Actions are not themselves actors, actions are something that people make to media for social change. They are spaces that are made by people to allow relationships between them that can test power. Social movements are generally seen as wonders of the modern era and industrialised society, whether situated in the First world or not. Development and urbanisation, technological progressions, and ongoing democratisation allowed people to push for change together from the margins of the polity, from outside of less-than-open institutions. Sociologists have inclined to describe and redefine social movements in response to the kind of complaints they saw taking place around them. The efforts by feminist researchers to think about women’s movements and women in movements make it clear that while self-consciously feminist movements are a relative rarity, women’s movements are many, and women’s contribution in mixed-gender movements is and has been ever-present. Certainly, feminist sociologists do not seem to differentiate women’s movements theoretically from other kinds of social movements, using and contributing to existing theory in their research on women; what is seen as outstanding about women’s movements is that they are led by women and for women. Though, this lack of theoretical difference between women’s movements and other kinds of movements in the making of meanings masks very real differences in the experience of involvement for females on the ground, particularly when they work together with men. Women have made their own movements or have been part of varied-gender social movements because women are never just women. They are workers; they belong to ethnic/cultural/national communities seeking expression, seeking presence, and compensation from authority. But it has also been the case that women have found both making their own movements and organising within varied-gender groups to be difficult because of their gender. The primary problem, and the one common to women in their own movements or in varied-gender movements, is the construction of the public compass, and therefore the political sphere, as male. While the potential for social movement involvement were generated by the changes brought about by industrialisation and urbanisation, those two processes also fuelled the ideology of “separate spheres”—the identification of public life as the proper kingdom of the “male” and domestic life as the proper kingdom of the “female”. A woman in public political life misbehaved her proper space, and disobeyed her proper role. The philosophy of distinct compasses and the documentation of public political space as male certainly still exist, even if it has less force with each female incursion into that space, and with each challenge to the ideology. One of the periodic and most moving themes that one finds in the stories of women’s public protest is how their very participation in movements changes their beginning of themselves and their position in their communities, even when their protest is in defence of traditional values. Social space is re-created and women’s lives are remade by protest action, sometimes at great personal cost. Participation in social involvement by men can be life-changing—but such participation is a qualitatively different initiative for women, who misbehave not just the rules of politics as usual but the rules of gender as well. It is women’s movements, women in independent organisations, who constitute the greatest threat to order, as they disrupt the political field, and societal expectations of how females should act in that turf through men. They have been leaders, though often their greatest charities have been as leaders behind the scenes. But in a manner similar to the way that a working woman comes home to do a second shift of domestic duties at home. In short, the economy of social movement activism rests on women’s energies in a way that replicates gendered divisions of labour in the larger society. Though social movement communities make boundaries flanked by themselves and the rest of society, physical social inequality finds its way into oppositional communities. Gender dissimilarity does not go away just because women mobilise with men on behalf of interests they have in common, and this endemic inequality becomes all the more problematic when women, in the sequence of social movement involvement with men, discover the interests they might have as women. The role of women was never tinted although they ranked top in the quotient of suffering and pains. It is an important issue to see their agonies and sufferings come to an end through better health care, education and dignity.
Monnishaa Mahajan, Principal Attorney at Legal Help NRI. Monnishaa has an experience of more than 15 years in assisting and advising NRI's in resolving their disputes in India.