Re-Presenting Feminist Methodologies

Interdisciplinary Explorations

Kalpana Kannabiran, Padmini Swaminathan

• Publisher: Routledge India
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351800372
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book tracks the trajectory of gender in the social sciences and humanities through an exploration of the challenges and contradictions that confront contemporary feminist analysis as well as future directions. Drawing on research in India, the essays in the volume engage with the subject in imaginative ways, each one going beyond documenting the persistence of gender inequality, instead raising new questions and dilemmas while unravelling the complexities of the terrain. They also interrogate extant knowledge that has 'constructed' women as 'agentless' over the years, incapable of contesting or transforming social orders – by taking a close look at gendered decision-making processes and outcomes, sex for pleasure, health care practices, content and context of formal schooling or the developmental state that 'mainstreams' gender. Do existing feminist methodologies enable the understanding of emerging themes as online sexual politics, transnational surrogacy or masculinist 'anti-feminist' sensibilities? The feminist methodologies delineated here will provide readers with a toolkit to assess the criticality of gender as well as its nuances. The work foregrounds the importance of intersectionality and builds a case for context-specific articulations of gender and societies that destabilize binary universals.

This volume will be useful to scholars and researchers across the disciplines of the social sciences and humanities, especially gender studies, women's studies, feminism, research methodology, education, sociology, political science and public policy.

Part I

Mapping terrains

Section 1

Feminist journeys

1 Studying women and the women’s movement in India

Methods and impressions¹

Joan P. Mencher

1. Introduction

One of the reasons I was asked to write for this volume is that I have been working on women’s issues since 1958, long before the women’s movement started either in the United States (where it only began in the 1970s) or in India. One thing that does stand out is that even before any movement existed, women working on women’s issues were basically using the methods and ways of thinking that originated in the academic disciplines they were trained in. These methods were all theoretically gender-neutral, although in practice, male anthropologists often talked only to men. This was partly because access to women was difficult for them in some societies and also partly because males were seen as more powerful by some anthropologists. To the extent that women had been working in anthropology as the field itself developed, at least in the United States − starting with Ruth Benedict, a prize student of Boas − the field was slightly different.

To me, basically the feminist lens includes looking at all of the issues that concern social scientists, workers in the humanities and in the legal and health professions and political activists, making use of methods already developed (by women as well as men) − but now including a crucial women’s approach. In addition, as opposed to the male approach that has been dominant until fairly recently (despite the pressure early on from Dr. Ambedkar), a wide range of feminist approaches have come to include, since independence, the effects of caste and class on women’s lives.² When I first started work in India, especially in rural India, very few scholars were interested in the work I was doing, or in my perspective − not only as a scholar, but also as a woman, who also had the handicap of being a foreigner (though some were also interested in me as an American − perhaps because they had known few, if any, before me). However, it would have made more sense to them if I had been a male scholar, or even a mere wife, focusing on people’s felt experience rather than just seeing people as ‘subjects’. Today this has changed somewhat, though even now economists generally command more attention than anthropologists.

2. Feminism and anthropology

I cannot say how feminism became a part of my life, because I was less than six years old when I first noticed people giving less value to what a female child said, in contrast to how they listened to a male child. Even when I was in elementary school, I was aware that female lawyers (my mother had two friends who were lawyers) had either inferior positions or no serious legal role, compared to my father’s lawyer friends. Thus, thinking about feminist issues predated my high school and college education. Though my classes were mixed before high school, I attended an all-girls’ high school for grades 10–12, and then (after a single year at Hunter College in the Bronx, a new co-educational college) I transferred to an all-women’s college (Smith College) for the remaining three years. Both in high school and at Smith, I was in an institution where it was taken for granted that women are entitled to receive a complete education and to become working professionals.

I decided to go into anthropology for graduate studies instead of continuing in physics for numerous reasons, which included reading Margaret Mead’s and Ruth Benedict’s writings for pleasure while taking physics, mathematics and philosophy courses. Furthermore, I had heard through the grapevine when I was in New York that the head of the physics department at Columbia had said that he would never give a PhD to a female student. This had a very negative influence on my thinking and led to my applying to Columbia for entrance into its anthropology department. At that time there were several women involved with the anthropology department at Columbia, including Margaret Mead, Ruth Bunzel and Gene Weltfish (whose class I attended during my first year).

