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Two Faces of Protest: Contrasting Modes of Women's Activism in India. By AMRITA BASU. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. xii, 308 pp. $35.00 (cloth); $15.00 (paper).
Toward Empowerment: Women and Movement Politics in India. By LESLIE J. CALMAN. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992. xxiii, 230 pp. $45.00 (cloth); $18.95 (paper).
The Issue at Stake: Theory and Practice in the Contemporary Women's Movement in India. By NANDITA GANDHI and NANDITA SHAH. New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1991. 347 pp. $21.50 (cloth).
These three studies analyze the strengths and limitations of different types of women's movement organizations in India. Nandita Shah and Nandita Gandhi highlight these issues from the viewpoint of activists. Political scientists Leslie Calman and Amrita Basu suggest the importance of considering women's movements in their larger context. Calman emphasizes how attention to Indian women's movements suggests needed modifications in social movements theory. Basu's systematic comparison of movement activity in two Indian states suggests that a full understanding of both rural movements and women's movements requires consideration of ethnic and political factors in addition to class and gender.
Shah and Gandhi seek to "document" the "subjective forces of the movement, its organizations, issues and ideologies" (p. 28). They successfully describe how movements use diverse strategies, including consciousness raising, pressuring public officials, and boycotting those who commit violence against women, to address a wide range of issues that include violence, health, work, and law. They describe the dilemmas associated with particular strategies, from legal reformers' sacrifice of grassroots activism to the burnout associated with consciousness raising. While they present some refreshing data from their interviews with members of thirty-five movement organizations, they do not attempt a systematic analysis of the reasons for the relative success of different organizations. Their broad-based description of movement theorizing of male dominance, capitalism, and the private sphere suggests, however, that movement insights could be the basis for developing feminist theory that advances gender justice by emphasizing social, political, and economic realities, rather than abstract individual rights (compare to Catherine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Leslie Calman combines her own interviews and fieldwork with consideration of secondary sources and firsthand accounts of movement activities in order to make systematic comparisons of movement...