Ryan,
 

>   What do you mean by "but we don't have a similar

> movement for men"?<


Women's movements tend to exclude men.  Western
feminist movements have typically done so and the term
'gender' is used in lieu of or often referring to
women/girls/females. In the Third world, my experience
of feminist movements or movements for social change
was a real eye opener. Women, especially poor women
had no desire to exclude men from their efforts
towards equity. The notion that the sexes are
different is accepted but equal is not. The same women
who taught me about the difference between education
and literacy, explained their perceptions of equity
and equality. What they looked for was equity, or
fairness regardless of their gender. Equality was a
completely different issue to them. In their eyes, no
social change would ever endure unless they included
their men, young and old. Hence they preferred to have
young men as tutors, as social interpreters and with
delicate negotiations (I learned a lot about diplomacy
in my years in the slums) they earned the support of
the older men as well.

In a different example, in the Himalayan foothills, in
one of our projects, I've seen women and men as
healers, as teachers, as parents and a number of them
attend life skills classes to share everything from
childbirth to cooking, farming and market work as well
as administering the village school in between.

Aside from the research I found in the 1990s for my
research, my own observations after living in the US
and France showed me that with so-called liberation
and 'equality', the division of labour between men and
women had not changed. Women just found additional
work and labour attached to their already considerable
(traditional) workload. 

The point I am making is that for lasting social
change, men have to be included in any movement.
Whether they need a separate movement for this, I
don't know. But whilst I see some difference in male
roles, I still see a majority of our work roles,
salaries earned, who stays at home being decided in a
traditional manner.

I am not saying there were no valid reasons for a
women's movement to be exclusive. I just found what I
learned when I returned to India for that prolonged
length of time, fascinating, turning all my
theoretical work in the US on it's head. Opened my
eyes to the spectrum of what is power, empowerment,
social change, equity and equality.

Regards,
Ujwala



		
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