Woman Question, Identity and the Emergence of Feminism

Abstract

Human existence is woven with the exegesis of ‘gender’. Being human corroborated with the fact of belonging to a particular gender determines the identity and substance of a human being. What follows is a power relationship between ‘being human’ and ‘being a particular gender’ with mostly one dominating the other. Defining is the ‘gender’ a social construct, not ‘human’ as natural. It is explicitly a tussle of power amid‘nature’ and ‘culture’ or what we call as ‘social’ that percolates down to all the levels of human existence.The result has been an ‘unequal equation’ within human relations either with nature or within themselves. As ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’ are the two unequal values allied with human beings; so are the definitions associated with both.What is a ‘man’ and a ‘woman’? And what it means to be a ‘man’ and a ‘woman’ under different settings and circumstances? The answers are not so intricate to find and perhaps lies in the question itself, what is it that induces us to ask such questions? When nature was appropriate to create human beings as males and females essential and complimentary to each other,who created ‘man and woman’ the binaries in hierarchy, or to be more precise the ‘woman’; for there never came a time when we were induced to ask and define the identity of ‘man’. Man is a ‘man’ and always was, the ultimate human being or the norm. But a‘woman’ is a ‘woman – a subjective reality’ and needed to be defined, as there is more to the etymological and historical meaning of the word ‘woman’ than the biological meaning of it, that is to be a ‘female human being’.Biology is not enough to give answers to the questions that are before us; why is women ‘other’? What humanity has made of the human female? These were some of the questions that preoccupied many women and men, andgot tenderedbefore us in the form of ‘feminism’.The present paper aims to emphasize upon how the identity as a function of thought process with various expressionshas determined the existence of women. Andhow farthe ‘Woman Question’was dealt in both theory and praxis in different places and periods of time, leading to the emergence of ‘feminism’. The methodology adopted istextual analysis and interpretation.