiulia Kristeva, Judith Butler, Helene Cixous, Laura Mulvey, Elaine Showalter, Mary Anne Doane, Teresa de Lauretis, Nancy Fraser, Linda Nicholson, Denise Riley.

It is, of course, important to remind ourselves that important work in this domain has been undertaken by Indian historians and scholars such as Gayatri Spivak, Kumkum Sangari, Sudesh Vaid and Mrinalini Sinha.

Let us, for example, take literary studies. Literary scholars who drew on, and displayed a partiality for, feminism began to raise insistently questions such as the following: How are women represented in literary texts? Have women writers been given their due?

What is the correlation between the silencing and misrepresentation of women in literature and the widespread oppression of women in society/have women been excluded from the canon? Is literary theory essentially male-dominated enterprise? These and related questions have fuelled the imagination of feminist literary theorists.

All feminists are united by a desire to rearrange society so that women acquire a parity of status. This requires corrective measures in the fields of politics, economics, social structures and culture. What initially began as a social movement quickly acquired the momentum of cutting-edge theory with implications for the arts, humanities and social sciences. So far, broadly speaking, one can identify three waves of feminism.

The first which began in the late nineteenth century and extended into the twentieth century focused on women’s suffrage. The second wave in the 1960s was characterised by a desire for women’s liberation in all spheres.

Feminism

The third wave, which began somewhere in the 1990s was both an extension and a repudiation of the concerns and preoccupations of the second wave. So it is obvious that feminism as a social movement has been growing rapidly as it responds in diverse ways to newer challenges and experiences.

While all feminists share certain fealties in common and wish to promote certain commonly accepted agendas, it is also important to bear in mind that feminism is not one thing but many things.

There are different groups that wish to emphasize different aspects depending on their personal predilections and scale of values they embrace.

For example, early on feminism was largely a white middle class project. This changed as women of colour began to urge a form of feminism that was in keeping with their experiences and which took into account traumatic historical experiences such as colonialism.

Similarly, some feminists felt that heterosexuality should not be promoted as the only available norm and as a consequence lesbian feminists began to voice their concerns.

Similarly there are other groups such as materialist feminists, postmodernist feminists who seek to emphasize their own distinctive interests. All these diverse collectivities, it needs to be pointed out, have contributed significantly to extending the discursive boundaries of feminism and contributing to the richness and variety of feminist theory.

Let us first examine the nature and significance of feminism as a mode of social investigation. Here I wish to pay particular attention to the idea of gender and its usefulness as an analytical tool. Until very recent times gender and biological sex were used as synonymous, and hence gender was regarded purely in biological terms and as a natural given. That it was principally a social construction was never given adequate recognition.

Only in recent times, with the remarkable growth of feminist theory, and the numerous and salutary ways in which it began to influence such diverse fields as literary study, film studies, media studies, cultural studies, has the importance and heuristic value of gender come to be recognised. It needs to be noted that gender is a fundamental organising category of social experience.

Analysis

It is a vial instrument of cultural analysis. Up until recent times, a decidedly masculinist perspective on cultural production which has laboured to convert the masculinist perspective into a universal norm has clearly dominated.

The task of feminist scholars, therefore, has been to uncover the ‘givenness’ and ‘naturalness’ of this domination, and to point out that the inequality among the sexes is indeed a social construction and not a given.

Feminism has played a central role in compelling us to re-think the whole question of gender and its social and political implications. Karen Offen, a well-known feminist scholar, in proposing a thoughtful re-examination and re-understanding of the public approach to feminism, based on the history of the word and its cognates, and on evidence of its use, makes the following observation.

‘I would consider as feminists any person, female or male, whose ideas and actions (in so far as they can be documented) show them to meet three criteria.(1) they recognise the validity of women’s own interpretations of their lived experiences and needs and acknowledge the values women claim publicly on their own as distinct from aesthetic ideas of womanhood invented by men) in assessing their status in society relative to men; (2) they exhibit consciousness of, discomfort at, or even anger over institutionalized injustice (or inequity) towards women as a group by men as a group in a given society; and (3) they advocate the elimination of that injustice by challenging, through the efforts to alter prevailing ideas and/or social institutions and practices, the coercive power, force, or authority that upholds male prerogatives in that particular culture. Thus to be a feminist is to be at odds with male-dominated culture and society.’

