Women's Movements in India

India has a long history of dynamic and varied women's movements beginning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Scholar activists (e.g., Gandhi & Shah 1992; Kumar 2002) normally identify two major waves: the first wave from around 1920 to 1945, which coincided with India's independence struggle and whose major aim was suffrage and education for women and later addressing legal inequities in family laws; and the second wave, also called the “autonomous” women's movement, from the early 1970s to the 1990s and whose main focus was violence against women. I identify a third wave, namely the transnational women's movement which, beginning in the mid to late 1990s, has organized across national and regional borders around issues of neoliberal globalization and religious fundamentalism, among others. Each wave consisted of many strands that were often in conversation with each other. And while each period had a main focus, there were many issues and strategies in each wave.