Chapter Fourteen - The Women's Question and Indian Maoism

Summary

Without unleashing the fury of women as a mighty force of revolution, victory in revolution is impossible. Hence, the mobilization of toiling women in the revolutionary people's war against imperialism and feudalism is a must. The equality between men and women can be realized mainly in the course of the revolutionary war and then further in the process of socialist transformation of society as a whole. (CPI(Maoist) 2004a, 52)

Women form one of the target groups for Maoist mobilization in India today. The movement is said to attract a large number of women, especially rural poor and tribal women. The Maoist agenda for larger socioeconomic transformations also includes the goal of women's equality and emancipation. Through the people's war, the Maoists in India today, who declare their ideology as Marxism–Leninism–Maoism, seek to usher in a ‘New Democratic Revolution’, which they believe will also alter existing unequal gender relations.

While the women's question usually forms an important part of the Marxist revolutionary agenda, it is seen as resolvable through class struggle itself. Frederick Engels (1884) was perhaps the first to elaborate on women's oppression. For him, the origins of patriarchy lay in the formation of class society. Consequently, its solution lay in the struggle against capitalism. The women's question within Marxism has always been a source of considerable debate.