It is evident that the social construction of gender and the universalisation of masculine norms take place through the working of ideology. Ideology can be described as the systems of beliefs and assumptions which represents, in the words of Louis Althusser,’ the imaginary relationships of individuals to their real conditions of existence.’ Ideology serves to mask contradictions and impose unreal coherences and deceptive unities.

It is invariably inscribed in discourse and produced and re-produced in cultural practices such as literature and drama and film. It is interesting to explore the subtle ways in which representational codes and conventions in literature and film have been shaped by dictates of ideology.

Gender studies in recent times have aimed to investigate how ‘woman’ is constructed in patriarchal discourses and practices; they also seek to fashion and put into circulation new reading strategies which will uncover these phenomena. This move, as I shall demonstrate later, has great implications for feminist history.

These new reading strategies underscore the need to re-conceptualize and re-formulate the complex relationships among language, signifying practices, social space, power and subjecthood. As a consequence a new and more complexly nuanced understanding of gendered subjectivity has emerged, and this emergence is vitally connected with the forward vectors of feminist history.

Oppression

When we examine the literature on feminism three words that occur with unfailing regularity are oppression, repression and expression. Elaine Showalter, the esteemed feminist writer, somewhat schematically, although I dare say with much justification, assigned these three terms to three different cultural traditions as a way of highlighting their uniqueness.

She remarked that the British feminists with their Marxist orientation focus attention on oppression, while the French feminists with their inordinate interest in psychoanalysis, both Freudian and Lacanian, underline repression, and American feminists with their preoccupation with textuality foreground expression. How about women of colour, feminists from Asia and Africa? I would like to add a fourth term to the pool – suppression.

When we examine the plight of the marginalised women of the developing countries, what we perceive is the subtle way their histories have been suppressed by colonial masters and indigenous elites. This, no doubt, is somewhat schematic and overdrawn; however, it serves to direct our attention to certain important dimensions of feminist thinking.

It is against this backdrop that I wish to discuss the significance of feminist history. Since about the 1970s there has been a persistent and insistent criticism that history was a characteristically male project.

There were few acknowledged feminist historians and that the historical identity of women was not given adequate attention. History books were replete with the actions and reactions of kings, generals, ministers, male thinkers, revolutionaries and inventors; unfortunately, women were totally left out of the picture.

Assuredly, this was a deficiency that needed immediate correction. It was as a reaction to this deeply felt need that feminist history began to take shape. As one feminist historian, Joan Kelly-Gadol aptly remarked, the aim of feminist history was ‘to restore women to history and to restore our history to women.’

Visibility

When we examine the growth of feminist history we can usefully identify two important stages. In the first stage the objective was to document the missing lives of women from history so that a new visibility could be conferred in them. This was a much-needed step. In the second stage, what became apparent was the need to re-theorise, re-imagine, the role of gender in constructing historical narratives thereby re-exploring the very enterprise of history-making.

This move was vitality connected with such issues as the nature of the production of knowledge, the relationship between knowledge and power and the supreme importance of gender as a category of social analysis. This entailed a certain self-reflexivity on the part of historians that served to enliven the field of historical inquiry and historiography.

This new departure also had the salutary effect of creating spaces for new debates and discussions on a variety of themes. In the interests of space, let me focus in three such important debates. The first relates to the distinction between the public and the private sphere. Males are customarily the occupants of the public sphere while females are confined to the private sphere.

Moreover, the work done by females in the private sphere is never regarded as productive work that has vital connection to the economic life of a society as opposed to the public sphere which is valorised as the site of economic activity.

Feminist historians have argued that this is misleading on two counts. First, women have historically played a significant role in the public sphere is only we care to look at it more carefully. Feminist historians have demonstrated cogently that the work accomplished by women in the private sphere has important implications for the economy at large. The role of women in the labour force has been grossly neglected.

