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1Feminism and Nationalism
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3in the Third World
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9The Feminist Classics
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12The Feminist Classics series brings together foundational texts in the critical and left feminist traditions, including works of politics, history, and critical thought. Addressing debates that continue into the present day, it aims to inform contemporary discussion about feminism at the intersection of class and race.
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14Other titles in this series:
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16Close to Home: A Materialist Analysis of Women’s
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18Oppression by Christine Delphy
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20Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace
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22Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History by Vron Ware
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28Feminism and Nationalism
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30in the Third World
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32
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34Kumari Jayawardena
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40Cover photos: Chinese “Lady Recruit,” one of the many
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42women volunteers in the Southern Armies of Canton
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44China, 1922; Nationalists Demonstrating in Cairo, 1919
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46This edition published by Verso 2016
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48First published by Kali For Women 1986
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50© Kumari Jayawardena 1986, 1992, 2016
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52Foreword © Rafia Zakaria 2016
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54All rights reserved
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56The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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581 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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60Verso
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62UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
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64US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
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66versobooks.com
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68Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
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70ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-429-4
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72ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-431-7 (US EBK)
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74ISBN-13: 978-1-78478-430-0 (UK EBK)
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76British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
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78A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
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80Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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82A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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84Printed in the US by Maple Press
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90Contents
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93Foreword: Saving Solidarity by Rafia Zakaria
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95Preface
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971Introduction
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992‘Civilization’ Through Women’s Emancipation in Turkey
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101The Tanzimat (Reorganization)
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103The Young Turks Movement
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105The Kemalist Revolution
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107Conclusion
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1093Reformism and Women’s Rights in Egypt
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111Reformism in Egypt
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113Male Reformers and Women’s Rights
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115Nationalism and Protests by Women
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1174Women’s Struggles and ‘Emancipation from Above’ in Iran
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119Women Leaders
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121Male Reformers and Women’s Rights
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123The Policies of Reza Khan
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1255Attempts at Women’s Emancipation in Afghanistan: A Note
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1276Women, Social Reform and Nationalism in India
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129Forms of Resistance
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131Agitation Against ‘Certain Dreadful Practices’
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133Growth of the Reform Movement
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135Agitation by Women
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137Gandhi and Women’s Rights
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139Nehru and Women’s Rights
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141Women in Political Action
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143Conclusion
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1457Emancipation and Subordination of Women in Sri Lanka
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147Buddhism and Women
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149Changes Under Imperialism
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151The Struggle for Political and Franchise Rights
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153Conclusion
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1558The Movement for Equal Rights for Women in Indonesia
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157The Advent of Western Imperialism
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159Kartini and the Issue of Female Education and Emancipation
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161Growth of Nationalism
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163Agitation by Women
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165Conclusion
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1679Women’s Struggles for Democratic Rights in the Philippines
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169The Spanish Conquest and Struggles for National Independence
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171The Period of American Rule
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173Conclusion
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17510Feminism and Revolutionary Struggles in China
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177Confucianism and Women
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179The Reformist Movement
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181Revolt Against the Old Order
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183Women in the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution
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185Women and the May 4th Movement
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187Women and the Revolutionary Struggles of the 1920s and 1930s
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189Two Policies
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191Conclusion
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19311Women Reformists and Revolutionaries in Vietnam
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195Criticism Through Poetry
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197Vietnam and French Imperialism
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199Women and Revolution
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201Conclusion
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20312Women and Resistance in Korea
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205The Struggle Against Foreign Intervention
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207Women During the Period of Japanese Repression
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209Conclusion
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21113The Challenge of Feminism in Japan
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213Position of Women
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215Dress Reform in Japan
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217Education and Westernization
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219Women in the Workforce
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221Women in the Popular Rights Movement
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223Women’s Rights Agitation
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225Militarism and the Women’s Movement
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227Conclusion
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229Conclusion
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231Bibliography
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233Index
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239I am a new woman.
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241I seek, I strive each day to be that truly new woman I want to be.
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243In truth, that eternally new being is the sun.
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245I am the sun …
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247The new woman today seeks neither beauty nor virtue.
