Fields of Protest: Women's Movements in India

by Raka Ray

The women's movement in India has a long and rich history in which millions of ordinary women live, work, and struggle to survive in order to remake their family, home, and social lives. Whether fighting for safe contraception, literacy, water, and electricity or resisting sexual harassment, a vibrant and active women's movement is thriving in many parts of India today.

Fields of Protest explores the political and cultural circumstances under which groups of women organize. Starting with Bombay and Calcutta, Raka Ray discusses the creation of "political fields" -- structured, unequal, and socially constructed political environments within which organizations exist, flourish, or fail. In other words, women's organizations are not autonomous or free agents; rather, they inherit a "field" and its accompanying social relations, and when they act, they act in response to it and within it. Drawing on the literature of both social movements and feminism, Ray analyzes the striking differences between the movements in these two cities.

Using an innovative and comparative perspective, Ray offers a unique look at Indian activist women and adds a new dimension to the study of women's movements on a global level.

Genres: Feminism, India, Sociology

236 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Raka Ray is an American sociologist and academic. She is a full-time professor at the University of California, Berkeley in the departments of Sociology and Southeast Asian Studies. She became the Dean of Social Sciences at UC-Berkeley in January 2020.

Reviews

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ray offers a view of a few different communities in India and presents what the women are interested in, organizing for, and up against.

[Sue · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was assigned for a class (and everyone else seemed to like it much more than I did). Ray compares women's activism (through the 1970s I believe) in Calcutta and Bombay.