The Third World's Other First Lady

The lack of female representation in the Sri Lankan legislature has been of great concern for over a decade. This concern has lead to some theorizing and attempts at practical solutions to the problem. Among these has been the suggestion of a reservation for a quota for women in the electoral process in every political party. Women have also been encouraged to apply for candidacy to the electoral lists of political parties they support and work for. These attempts have not met with appreciable results. It has been the experience of activists that leaders of political parties at all levels are reluctant to include women in their electoral lists. Unsurprisingly, all leaders at all levels of all the political parties in Sri Lanka today are also male. On the other hand, only a very few women have come forward seeking such nomination. It is also a fact that very few of the women who gained nomination were able to get themselves to be elected by the people. In the 21 st century Sri Lanka, women's involvement in politics is in inverse proportion to the awareness and discourse on the need for the inclusion of women and gender-related issues in political agendas. The present study attempts to explain this apparent paradox.

2018

A long and difficult election journey for uncountable numbers of Sri Lankan politicians and for party supporters of Sri Lanka Freedom party (SLFP) had proceeded in June 1994.

2013

In the project to write a history of a country’s women’s movement, Dr. Selvy Thiruchandran’s book, Women’s Movement in Sri Lanka: History, Trends and Trajectories (2012) begins by asking whether or not the collective identity of ‘women’s movement’ has narrative viability. As the book states in its introduction, there are those who write about the idea of a women’s movement, with the contention that there is no movement—"the proponents of the non-movement theory"—and those who write about the idea of a movement with "the movement theory" (xii). In citing these "contending schools of thought" that exist before its publication, Women’s Movement in Sri Lanka suggests how a ‘history’ of the women’s movement in Sri Lanka could have narrative viability. As the book suggests, for ‘non-movement’ and ‘movement’ theorists alike, it is still possible to make the history of the women’s movement in Sri Lanka the subject of their writing because, whether or not they a...

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF GENDER & WOMEN'S STUDIES, 2014

Women have held key leadership positions since the year 3000 BCE. Indeed, one of the earliest Egyptian queens, Ku-baba, ruled in the Mesopotamian City-State of UR around 2500 BCE. However, this trend to place females in key leadership roles did not emerge in the Western World until during World War I when women took on the role as members of the revolutionary governments in countries such Ukraine, Russia, Hungary, and Ireland. By the 1960s there were to be further gains as Sirivamo Bandaranaike of Sri Lanka became the world's first female President and in 1974 Isabel Perón of Argentina also assumed a leadership position. Today, there are approximately twenty nine female leaders in twenty nine different countries. Eleven of these female Presidents are in the countries of Argentina,

Development and Change, 2006

Nationalities Papers, 2020

This article addresses women's cross-border internationalist connections within the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), focusing on the exchanges between women's organizations in socialist Yugoslavia and the Global South during the 1950s and 1960s, as well as during the UN Decade for Women (1975-1985). As a result of the Soviet-Yugoslav split, Yugoslavia was expelled from the Women's International Democratic Federation (WIDF), the main organization federating antifascist, communist, and socialist women, in 1949. To overcome international isolation, Yugoslav representatives established their own bilateral connections with women's organizations internationally, particularly in the Global South. Throughout the Cold War, the main figure behind women's internationalism in Yugoslavia was Vida Tomšič (1913-1998), a former partisan and leading politician, trained as a lawyer, who had a fundamental role both in nonaligned and UN settings. In this article, I further analyze Vida Tomšič's visits to India, and examine her correspondence with Indian scholar and Women's Studies pioneer Vina Mazumdar (1927-2013). The exchanges between Vina and Vida, as they amicably addressed each other, exemplify the significance of the alliance between activists from socialist countries and activists from the Global South during the UN Decade for Women.

Contemporary South Asia, 1996

Building a socialist feminist movement in Sri Lanka is not solely in the interests of women but is a condition for the development process itself. By combating authoritarian relations in the home, violence against women, and a gender division of labour which fails to socialise boys and men into caring and nurturing roles, it would on the one hand counteract tendencies towards large-scale violence and human rights abuses, and on the other enable a more rational use of human resources through the optimum development of everyone's talents and abilities.