As both Mead and Benedict had begun to show in their research based in diverse societies and in different socio-cultural contexts, gender roles were often different from what existed in the United States or even in Europe. This appeared very clearly in Mead’s work in both Samoa and Bali, and to some extent in hunting and gathering societies like those found in New Guinea. Also, even though neither of them was given tenure at Columbia, Mead primarily was a strong influence on my thinking through her writing − and later also in person, especially after she became one of my dissertation advisors. Mead and Bunzel, along with other Columbia women, made me feel accepted there.

With the male students I often felt that I was fighting or struggling against them, even though they were older than I was − perhaps partly because I felt that my words were not heard. This was similar to the arguments I had often had with my father as a child, which covered almost every subject imaginable. But it was just assumed by (at least some) people at Columbia that the words of women also counted, especially to the women anthropologists I came to know as mentors and as teachers and by reading their books. From the very beginning of my anthropology graduate school experience, at least the female graduate students knew that they needed to talk with women as well as men in order to fully understand another culture.

In addition, before I arrived in India, I was aware of how political and social philosophies affect how women function, and of the important use of a feminist lens to look at just about anything and everything in human life. I had been aware of gender inequality from childhood and later on had learned from what people told me about how to fight for women and how important this fighting was.

During my graduate studies I became more aware of a gender perspective whenever I did any type of research, even for a class exercise. I was fascinated by what I read about the female suffragettes and how they fought not only for the right to vote but also for the right to hold office and all that entailed. I remember being often told I was too militant by some of my father’s friends when I would venture an opinion. I wanted to be a strong woman because standing up for women’s rights was an important part of my life, and I wanted to show that I was aware that women’s words were often ignored or twisted. Thus, even as a young girl I made my opinions known forcefully, though not always tactfully.

I had applied to Columbia’s doctoral programme in anthropology while I was finishing up my BA in physics. Early in my graduate studies I wanted to go to India and in fact had studied some Hindi to satisfy one of my language requirements, though I ended up doing my doctoral research as part of a large-scale study of Puerto Rican immigrants in East Harlem (part of New York City), which taught me a great deal that turned out to be useful in doing fieldwork in India. In this research project, which was based at a small health clinic in New York, my responsibility was to work with women, mothers of young children and elementary-school students. I was able to get to know the women quite well, using what has been called Spanglish (a mixture of Puerto Rican Spanish and English). I found the women I met in East Harlem, especially those who had come from Puerto Rico, quite open and friendly to me, especially when they found out that I was interested in their own lives, not only their children’s, and in understanding their relationships with their husbands or boyfriends. As I spent more and more time with them, I came to know about their lives up to when we met and also their current lives − how they managed people, how they manipulated both their biological families and the other males in their lives and how they handled their finances. Life histories, which I had already learned about in my anthropology courses (building on my earlier experiences of talking with the women in my life), became an important part of my toolkit, both in this study and later in much of my fieldwork in India (see Mencher 1958).

By the time I arrived in India I had been exposed to many diverse methodologies for doing research, including standard personality tests such as the Thematic Apperception Test, ways of interviewing children about their perceptions of gender roles and interviews of both women and men on a wide variety of topics, including their life histories. I had also been exposed to poverty and family issues in the United States during my doctoral research, along with the often-complex ways in which government policies dealt with the needs of women (as well as men) in terms of housing, children’s schooling and such issues.

3. My first trip to India

While I was writing my thesis, I applied for two research grants to go to India after receiving my degree in the summer of 1958. The first of these, a postdoctoral grant from the American Association of University Women, covered my research and some travel expenses, and was predicated on my completing my PhD before starting the work. The second, a Fulbright-Hayes pre-doctoral grant, paid for my travel to and from India as well as some travel within India, and required me to have an affiliation with the University of Baroda in Gujarat.³ Because I was fascinated by matrilineal societies for a number of reasons, I applied to go to Malabar District (formerly a part of Madras Presidency), which had become a part of Kerala State by the time I reached India, though up to that time it had been part of Madras Presidency, and people in Malabar still retained close ties to the city of Madras. Malabar, along with Cochin and Travancore, constituted the main matrilineal (and to some extent matriarchal) area of India.

