Refusing to Be an Exception Anymore: Women in the Farmers’ Protest

Abstract

There has been much written about the farmer’s protest from various perspectives, and gender is one of them. In this piece, I am going to delineate that perspective with a premise that this protest is not solely a farmer protest, but a mass movement led by farmers. Historically, women’s labour has not been recognized in any sphere, whether domestic, workspace or in public life. The galaxy of outstanding women in these spaces has broken many barriers and paved a way to snatch their due recognition, but the social structure has at most remembered them as exceptions. There is no material ground to do so, besides patriarchal bias, which always looks at them as an exception. Women make up more than half of the agrarian workforce, and if we include animal husbandry, they outnumber men significantly.