Second, the role of women as change agents had received very little attention of mainstream historians. Feminist historians were so keen to change this and focus on various organizations of women, both big and small, that had played a role in social transformation. To strengthen current moves towards liberation of women, it is important to acquire a deep historical perspective and situate current trends in a larger historical framework.

As a consequence of this new mode of thinking scholars have begun to pay greater attention to the symbolic worlds and expressive cultures produced by women. Consequently, feminist historians are increasingly interested in the role of female writers and artists and thinkers who, until recent times, were kept in the margins, if not totally silenced.

Culture

As one commentator noted, modern scholars are focusing on ‘the wealth of material which demonstrates that through the ages women have formulated their own culture and their own symbols. Forms of art and culture are discovered as expressive of female traditions; letters, songs, craft work, patchwork quilts, gossip, diaries, mystical texts…..have been rescued from oblivion and acquired historical importance as part of special cultural traditions of women.’‘

Third, the idea of patriarchy and the power relations that go with it have been subject to intense interrogation by modern feminist historians. It is important to bear in mind the fact that feminism is vitally connected to politics that has as its objective transforming the power relations in society among men and women.

Many feminist historians take as their point of departure the inescapable patriarchal structure of society. This patriarchal structure points to the ways in which, both subtle and not so subtle, in which women’s interests and agendas are subordinated to those of men.

The patriarchal power emanates from the social and cultural meanings we assign to biological sexual differences. What is obvious in patriarchal discourse is that the social roles performed by women and their nature are defined in terms of masculine norms. What feminist historians are seeking to do is to change this situation. Fourth, there has been, in the past few decades, an attempt to look at afresh the whole enterprise of history-making and what issues of knowledge production and problems of representation are involved in it. The identification of sources the critical reading and interpretation of them paying closer attention to silences and slippages have become imperative for feminist historians.

No sources

As one commentator remarked, ‘in this respect, it is crucial for women’s history to refute the argument that the history of women cannot be written because there are no sources. Ingenuity and perseverance showed that the sources for women’s history are inexhaustible. Covering a varied range from diaries to annual accounts, from registers of birth to housekeeping books, from periodicals to student dossiers, from myths and fairy tales to legal sources – if the right questions are asked these sources can uncover suitable new data about the past.’ It seems to me that the motive for asking these ‘right questions’ should be guided by an appreciation of the complexities of critical reading and decoding texts.

There is no doubt that during the last two decades or so, feminist history has attracted a great deal of attention both inside and outside the academia. A number of distinguished historians and commentators, who approach the topic of feminism and history from their distinctive vantage points has appeared on the scene opening up new and interesting pathways of inquiry.

However, it is interesting to note that one of the early commentators who chose to call attention to the imperative need of women’s history was not a historian but a creative writer – Virginia Woolf. In 1929, in her book A Room of One’s Own, she underscored the importance of feminist history. She reflected on the inadequacies of the current historical writings which she saw as ‘a little queer, unreal and lop-sided.’ These are his observations on this theme.

‘What one wants, I thought – and why does not some brilliant student at Newnham or Girton supply it? - is a mass of information; at what age did she marry, how many children had she as a rule; what was her house like; had she a room to herself; did she do the cooking; would she be likely to have a servant? All these facts lie somewhere, presumably, in parish registers and account of books; the life of the average Elizabethan woman must be scattered about somewhere, could one collect it and make a book of .

Ambition

It would be ambitious beyond my daring, I thought, looking about the selves for books that were not there, to suggest to the students of those famous colleges that they should rewrite history, though I own that it often seems a little queer it is, unreal, lop-sided; but why should they not add a supplement to history.

Here, Virginia Woolf is calling upon historians to write history from a feminist viewpoint – her-story rather than his-tory. Modern historians have taken up this challenge and pursued a number of productive paths towards the achievement of this goal. Among these historians and cultural critics,, Sheila Rowbotham, Joan Kelley, Gerda Lerner, Nathalie Zemon Davis, Gisela Bock, Joan Scott, Mary Poovey, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak, deserve special mention.