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249She is simply
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251crying out for strength,
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253the strength to create this still unknown kingdom …
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255Hiratsuka Raicho (1911) (Sievers 1983: 176)
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261To the memory of my mother, Eleanor (Hutton) de Zoysa,
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263and my aunt, Doris Hutton,
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265and for Doreen (Young) Wickremasinghe
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271Foreword: Saving Solidarity
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274Rafia Zakaria
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277The present de-colonial moment is not a hopeful one for feminist solidarity; the coming together of women from distant parts and portions of the world to claim in some unison the centrality of feminist identity seems an unlikely if not discarded project. The vagaries of power and privilege borne of colonialism have imposed disparate fates on the female; and as the dissection of these varied fortunes proceeds, the inequities unearthed, the injustices revealed have pushed dialogue into a realm rife with complication and recrimination. The replication of old colonial patterns in neo-imperial ventures such as the American foray into Afghanistan and Iraq, the former explicitly predicated on the ‘liberation’ of Afghan women, have further muddied the waters. US feminist groups such Feminist Majority have championed these allocations, ignoring their inherent attachment to bombings and raids. All of it recalls colonial patterns; and all of it has led to misgivings and an ever-expanding chasm between female activists, and questions about the possibility of solidarity.
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279It is not simply the formerly colonized who come with misgivings. In the West, post-feminist scepticism has rendered the very label ‘feminist’ irrelevant to some, and itchy, awkward and constricting to others. There have been arguments against the narrowness of the term feminist, against its capacity to include marginalized identities and to enable the intersections that such inclusion should garner. Resurrections of feminist discourse, to the extent they have occurred, have remained preoccupied largely if not exclusively with the concerns of the white, upper-middle-class woman, pushing tomes written around their careerist aspirations of Leaning In and Having it All to the tops of best-seller lists. Eagerly consumed and much discussed, they have moved feminist critique away from the state and instead to the individual female, her inability to speak up and model male aggression as at least partial reasons why gender inequality persists.
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281To modify Rousseau’s famous (and exclusionary) words, woman is born free but is everywhere in chains.
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283It is this quagmire of separation and scepticism that makes Kumari Jayawardena’s Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World a crucial text, the basis for answering questions that many believe have no answers. In tracing the history of early feminisms from India to Sri Lanka, Iran to Japan and several other countries, she provides a historical narrative that grounds feminist consciousness in indigenous histories, in the struggles of women whose names do not ordinarily appear in the nationalist stories that dominate most post-colonial societies. Even as she does this, she recognizes that such resurrections are themselves tainted by the sources from which they are constructed. The country studies in the volume, even while they refer mostly to historical periods prior to the advent of Western imperialism, rely inevitably on descriptions from ‘foreign missionaries and travellers, or from local nationalists, male reformers’ and only finally from ‘women who were active in feminist struggles’. This problem of sources that Jayawardena correctly identifies has led to one of two approaches to the task of excavating early feminist history. The first discards all for its taint; the second, equally a response to imperialism, reifies indigenous practices, even misogynistic ones, as a revitalization of lost cultural authenticity.
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285It is possible to evade both of these pitfalls, and Jayawardena’s work shows us how. Its relevance to two feminist audiences is the focus of the remainder of this essay.
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287The first are feminists in the West who seek to create more meaningful dialogue with feminists from the global south (the latter term having succeeded ‘Third World’ in global discourse). This includes everyone – aid workers, journalists, NGO staff, students and the ever growing cadres of Western female travellers – who want their experience of the world, and particularly of feminist consciousness, to be deeper than the puerile support of war-projects that sell themselves as directed by the emancipation of this or that group of impoverished females.
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289The second are feminists of the global south who are faced with the tricky task of calling out misogyny in traditional and cultural practices under the omniscient shadow of an imperialism that has justified evisceration of all colonized culture as justified by the moral project of improvement and enlightenment. As a columnist for Dawn, the largest English newspaper in Pakistan, I routinely face these questions from feminists who are fighting on two fronts: against misogynistic cultural norms resurrected as emblems of cultural authenticity and a necessity for de-colonization, and against a resurrected imperialism that routinely latches on to women’s issues to paint the non-white others as inherently backward, always requiring external assistance to realize equity or empowerment. It is these two groups that I wish to address, in turn, in this foreword.
