What's wrong with being a feminist?

In the last two or three days, I have met several people who want to reassure me that someone or the other is not a feminist. Since I AM a feminist, this puzzles me.

I have always been a feminist, before I knew the word, before I knew there was theory to go with it, before I knew much about women's movements. The marvelous definition that Cheris Kramerae and Paula Treichler came up with ("Feminism is the radical notion that women are people") resonates in any time and space (which really is most of them) that dehumanizes women.

In the US in the early 1990s, I learned that it had become very un-cool for young women to be feminists. I did not understand it, but as all international travellers learn to do at some point, figured, "It's their culture."

It is beginning to bother me now. When someone assures me that they or another person is not a feminist, I hear a justification for middle class male assertiveness and bullying. A couple of years ago, at a seminar in Chennai on violence against women, someone had the temerity to say: "I do not understand what women want. Young girls these days are not even willing to make tea!" Now, this gentleman was only saying aloud what many people think, I suspect. When I hear statements like that by Pratibha Patil's Government Law College classmate (which I cannot find to link here) that she is not a feminist, which we are told is not something he finds appealing (do I care?!), then I go back to that moment at the seminar. It's an experience like nails scratching a blackboard.

When a woman tells me that she or someone else is not a feminist, I hear a quiet pride that makes me want to cry for all those feminists that made it possible for her to stand up and say anything at all and for all those women and girls who still need her help. I hear the contemporary public space equivalent of young middle class Indian girls who are raised not just to sew, cook and clean for their future sasuraals but also to sing, dance, play instruments and paint--to never have any of those gifts encouraged again. I feel like the woman is trying to curry favour with some patriarchal standard that should not exist in the first place.

And how can feminism not be relevant still in an age when reporters trying for the human interest angle on this presidential nomination, are getting us certificates for Ms. Patil being a good wife, a good mother, a modest lady, traditional looking but of scientific temperament. What a relief! What a tragedy if our woman-President should be dignified, competent, brilliant and experienced but not any of these things! Would India survive?

I have a pretty decent memory and it is now more than thirty years since I started reading newspapers with comprehension. I am pretty sure I never learned the answer to these questions so I will ask them now:
1. Was S. Radhakrishnan a good father?
2. Did K.R. Narayanan worry about disruptions in schooling when he was a diplomat?
3. Was V.V. Giri a good husband?
4. Was Neelam Sanjeeva Reddy modest?
5. Was Rajendra Prasad traditional-looking but scientific?
6. Did Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed do a good job of juggling household responsibilities with a political career?
7. And this is very important: did Giani Zail Singh fast a few times every week?

And some feminist ones too: Did any of them beat their wives? How many gave or took dowries? How many of them tried like Insy Winsy spider to have sons? How many observed rituals that were demeaning to women in their lives? I am going to give in to temptation and ask, how many were fit to head a state with a declining number of women?

Now, I don't mean to malign our former Heads of State. I am simply trying to point out that now that a woman has been nominated (and everyone wants credit for this "progressive" gesture that makes me want to curtsey with Eliza Doolittle and sing, "How KIND of you to let me come!"), we are being given all sorts of information about her that has no bearing on her appropriateness for that office. And if it is appropriate, did anyone ask these questions of the men that went before her? What's sauce for the gander, is sauce for the goose too.

A feminist consciousness would allow us to respect and discuss our Presidents and Presidential nominees without making reference to their gender, their adherence to gender stereotypes and standards and based, as we like to say in India, on the merits of each case.

Once, in another lifetime, an Indian man (a friend, even teacher) said to me, half in jest, half as accusation, "You say all these (feminist) things, because you studied abroad." I said to him, "No, it is because I have been meeting Indian men all my life." Now, I assure you that some of my best friends are men, but I must say, that there is no better grounding for feminism than a large circle of male acquaintances. But I am not a feminist because I know obnoxious, abusive, annoying, pompous or tedious men.

I am a feminist because I am alive and I can see, hear, think, have empathy and feel. Being a feminist is not a grafted set of preferences but the natural outgrowth of seeing women treated as less than human in many settings, of being silenced, patronized, dismissed or elbowed out (or seeing others treated that way), of growing up around strong women and not knowing I had a place that I had to know. Being a feminist for me has been and remains being a woman who will exercise the right to think for herself, to have her own preferences on all matters across the board, to disregard limits and limitations placed on her and to act when moved to do so. It is the right to dream without a framework and the right to make my dreams come true. It is the right to speak my mind when something is wrong and to speak for something I feel is right. It is the right to be a person.

What's wrong with any of this? What's wrong with being a feminist?