The role of women in the freedom struggle during the Gandhian phase

M. K. Gandhi is known to be one of the few people who encouraged women’s active participation in the freedom struggle-marking him as a rare promoter of women’s liberation. Women’s entry into national politics through non-violent methods brought miraculous results. On the one hand, women became aware of their inner strength, and on the other, the process brought human and moral elements into politics. 

Gandhi had tremendous faith in women’s inherent capacity for non-violence. And his experience of participation by women in politics from his days in South Africa till the end of his life bears testimony to the fact that they never failed his expectations. With Gandhi’s inspiration, they took the struggle right into their homes and raised it to a moral level. 

Women organized public meetings, sold Khadi and prescribed literature, started picketing shops of liquor and foreign goods, prepared contraband salt, and came forward to face all sorts of atrocities, including inhuman treatment by police officers and imprisonment. They came forward to give all that they had - their wealth and strength, their jewellery and belongings, their skills and labour-all with sacrifices for this unusual and unprecedented struggle. 

Gandhi’s call to women to involve themselves in the freedom struggle had far-reaching results in changing their outlook. “The cause of Swaraj swept all taboos and old customs before it”. Many women in their individual lives shed their age-old prejudices against the caste system. They had no hesitation in leaving the boundaries of their protected homes and going to the jail. They even broke their glass bangles (a sign of ill omen for married women) when they were told that they were made of Czechoslovakian glass. Women’s participation in the freedom struggle feminized nationalism and the nationalist struggle helped them to liberate from age-old traditions. Though Gandhi never challenged the traditional set up, he inspired women to carve out their own destinies within it, and thereby changing its very essence. 

Women learnt from Gandhi that one can be strong, even if seemingly weak, to protest against injustice. They realised that they do not have to accept the norms of male-dominated politics. They evolved their own perspectives and formulated their own methods. In a way they presented a critique of the colonial unethical state.