Abstract
The vexed nature of women’s leadership - specifically the tension between claiming a place within existing (unjust) power structures and subverting these structures altogether - are explored by Devaki Nambiar, Gloria Benny, and Hari Sankar in their chapter on Kerala, India. They conclude that there is everyday resistance to playing by the rules but this falls short of a more radical feminist praxis among women leaders.
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Notes
- 1.
This tension can also be seen in the political arena, exemplified quite plainly in the case of the Women’s Reservation Bill, an affirmative action measure which reserves quotas for women in legislative bodies. The Bill was introduced as early as 1996, just 2 years after the International Conference on Population and Development, but lack of political consensus has meant that the Bill has never been passed, even as the Indian Constitution, and various commissions have sought to create a more enabling environment for women’s political participation (Chadha, 2014).
- 2.
The Travancore region also boasted the first woman judicial officer “in the entire Anglo Saxon world” (Pillai, 2016, p. 704).
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for the support and inputs of Dr. Sreejini N (formerly Public Health Foundation of India) and Dr. Anup Karan (Indian Institute of Public Health-Delhi). This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust/DBT India Alliance Fellowship (grant number IA/CPHI/16/1/502653) awarded to Dr. Devaki Nambiar as well as the Global Women’s Health Program of the George Institute for Global Health. We are grateful for the support of the Kerala Department of Health and Family Welfare as well as the State Health Systems Resource Centre, Kerala. Most of all, we are deeply grateful for the time and thoughtful reflections given to us by interview participants: women leaders who are extremely busy and made time for this exercise.
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Nambiar, D., Benny, G., Sankar, H. (2022). Women Health Leaders in Kerala: Respectability and Resistance. In: Morgan, R., Hawkins, K., Dhatt, R., Manzoor, M., Bali, S., Overs, C. (eds) Women and Global Health Leadership. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84498-1_10
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