WOMEN IN PATRIARCHY: Cross-Cultural Readings

“Women in Patriarchy: Cross-Cultural Readings” is an anthology of twenty-three pieces – short stories, essays, extracts – which tell their own story. Covering a period of two centuries and more, they bring together a history of women’s struggles across national boundaries and articulate their emotional and intellectual responses to patriarchal control and imposition.

As each struggle leads to a new one and another frontier is opened, women have changed their strategies and moved from reasoning to protest, from silence to articulation, from insanity and ostracism to self-assertion and confidence. In the process they have also had to explore their strengths and weaknesses, their sexualities and relationships and negotiate the barriers of colour and race.

Divided into two sections, the volume looks at fictional projections from India, England, Canada, South Africa and United States. These narratives by women of the first world as well as third world nations look at childhood, old age, loneliness, and work with bold strokes of comedy, irony and radical ideology, right from Kate Chopin to Githa Hariharan.

The second section covers the debates of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries from Mary Wollstonecraft to Chandra Talpade Mohanty. Together the two sections seek to accord visibility to the third world, cross geographical and political barriers, bring together the parallels, focus on the differences and extend the boundaries of knowledge and understanding.

Jasbir Jain, writer and critic, is currently working on “Indigenous Roots of Feminism”.