Women’s Solidarity, empowerment and Sisterhood

Problems of Women’s Solidarity, women’s empowerment and Sisterhood

Womankind is facing grave problems in establishing sisterhood and in expressing solidarity with their sisters against men. Women’s solidarity refers to the unity and mutual support among women working toward common goals, while women’s sisterhood emphasizes emotional bonds and a collective identity among women.  This essay explores the challenges of achieving woman’s solidarity and sisterhood, emphasizing their potential to advance gender equality but also highlighting the obstacles that hinder a unified movement. Generally, women face the problems of intersectionality, political differences, lack of inclusivity, and practical challenges, complicating efforts to build solidarity. Women’s empowerment principales are not being upheld by everyone.

Intersectionality is crucial for understanding the diverse experiences of women, shaped by factors like race, class, and sexuality. These intersecting identities lead to different forms of oppression, making it hard to find common ground within the framework of women’s sisterhood. For example, a wealthy white woman may face different challenges than a working-class woman of color. Lack of Inclusivity is another significant challenge, as some women feel excluded from the mainstream feminist movement due to their race, class, or sexuality, undermining the very idea of women’s solidarity. African women’s  voices are frequently underrepresented or marginalized within the broader feminist discourse.

Political solidarity is also complicated by the diversity of women’s political views and priorities. Different groups of women may focus on different issues, leading to divisions rather than unity. For example, women of Gaza and Israel fail to find common ground. They do not express solidarity with each other. It is shocking to see Israeli women coming in support of the prison torture of Palestinian women in Israeli prisons,  and also they have been seen blocking of aid to their Palestinian sisters, and they do not care  dismantling of houses of Palestinians in West Bank by Israeli settlers driving their Palestinian sisters violently out of their homes. Very few feminists condemn taking Israeli women as hostages by Palestinian militants and at the same time condemn the massacre of Palestinian women in Gaza. Instead of women’s solidarity, Political allegiances and prioritization of certain issues over others can lead to selective condemnation within feminist movements.

Practical challenges further complicate efforts to build solidarity and sisterhood. women’s responsibilities in the home and workplace often limit their ability to engage in sustained activism. The tension between individual and collective needs also poses a challenge, as women may struggle to balance their concerns with the demands of solidarity.

 Several questions arise: why do women commit more atrocities against other women than men do? Men unite against women collectively, why women do not establish sisterhood against men? Why is a woman convinced, even in the twenty-first century, that they cannot seek parity with men and cannot free themselves from their oppression and subjugation? These are relevant questions any self-respecting woman might be posing. Here I shall discuss four major problems women are facing in establishing sisterhood and expressing solidarity with oppressed women.

The Problem Of Fragmentation

The first problem womankind faces is the problem of fragmentation, it is the same problem working people are facing. Women are embedded in patriarchal social order in such a way that they are compelled to side with men against other women, in the family against their daughters, at the workplace against their women colleagues, in man’s resource wars against women of the enemy nation, and against working women in their class struggle. They are dispersed and fragmented horizontally and vertically on class, caste, ethnicity, and racial lines, and held in a web of lies weaved through RIA(Repressive Ideological Apparatus) in the public sphere by men and they are also subjugated by muscle men of RSA(Repressive State Apparatus) (Althusser 1971). Thus, women become their enemy. They express solidarity with men, blame fellow women that are victims of atrocities at the hands of men, and confine their empathy and compassion within the four walls of the family. Beauvoir states, “They [women] have no past, no history, no religion of their own [. . .] they live dispersed among the males, attached through the residence, housework, economic condition, and social standing to certain men – fathers or husbands – more firmly than they are to other women. If they belong to the bourgeoisie, they feel solidarity with men of that class, not with proletarian women; if they are white, their allegiance is to white men, not negro women [. . .] the bond that unites her [woman] to her oppressors is not comparable to any other. The division of the sexes is a biological fact, not an event in human history. (SS: 19)” (Tidd, 2004)

The Problem Of Genetic Nepotism

The second problem is that woman is the victim of genetic nepotism more than men are. There is nothing like women’s solidarity as far as the life and welfare of their children are concerned. They compete with one another in mate selection (wasting their time, energy, and resources in attracting and appeasing men) and send their sons to wars in which men rape women of the fallen enemy as a weapon of war. In short, the woman is only concerned about the welfare of the children she gave birth to, and no one else. It may be because her share in parental investment is much more than that of men.

When a person is only interested in the replication of his/her genes, he/she does not act as a true species being. A woman strives to live at the cost of the lives of other women’s children to feed their own children, collaborate with men (including their husbands) in oppressing women belonging to a different class, ethnicity, or religion, and proactively supports men’s resource wars. Woman abets honor killing of their daughters and condones gender discrimination within the family. The day woman treats all children as her own and the whole of mankind as her children which will be a significant threat to the present-day world order and end of male domination. This alone can lead to world revolution.

The Problem Of Beauty Myth

The third problem is competing with another woman to attract and appease men with their beauty myth. Men have effectively exploited women’s predispositions to display their erotic capital to draw the attention of men. Men date more than women do and marry more than one woman. Men have coined divisive beauty myths and forced women to compete with one another to appease men, who are masters and architects of the present-day patriarchal world order. Wolf states, “The beauty myth is always actually prescribing behavior and not appearance. Competition between women has been made part of the myth so that women will be divided from one another. Youth and (until recently) virginity have been “beautiful” in women since they stand for experiential and sexual ignorance. Aging in women is “unbeautiful” since women grow more powerful with time and since the links between generations of women must always be newly broken: Older women fear young ones; young women fear old, and the beauty myth truncates for all the female lifespan. Most urgently, women’s identity must be premised upon our “beauty” so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.” (Wolf, 2002) He further explains the concept of beauty, “Beauty” is a currency system like the gold standard. Like any economy, it is determined by politics, and in the modern age in the West, it is the last, best belief system that keeps male dominance intact. In assigning a value to women in a vertical hierarchy according to a culturally imposed physical standard, it expresses power relations in which women must unnaturally compete for resources that men have appropriated for themselves.” (ibid)

The Problem Of The Object Mode

The fourth problem is that women are inclined to act in the object mode in relation to men who treat them as the object of sex. The reason for this might be that women have lived under patriarchal domination and subjugation for centuries and are painfully aware of their powerlessness and insignificance as a girl child. To compensate for this, she wants to be possessed by socially powerful men, or offer them sex, and to seek their attention by doing everything she thinks men like. She does not venture to imagine that she could live with men with mutual co-existence and recognition, and her relationship with men can be inter-subjective.

One of the reasons for this is that if a woman strives to act as a subject, she has to bear structural violence in a phallocentric androcentric society. Benjamin holds, “Benjamin wants a woman to become subjects: The challenge for women, she decided, is to move from being just an object of desire to becoming a subject: she who desires.” (Epstein, 2006)

To conclude, while women’s solidarity and sisterhood have the potential to drive significant social change, achieving these ideals requires addressing the complexities of intersectionality, inclusivity, and practical obstacles. By recognizing and overcoming these challenges, the feminist movement can work toward a more inclusive and effective model of solidarity that reflects the diversity of women’s experiences.

References:

1. Epstein, Julia. *The Subject of Gender: Daughters and Mothers in the American Novel*. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006.

2. Louis Althusser, ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation)’, trans. by Ben Brewster, in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (London: New Left Press, 1971)

3. Tidd, Ursula. *Simone de Beauvoir*. London: Routledge, 2004.