Gandhi’s inclusion of women required their compliance with patriarchy

Evidence

Gandhi did indeed make the space for women to participate in the national movement. But those women had to be virtuous; they had to, so to speak, bear “marks” upon their person that would “sterilise the sinner’s eye”. They had to be obedient women who never challenged the traditional structures of patriarchy. … No questions seem to have arisen as to how one was to carry one’s husband with one. Nor any thoughts on whether satyagraha would be effective, for example, against the hoary tradition of marital rape. — Ambedkar, B R, Annihilation of Caste_ The Annotated…, 243

Categorization

• SEED: A sharp essay angle: how a movement’s inclusivity conditions can reproduce the very hierarchies it claims to dismantle.