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295To Western Feminists
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298Every year on International Women’s Day and sometimes on one of the other days that commemorate and seek to draw attention to an internationalist feminist identity, there is an attempt to make the feminist conversation ‘global’. In line with this effort, women from prior colonies or new ones, Pakistan and Haiti, Afghanistan and Iraq, are gathered on a stage at one or another conference, often held in cities that were colonial metropoles or, in the case of New York and Washington D.C., are centres of neo-imperial internationalism, and given a few minutes to speak about the challenges they face. The conversation is hopeful but predictable; women from the global south, eager to participate in a global discourse from which they are usually excluded, say all the right things; it is what they are expected to do in these contexts, their presence often paid for by Western host organizations eager to put their inclusiveness on display. There are hugs and sometimes tears; awards are often handed out and the commitment to a feminism based on solidarity is deemed fulfilled: the formerly oppressed or currently bombed have been given a moment, a fully paid trip to the better world, a role as an emissary from the lesser world.
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300This sort of interaction, one continually replicated, does nothing for feminist solidarity and reduces it to its most superficial and banal components. By their very architecture, invitations by Western organizations, governments or even academic institutions preclude the capacity and possibility of their guests from the lesser world to truly take on the areas of conflict that undermine feminist solidarity. In simple terms, the larger project, underlined so clearly in this book, of extricating feminist history from colonial domination (past or present) is left untouched. To put it in actual terms, an Afghan activist whose NGO is funded by USAID speaking at a forum in New York is unlikely to be in a position to point out that attaching the construction of women’s shelters to the presence of an occupying army does nothing cumulatively to empower women. If anything, it leaves them with the moral taint of being the covert agents of neo-imperialist domination.
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302The silence on these issues may preserve decorum, but it reduces feminist solidarity to a empty husk. One reason is that feminist interlocutors from the global south who have twenty minutes to speak, sometimes less at an international conference, can never quite explain the complexities of a history where feminist consciousness has developed in constant dialogue with colonialism and imperialism. For this, Western feminists must turn to the work of Kumari Jayawardena. In reading her sharp and succinct historical accounts of feminist awakenings, pre- and anti-colonial, they can fill the contextual gaps that now define the interaction between these feminists and feminists from the global south.
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304Doing so is likely to be the progenitor for many revelations unavailable to Western feminists, even those who seek to account for the differences in power and privilege that currently typify the north–south conversation. Among them may be the realization that the colonial enterprise’s evisceration of tradition did not necessarily target some archaic patriarchy but rather whatever was noxious to a narrow colonial mentality. In one example, Dutch and Portuguese colonizers in the 1800s were aghast by the Kingdom of Kandy, whose offending traditions included, among others, the custom of polyandry and forms of marriage in which the husband was incorporated into the wife’s family and could be expelled at will. It is also notable that the Kingdom of Kandy was a stolid opponent to imperial presence, though the latter won out eventually as Jayawardena says: ‘When the British captured Kandy, they attempted to change the marriage laws; basing themselves largely on a moral repugnance to polyandry; marriages were to be monogamous and registration was necessary if the children were to be deemed legitimate.’
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306Colonial enterprises have long been constructed, as neo-imperial enterprise is today, on being accompanied by women’s liberation – but women’s resistance to their own fetishization have been just as longstanding. Jayawardena introduces us to Raden Kartini, whose early feminist writings reveal not only a passionate commitment to women’s equality in Indonesia but also to the role of the newly liberated colonized woman within the larger political discourse of the colonizers. As she says: ‘We know why The Echo is glad to publish our articles. It is because we are a novelty and make fine advertisements for that paper. The Dutch “Lelie” placed its columns at my disposal and time and again the directress has asked for letters from me. Why? For the advertisement letters from the true daughter of the Orient, from a real “Javanese girl”, thoughts from such a half wild creature written by herself in a European language, how interesting.’
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308Kartini’s words could well capture the position of the Afghan or Iraqi woman of today, whose ‘authentic’ reflections are much in demand on the feminist conference circuit or in publications as a moral gloss for American intervention for those countries. Instead, Jayawardena provides a substantive genealogy for the sort of feminist engagement that is dictated by the production of a moral basis for intervention, rather than true dialogue. In considering how central colonialism and the nationalism birthed alongside resistance to it is to the ontology of feminism in the global south, one hopes that Western feminists can see how the flaws of current international engagements fit into a historical legacy. In providing us a history that is centred so integrally on the feminist experience, Jayawardena has given us a connection to the past, which inevitably presents us with a path to the future.
