Feminism and Bangladesh: A Letter To Estelle B. Freedman

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Dear Estelle Freedman, Greetings from Dhaka, Bangladesh. I just read your book “No Turning Back” with great pleasure. It is highly informative. While reading the book, I tried to relate the ideas to Bangladesh. Here I was disappointed. For instance, feminists want inclusion of women as equally citizens. But in Bangladesh, we don’t even have a notion of a citizen.  In fact, we have no concept of the state. There is no word in Bengali for state. We cannot go beyond the state as a person. And these people naturally regard the state as a personal possession, democratically elected or not. Moreover, the worst enemy a woman may face is not a man but another woman - a mother-in-law or a sister-in-law. Mothers typically dominate families (there are exceptions), including the husband and son. When  a woman marries into a family (she always marries a family, not a single man), there’s a titanic struggle for dominance over the son. I am a man, but I know whereof I speak. My grandmother used to dominate her family, and when my mother married into the family, my grandmother made her life miserable. Ultimately, my mother threw out my grandmother from the house. In turn, my mother dominated her family. She ruined my brother’s marriage. I was careful not to let her oppress my wife, but we had to leave the house. The reason why mothers acquire such power is motherhood - of a son. A woman is expected to produce a son, and when she does she becomes immensely powerful. Dowry? Men alone don’t take dowry; the whole family does, including the mother-in-law and sisters-in-law. When a woman is killed for dowry, it is the whole family that commits murder. Feminism is a nonissue in Bangladesh. There are a few women’s NGOsf where elite women hobnob with Western intellectuals. The government promotes women-friendly policies, but as part of development. There is no pressure on a woman to lose weight, despite the predominance of western media. Prostitutes take ‘fat pills’ to gain weight. One of my girlfriends worried she was too thin; another was plump, but it didn’t bother her (or me!). ​ http://postcolonial.org/index.php/pct/article/view/372/812 ​ Finally, we had no antislavery movement here because none was necessary. We didn’t have large-scale chattel slavery. Consequently, the notion of individual freedom is completely absent. The unit of society is not the individual but the family. We have some notion of collective freedom (we were ruled by the British) but even that is missing among the masses. ​Please read the following.​ ​https://www.brunel.ac.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/185878/ET53SayeedEd.pdf ​ In your book, I missed a treatment of wartime feminism (or its absence): English women vs German women, Nazi women vs Jewish women. The biggest problem in our country is, of course, poverty. 60 per cent of our people live below the poverty line. The fertility rate is down from 6 in the 70s to 3 today. So there has been some progress. However, many girls marry underage and that causes problems for childbirth. Maternal mortality rates have been declining. These are all treated as development issues. I would appreciate it very much if you would kindly tell me your views on feminism and Bangladesh. I look forward to hearing from you. Best wishes