Tamil Eelam women's day is celebrated on October 10, a date that marks the anniversary of the death in battle of the first woman Liberation Tiger fighter, 2nd Lt. Malathy. She was killed in the first battle against the Indian army at the strategic junction of Kopay.
Since those days of guerrilla attacks, the women's wing of the Liberation Tigers' fighting units has grown substantially. Today, they form a well organised and autonomous unit that has often played a strategic role in battles against the Sri Lanka army (SLA). In doing so, they have broken new ground for women, not only within Tamil society but outside it as well.
While women have often had a role in war, it has usually been defined in terms of their traditional caring role. They have been confined to auxiliary or supportive units in which the stereotypic role of women is extended into the area of conflict. However the image of Lt. Col. Vidusha, raising the flag at Kilinochchi, places women right at the centre of the Tamil struggle. The image stands as a challenge to prevalent notions of what a Tamil woman should be while also signifying that important changes have already taken place. The Tamil women's liberation movement must also be seen in the context of the ongoing feminist movement that started over 150 years ago.
The earliest part of this movement started in the middle of the 19th century when women, mainly in Western Europe and United States, began to organize collectively to demand the same legal rights as men. Although the movement was widespread, able to mobilise middle class and working class women, there were differences in tactics and aims.
Some women thought that the ultimate aim was enfranchisement, as this would prove that women were equal to men as rational, thinking human being. Others saw the vote as just the beginning of a struggle to improve the social and economic conditions of the poor and to improve working conditions in the home countries and the colonies.
Once the franchise had been granted to all adults over the age of 21 in 1928, many of the groups disbanded. However the idea of women's rights and particularly the word feminism entered into popular debate. The idea of feminism is notoriously diffuse and difficult to pin down. Journalist, Rebecca West, wrote in 1913:
"I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
Feminism continued to be a dirty word and this shows that although women had formal equality, their position remained defined by cultural attitudes so that women as a whole continued to have unequal access to education, employment and political power.
Formal legal equality had not provided the key to understanding women's subordinate position, as it did not question the social basis of their oppression. This occurred later in the 1960's.
The second wave of feminist activity took place in the 1960's and 70's and coincided with the civil rights movement and student opposition to the Vietnam War. It was fuelled by women's frustration with the inability of the liberal democratic mechanisms of equal rights to effect any real change in the marginalized condition of women.
The movement's contribution to feminist thought was the idea of gender, as differentiated from sex. Whereas sex referred to the biological differences between men and women, gender referred to the differences in cultural practise that arose as a result of differences in sex.
The concept of gender provided the key theoretical insights that have both unified and fragmented the feminist movement. The immediate consequence of gender was that women's roles and positions in society were not fixed by biology but defined by society. Anthropological surveys showed that gender roles varies immensely between different societies and there was therefore no natural and given masculinity or femininity.
Although a great deal of diversity was found in how femininity was defined, one unifying factor was its basis in the female reproductive function. Almost all cultures construct female gender around the core functions of care and nurture while men are defined in opposition to that around values such as self - assertion and competition.
However gender is not just a dichotomy of male and female, it is a hierarchy too in that male gender is more highly prized than female. Gender confines women to the domestic sphere and gives them total responsibility for child care and thereby excludes them from the public spheres of politics and power, to which men have almost exclusive access.
The system of Gender confined women to the home, under the control of men, while it gave men the freedom and resources to active in the highly valued public spheres.
The idea of gender proved useful in helping to explain how the unequal distribution of power men and women was perpetuated through different institutions. Feminists showed how gender roles were reproduced and enforced through the family, educational institutions, political systems and the media.
This produced a multi pronged strategy that undermined the gender system by focusing attention on a number of areas that were previously considered outside the realm of politics.
Feminists brought issues such as domestic violence, rape, sexual harassment and pornography to the public consciousness by treating them as expressions of the system of male domination.
However the movement became fragmented and diluted as feminists sought to explain all systems of power and oppression as based on the fundamental division of gender. The term patriarchy was used to encompass all forms of domination: the domination of men by women and that of men by men.
The urge to unify has produced fragmentation as black feminists and feminists from the third world have criticised universalistic theories that could not account for culturally specific experiences of gender.
Black feminists argued that much of gender theory was ethnocentric in that it failed to take account of the importance of racism in the experience of black women. If the exploitation of gender was perpetuated by both black and white men, the oppression of racism was similarly inflicted by both white men and women.
There were also differences in strategies and emphasis. Women in the western world fought for access to contraceptives while many poor women in the third world were faced with western funded population control programmes that sought to force birth control methods on them.
As theoretical feminism turns in on itself debating the primacy or not of gender oppression, the Women Tigers are a real liberation movement taking part and creating concrete social action that is transforming the consciousness and lives of women.
Their participation is borne of their direct experience of the condition of Tamil women living in the North and East of Sri Lanka. While the liberation of Tamil women within Eelam society and the liberation of Eelam are not the same thing, they cannot be achieved independently of each other.
One is not a woman and Tamil separately, one experiences both identities simultaneously.
Nor should women's liberation be thought of as a once and for all phenomenon; gender attitudes are too deeply entrenched. It has to be an ongoing process in which all sections of society participate by being aware of how ideas of gender can structure attitudes and behaviour in way that is fundamentally antithetical to the interests of both men and women.
Tamil Guardian
October 21st,2000
Courtesy : TamilGuardian