I'm With Her

Whether it’s breaking news or shattering gender stereotypes, BARKHA DUTT isn’t afraid to disrupt the status quo. The award-winning journalist shares with Vogue her seven-point feminist manifesto

- Barkha Dutt

Last December, as I approached my 46th year, I was finally ready to stop dis-owning my gender. Like so many female professionals, I have never wanted to be defined just by my gender, and like so many women I wanted my work to speak for me, instead of my sex. But with the experience of 22 years in the media—and after reporting from war zones, insurgency belts, riots, floods and famines—I confronted the inevitable truth: women will have to work at least twice as hard and be twice as talented to reach the same position as men. And the better we do, the more success we achieve, the more we shall be subjected to the harshest of scrutiny, calling upon us to develop what Hillary Clinton once described to me as “a skin as thick as that of a rhinoceros.”

Over the years, my feminism has also been better informed by the awareness of my own relative privilege and how caste and class make the gender debate that much more complex. And so, in 2017, the first year of my life as an entrepreneur, was born the idea of We The Women, a unique participatory, break-free festival inaugurated at Mumbai’s Mehboob Studio. Its defining spirit was conversation and camaraderie, an inclusive space for extraordinary women and men—both famous and unknown—to talk and connect against a backdrop of great art, music and food. Union ministers, actors, models, sporting icons, women soldiers, dancers, filmmakers, poets, sex workers, transgender activists, sanitation workers, Dalit activists—all came together in an eclectic mash-up. Apart from being a biannual festival that will eventually travel across India, We The Women will also be an active community and content portal that runs through the year. The initiative also got me thinking about how I would describe feminism in a single sentence. It wasn’t tough; feminism, to me, is about freedom. So here are some excerpts from my Feminist Manifesto for women everywhere.