I was particularly interested in the Malabar region, because in the north there were matrilineal Muslims as well as Thiyyas (a semi-untouchable caste) and Nayars, and also because I had already made contacts with people from this area when I was in Delhi, Baroda and Madras City (now Chennai). Just before I left for India, I was fortunate in being visited in New York by Dr. Kathleen Gough, who was on the way to the United Kingdom with her small son. She had worked in Malabar in the very first years after independence and brought along a copy of her doctoral thesis on ‘The Traditional Kinship System of the Nayars of Malabar’ (Gough 1954; see also Schneider and Gough 1961), which I was able to go through at night while she slept, so I was able to take notes and read it before she left for the United Kingdom. She also suggested that I stay at first in the village where she had worked in North Malabar, which I ended up doing before switching to work in South Malabar later. One of her comments always stayed with me: she mentioned that she was not able to learn much from women, and most of her conversations and discussions were with the men. She found the women less interesting, and I could understand that when I first spoke to the middle-class Nayar women, but later when talking to their daughters, and also to the Ezhava/Thiyya (lower-caste) women, my understanding changed a great deal because women of both groups were freer than the older high-caste women in telling me about their lives and personal issues. I became aware first in North Malabar, and then later when I moved to Kottakal in South Malabar, of the importance of crossing class lines and of working with both women and men.

3.1 Cheriamma’s family

In addition, even before leaving for India, I was fortunate in obtaining an introductory letter to a woman member of Parliament (MP) who came from Malabar, Mrs. Ammu Swaminadhan, whom I met after reaching Delhi. She had already heard from several people that I was coming to India to study marumakkathayam (matriliny). She asked me to address her as Cheriamma (the Malayalam word for mother’s younger sister). Through her, I had the opportunity to meet other female parliamentarians, including Lakshmi S. Menon, who was working with other MPs on special laws to perpetuate the rights of women belonging to matrilineal traditions − rights that were then being threatened by proposed new all-India uniform marriage and inheritance laws for women. I also met some of Mrs. Swaminadhan’s relatives living in Delhi, in Madras City and in Malabar, and later on some who came to New York after my return.

During my first two trips to India I was unmarried and as such was welcomed into homes, looked after and also taught how young women were supposed to behave, in a way that would not have been possible if I had been travelling with a husband. I noticed the difference later on when I travelled in India with my husband.

My first stop in India, six days after arriving in Bombay (now Mumbai), was Baroda, where I was to be affiliated with the Department of Sociology at the University of Baroda, where Dr. M.N. Srinivas was a professor.⁴ While in Baroda I had the opportunity to meet one of the first Nayar social anthropologists, Professor Raman Unni, who was affiliated to the University of Baroda and who had done fieldwork in Malabar. Once I reached Kerala in the fall of 1958, he helped me to visit several lower-middle-class taravads (traditional matrilineal households), which were still in the process of partitioning, and, in 1962, to visit some of the best-known Nambudiri Brahmin households along with several middle-class Nayar taravads.⁵

In Baroda in 1958 I became acquainted with several people indirectly related to Cheriamma. This included the brother of her second daughter’s husband and his wife, who worked in Baroda. I also had the opportunity to get to know Professor M.N. Srinivas, who was officially my supervisor − even though I already had a PhD. I was happy to get to know him and really enjoyed meeting some of his friends, the Amins, who invited me along with Dr. Srinivas for a weekend at their farm outside of Baroda. I had an unusual experience there. As we were talking the first evening before dinner, I felt that some assumptions were being made about me because they had mostly known British scholars and very few Americans. When I mentioned in passing that my mother had been born in Czarist Russia and that I was of Jewish background, it was as if a curtain suddenly dropped from Dr. Srinivas’s face, and he smiled at me warmly. From then on he treated me almost as if I was Indian and no longer a foreigner. I had never had such an experience before, certainly not in the United States, and it was unforgettable, as I was from then on treated as someone they could all be freer with. It added a kind of openness that I never expected.

Through Cheriamma, I had the great privilege of meeting numerous other women who had fought for independence, and a few who were coming into important positions under Nehru, along with others involved with the new laws being added to the Constitution and serving in government agencies and departments. While their numbers were small, they were quite outspoken in Parliament and in dealing with constitutional issues affecting women. The women coming from matrilineal families were especially concerned that they not lose their traditional privileges relating to the making and breaking of marriages, the inheritance of familial property and related issues. Even though they were fewer in number than the male parliamentarians by comparison with the US Senate and Congress, they were quite outstanding women. All of them had been freedom fighters.

I also had the opportunity of meeting some of Cheriamma’s family members even before I went to the south, including one whose husband was also in Parliament and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: re-presenting feminist methodologies
• Part I Mapping terrains
• Part II Exploring themes
• Index