Patriarchal ideology, petit bourgeois morality, liberal ideas and even feudal values often tends to appear as ‘common sense’ in society, and therefore some elements of these persist stubbornly even within the communist movement and its women’s organisation. We need to educate our ranks to recognise and resist it. Let us discuss some such attitudes.

As we have seen, liberal political theory traditionally associated the ‘private’ with women and ‘public’ with men. In India, this private-public dichotomy became a very powerful part of bourgeois nationalist ideology. Nationalists on the one hand asserted that men of the non-white races too were ‘rational’ enough to be citizens. But they also felt threatened by colonial intervention, and therefore sought comfort in the idea that while the ‘public’ sphere and men’s lifestyle had been colonised, the ‘private’ sphere – women’s lives inside the home and women’s bodies – continued to preserve ‘Indian/Hindu culture’ in its pure form, uncorrupted by colonialism. This was why there was so much resistance to any attempt to change the Hindu marriage laws, age of consent etc... This ideological legacy affects us even today. Popular films even today love to show how ‘western culture’ is corrupting Indians – and contrast it with the character of the ‘pure’ Indian woman who preserves tradition within her own body and eventually reforms and redeems the corrupted culture.

We on the Left do not officially subscribe to such an ideology – nevertheless liberal ideology has been so dominant that we often tend to accept some aspects of it as ‘common sense’. For instance, we tend to internalise the idea of the separation of ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres. We sometimes tend to think that issues of the ‘private’ sphere, family, etc... are less ‘political’ than those of the ‘public’ sphere.

For instance, sometimes we are told that domestic violence has nothing to do with class or with economic exploitation; that taking up such issues within the family will ‘divide’ the people and weaken class unity. Such an approach is a distortion and caricature of Marxism. Marxism recognises that domestic violence is a direct form of controlling and exploiting women’s labour within the home. Since the exploitation of women’s labour is a crucial requirement of capitalist production, all our attempts to resist this exploitation and violence within the home is bound to strengthen the class struggle.

Another distorted representation of Marxism is to suggest that the issue of domestic work is an issue only for middle class women – and therefore of secondary importance. Is it really true that only middle class women wish to be freed from the drudgery of domestic work? Far from it; domestic work is a key aspect of the exploitation of women’s labour, that calls for changing the way in which society organises production and reproduction.

We easily recognise and firmly resist feudal practices like dowry, sati and various obscurantist practices. But it is less easy to recognise and fight feudal attitudes when they appear to be a critique of capitalism. It is common in our society to valorise the family as a bastion of ‘traditional’ values; to disapprove of the breakdown of the family, and blame capitalist modernity for the breakdown of family traditions. A good example of this is the recent Supreme Court verdict which lamented that the Hindu Marriage Act (one of the first legal reforms of the Hindu civil laws that extended some basic legal rights to women) was causing more divorces, and declared that ‘divorce is not part of Hindu tradition’. We need to guard against such attitudes, which blame the breakdown of the traditional family rather than the capitalist State for the failure to provide care for children, elderly, and the sick. In a situation where state-provided services for such tasks are either non-existent or very poor, the family appears to be the ‘haven from the heartless world’. In India, this explains the nostalgia, often expressed in cinema for the joint family, where the elderly are cared for and in turn care for the young; an idyllic image that effaces the fact that the very same family is also the site of horrific violence, dowry burnings, oppressive surveillance of women and brutal and forceful control of women’s sexual choices in the name of ‘honour’. Instead of sharing this misplaced nostalgia for feudal familial values, we must acknowledge the family’s role as prison house, as training ground for women’s role as domestic slave. Gorakh Pandey’s scathing indictment reminds us of how ‘every home has prison walls/every house is a burning ghat/every home has a gallows’ (‘Ghar ghar mein deewarein hain/ghar ghar mein shmashan ghat hai/ghar ghar mein phansi ghar hai’).