Clearly, there are many others who have contributed significantly to this ever-widening stream. Of these scholars, later in this column, I wish to focus on the work of Joan Scott. I find her work illuminating, and the way she opts to draw on contemporary literary theory makes her doubly attractive for me.

To be sure, there is no unanimity of opinion among these feminist scholars despite the fact that they are all united by a firm conviction that there should be parity of status among men and women and that this involves a fundamental re-thinking about the relations between men and women. In order to keep the discussion within manageable limits, I would like to focus on three areas in which there is considerable debate. First has to do with the relationship among the concepts woman, sex and gender. There is a tendency to use these terms as if they referenced the same entity; clearly, this is not the case.

As a term of description woman covers a broader range of issues than the other two, while the word sex is denoted to index biological differences the word gender is deployed to point out the social discourses that have gathered around the term sex. However, not all feminist scholars agree with this distinction. For example, the eminent feminist thinker, Judith Butler, who has done important work in the domain of gender and performativity makes the following comment.’

Gender

‘It would make no sense….to define gender as the cultural interpretation of sex, if sex, itself is a gendered category. Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pre-given sex……(but as) the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established.’ I believe Butler is here drawing attention to an important fact that should enter our discussions on sex and gender in a significant way.

In addition, psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan have complicated the situation. Freud said that, ‘it is essential to understand clearly that the concepts of masculine and feminine, whose meaning seems so unambiguous to ordinary people, are among the most confused that occur in science.’

He continued, ‘in human beings pure masculinity or femininity is not to be found either in a psychological or a biological sense.’ Similarly, Jacques Lacan asserted that men and women, contrary to common understandings, were not biological descriptions, but signifiers of the symbolic position assumed by human subjects.’ It is evident that such authoritative statements have resulted in complicating the nature of the discussion of males and females.

The second area in which there is an ongoing discussion regarding gender issues is that of the universal and culture-specific nature of gender. For historians such as Joan Scott, gender is pivotal to the writing of feminist history. For her gender implies knowledge about sexual differences.

It is evident that she has been influenced by the thinking of Foucault because she employs the term knowledge to denote understandings produced by societies and cultures and human interactions between men and women. The way Scott sees it, knowledge signifies not only ideas but also institutions, structures, and everyday practices and specific social rituals which constitute social relationships

In discussing the issue of gender, there seems to be certain divergence of opinion among feminist historians. Those who favour a more politicised approach would like a universalist interpretation of gender while some others who are more interested in social formations and historical conjunctures would like to gloss gender in terms of specific cultural geographies and temporalities.

Joan Scott presents the case for those who subscribe to the latter opinion in the following manner.

‘’but if gender- the unvarying fact of sexual difference – is universal, what, other than biology, can finally explain its universality? If gender means the social forms imposed on existing differences between women and men, then nature (bodies, sex) is left in place as the determining factor of difference.’

Experience

The third area in which considerable discussion has taken place is that of economics and women’s experience. Feminist historians like Jane Lewis have pointed out, historically speaking, the complexities of sexual division of work. It is her conviction that historians, by and large, have tended to perceive ‘work in the family and the work in the labor marker dichotomously.’ and that, ‘women’s position in the family is invoked to explain their position in the labor market’ because ‘work is not thought of as part of the gender order.

Rather, the sexual division of work is made to fit already existing frameworks of application.’ It is this practice that some feminist historians are keen to interrogate and displace. Jane Lewis feels that women’s work was ‘doubly gendered, first being confined to female tasks, whether paid or unpaid, and, second being subordinated to men’s work both at home and in the workplace.’

Certain feminist historians would like to embed the problems associated with gender squarely within the Marxian analysis of capitalist growth, while some others would prefer to operate outside that framework. For example, economists such as Heidi Hartman would argue that it is important that we take into account patriarchy and capitalism as distinct but intersecting systems.

Some feminist historians are uneasy with the way in which economic causality seems to have the upper hand, and the way patriarchy is explained solely in terms of relations of production. This debate continues with sound arguments being advanced from both sides.

