Published in 1999
236 pages
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.
What is this book about?
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.