When conservative women’s groups deal with divorce or domestic violence cases (for instance, in the crime against women cells or family courts), they usually seek to save the marriage, to persuade and pressurise women to remain in abusive, violent and unhappy marriages. Our approach is in sharp contrast to such an attitude. In dealing with such cases of conflict within marriages, it is not our concern or purpose to save the marriage or to break the marriage: our purpose is primarily to raise the consciousness and confidence of the woman and strive to create the material basis for her confidence, in terms of economic independence as well as involvement in political activism. We encourage the woman to stand on her own feet – be it within the marriage on a fresh footing or outside the marriage.

It is true that capitalist society creates bourgeois individualism – including somewhat greater economic and sexual freedom for women (though this has happened to a very limited extent in India’s semi-feudal variety of capitalist development). But it is very important for us to remember that “with all its defects, bourgeois individualism represents an advance over feudalism” (Johanna Brenner, Women and the Politics of Class, Aakaar Books, 2006). At every step, we must beware of glorifying feudal ‘traditional’ values in the name of resisting capitalism. Even as we hold capitalism responsible for its commodification of women, and for the neglect of children and the elderly, we must defend each and every freedom that women enjoy [in a relative sense] in capitalism – the freedom to dress as they wish, love and marry according to their choice, freedom to divorce, freedom to break any relationship where love no longer exists etc... Our critique of these bourgeois freedoms is not from a feudal, traditionalistic standpoint: rather it is from the vantage point of socialism. In other words, we critique these freedoms because each of them comes with continuing chains of economic inequality and new forms of exploitation; because women are not free enough, not because women are too free!

We do not ask women to exchange the relative freedoms offered by capitalism for the dubious ‘protection’ offered by feudal traditionalism. In conservative feudal ideology, men are considered ‘pro-women’ as long as they treat women as their ‘mothers or sisters’. “Don’t you have mothers or sisters at home?” is the question that is often asked to sexual harassers. But in actuality the ‘rakhi’ ideology – the ideology of men ‘protecting’ mothers and sisters is an extremely oppressive one. The Rizwan-Priyanka case, the Nitish Katara murder, and innumerable such cases all remind us of how oppressive feudal ‘protection’ really is. We want men to treat women as their equals, not as ‘mothers and sisters’.

One of the foremost areas where petit-bourgeois morality tends to infect even the Left ranks is that of women’s sexuality. Take an instance in 1990, responding to the rape of 3 women in Birati near Kolkata, CPI(M)’s party organ PD had carried a statement by the West Bengal General Secretary, Ganatantrik Mahila Samity. The statement had commented that the three rape victims had “stayed in the unauthorised hutments”; that “so many women of that area... were involved in foul professions and such honeymoons of these women with the anti-socials were an open secret” and that one of the victims was “the mistress of a notorious anti-social”. This statement echoed the widespread idea that prostitution is a ‘foul profession’ that corrupts society; prostitutes are women without ‘honour’; without izzat; and rapes of women who in any case have no honour/izzat are somehow justified. Within our own ranks, only if we consciously and relentlessly challenge all elements of gender ideology can we give our women’s movement a truly revolutionary orientation.

Rape and violence are often seen, even by our judiciary, as an assault on women’s izzat (honour), and by extension on the ‘honour’ of their community. In fact, it is because women are seen as repositories of ‘community/family honour’ that they become the targets of communal and caste violence. We must recognise that this notion of rape as an assault on women’s (and community/family) honour has another side of the coin: violence against women within the community and the family is often defended in the name of protecting ‘honour’; and women who are considered to have ‘no honour’ (because they are said to be ‘immoral’ or because they wear ‘provocative’ clothes etc...)!

Even on the Left, there tends to be deep discomfort with any actions by women that disturb society’s notions of sexual morality. We must consciously educate our ranks about the double standards of feudal and bourgeois morality. When women’s sexual behaviour, dress etc...challenges society’s mores, we, as communists, must resist all attempts to stand in moralistic judgement. We also oppose all moves to brand same-sex relations as immoral, unnatural etc... Same-sex relationships have existed in every society, and as communists, we understand how society which enforced monogamous marriage for women to ensure ‘legitimate’ paternity and transfer of property along the male line, also punished same-sex relations for much the same reason: to uphold monogamous marriage as the only moral norm. We are opposed to criminalising any consensual adult sexual choices and orientation, and therefore support the demand to scrap Article 377 IPC.