I mentioned earlier some of the most important feminist historians and cultural commentators. I wish to single out Joan Scott from among them because she seems to adumbrate the future growth trajectories of this field in interesting ways. She is a distinguished historian who has consistently raised issues related to gender, knowledge and power. Her books such as The Glassworkers of Carmaux, Gender and the Politics of History, Only Paradoxes to Offer, Feminism and History, Parite: Sexual Equality and the Crisis of the Politics of the Veil have generated widespread interest. Joan Scott is deeply interested in the theoretical implications of feminist historiography and she has successfully drawn on the writings of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan etc. in pursuing her goal. The essays collected in her book gender and the politics of history are particularly important in this regard because she was able to demonstrate in them how post-structuralist thinking can be productively assimilated into social and cultural history.

Scott’s theoretical intentions are made manifest in statements such as the following. ‘historicising gender by pointing to the variable and contradictory meanings attributed to sexual difference, to the political processes by which those meanings are developed and contested, to the instability and malleability of categories of women and men, and to the ways those categories are articulated in terms of one another, although not consistently or in the same way every time.’ The point that Scott is making here is that it is important that we do not gloss gender as a historically stable concept, because such a move, according to her, would almost certainly rob it of its value in mapping women’s history.

Connection

As a student of literature and literary theory, one of the aspects of Joan Scott’s work that I find particular attractive is her determination to draw on contemporary cultural theory and on the linguistic turn in the humanities. She maintains that there is a vital connection between the study of language and the study of gender.

It is important to keep in mind that by language Scott does not mean merely words in their literal usage but the production of meaning through differentiation. One can, at once, detect the Saussurean line of inquiry here. Similarly, she uses the word gender to signify not only the social roles of women and men but the way they are articulated in different social contexts of understanding of sexual differences.

As she tersely expressed, ‘my argument , then, is that if we attend to the ways in which language constructs meaning we will also be in a position to find gender.’ This approach to language and gender advocated by Joan Scott not only inaugurates a new mode of inquiry into history-making but it also brings the disciplines of history and literary theory closer together, a theme that I have been insistently pursuing in these columns.

What I have sought to do so far is to examine briefly the nature and significance of feminist history and indicate some of the orientations it is finding for itself and the new agendas that are bring proposed by its most able practitioners. It is against this background that I wish to forge a link with modern Sinhala literature.

The work of these feminist historians can prove to be extremely valuable to our writers, especially to those who are committed to the exploration of such themes as female agency, feminine identity, freedom for women, and the power of patriarchy.

A writer whom I find especially interesting in this regard is the late Monica Ruwanpathirana. In the latter half of her productive life she devoted herself more and more to the reconfiguration of feminist predicaments and feminist experiences.

Intent

She was, to be sure, not always successful in her attempts and some her verses do not rise above laudable statements of intent. However, in her more accomplished pieces, one sees the kind of interests and objectives that drive the work of feminist historians. Joan Scott once said that ‘knowledge means…the understanding produced by cultures and societies’, and Ruwanpathirana’s poems dealing with Sri Lankan peasant women admirably exemplify this.

For example in her work titled, Navathan Poledi one comes across a number of poems that illustrate this fact. She focused on the plight, the hardships and, the dilemmas of Sri Lankan women burdened by poverty from a feminist perspective.

What is interesting about her writing is the fact that they are guided by a culturally -grounded historical imagination, the inimical effects of colonial modernity being frequently highlighted aspect. Monica Ruwanpathirana was keen to underscore in her writings how gender operates as a symbolic system and a signifier of power asymmetries in society.

In many of her poems, she dealt with helpless house maids, abused wives, and poverty-stricken mothers who struggle to eke out a living against severe odds. For example, one of her untitled poems dramatises the plight of a middle-aged woman with four children, whose husband has become a drunkard; her suffering is reconfigured with a deep humanistic understanding. The way poetic imagination and historical imagination meet in her feminist poems merits closer study.

(To be continued)