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314To Feminists in the Global South
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317As a young girl growing up in Pakistan, I barely ever heard the word ‘feminist’. There were strong women around me, even a female prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, but never this idea of a commitment to gender equality being somehow central to one’s identity. On the obverse, I saw a vast chasm between Bhutto and her glitzy entourage and the general condition of women in Pakistan, which was defined by powerlessness and poverty. Jayawardena’s introduction to her chapter on Sri Lanka hence struck a chord: she recalls the great attention Sri Lanka garnered in 1960, when a woman, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, became the world’s first female prime minister. There is a tendency, Jayawardena points out, to elevate the extraordinary achievements of individual women as indicative of the general condition of women in the country. It was a problem in 1960 when Bandaranaike was elected, it was a problem in 1988 when Bhutto was elected, and it is still one today.
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319This dominance by an elite-led feminism, constricted by class-bred opportunity, is one of the most important themes of Jayawardena’s book. In her descriptions of early feminisms in Afghanistan and India, in Iran and Egypt, one sees the charge for emancipation led primarily and sometimes exclusively by women from the highest echelons of society. In Afghanistan, for instance, ‘in 1928 Queen Surayya appeared unveiled in public and it was decreed that women should in future discard the veil’. Attaching veiling and other women’s empowerment projects to a monarch’s agenda proved, of course, to be a bad idea; for when the king fell, so too came an end to the women’s empowerment agenda that he had ‘decreed’.
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321A similar trend of ‘queen feminism’ can be seen in early feminist organizing in India. Consider for instance, Jayawardena’s description of the activities of the All-India Women’s Conference:
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323At the 1928 sessions of the conference in Delhi, Muslim women’s participation was much in evidence; the name was changed to All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and a Muslim president was appointed, the Begum Mother of Bhopal, Maimoona Sultana. In 1929, the AIWC conference in Patna elected the Rani of Mandi as President.
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327There is hopefulness and distress encapsulated in this description. On one hand it is hopeful that Muslim women were joining the ranks of feminist organizing in India; on the other it is notable that it is mostly the queens who seem to ascend to leadership positions.
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329Sometimes, the passage of time makes the past more palatable; at others, it inflects it with even further tragedy. In the case of this particular description of Muslim feminist organizing in India (or the soon-to-be-created Pakistan), it would be the latter. Jayawardena’s isolation of class as an obstacle that feminist organizing confronted is an important one; in some countries like Pakistan, this obstacle remains un-surmounted with the feminism of workers’ movements unable to coalesce successfully with that progeny of ‘queen feminism’. For a more robust feminist future, class divisions within the global south must be confronted and overcome.
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331In the conclusion to her book, Jayawardena writes hopefully of the raising of consciousness among women workers in Asia regarding their rights and feminist awakening. It is indeed true that the labor of these workers, who produce so much of what the rest of the world wears, plays with, eats with or sleeps on, is where the future of feminism in the global south lies. The narratives of these women who participate in the global capitalist economy, are sidelined by a feminist discourse dominated by white Western women preaching fast tracks to CEO positions.
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333The chasm is a significant one. But this book, as a compendium of female courage from long before feminism was a term, and far beyond the existence of most nations as we know them today, provides potential for a bridge. In Jayawardena’s snapshots of Asian countries and in her excavation of feminist histories, is the possibility of reclaiming a belief in the broad, global universality of women’s struggles, in a dialogue and a feminist solidarity built on a material interconnection that requires urgent and immediate resurrection.
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339Kumari Jayawardena: Feminist, Scholar, Socialist
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342In her essay on Kumari Jayawardena’s work, Selvy Thiruchandran writes that ‘socialist feminists were and still are criticized by orthodox Marxists for shifting the analysis from class analysis to gender analysis.’ The description is important; it reveals how feminists, regardless of their location in the global north or south, face opposition from the generally male-dominated cadres of intellectual discourse because of the project of interposing gender identity into systems of analysis that they (men) believe to be perfectly adequate.
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344Jayawardena’s life and work are both testaments to her intellectual and personal perseverance, the destiny perhaps of all those who seek to chart a different course from the well worn and best known. Born of a Sri Lankan father and a British mother, the home she grew up in likely modeled the very bridges that underlie much of her scholarly work. Her father, Dr. A.P. de Zoysa, was a politician and a Buddhist scholar; her mother, Eleanor Hutton, an avid patron of the arts. Their cumulative influence must have created a vibrant household and an international one. Activism must also have come early; Eleanor was a member of the Sri Lankan Women’s Conference and attended many international women’s conferences. Zoysa’s views on women were not only enlightened but also revolutionary for the time; as a member of the State Council, he introduced a motion to abolish the Dowry system in Sri Lanka. The vote was tied and the deputy speaker, a man named Susantha de Fonseca, had to break it. He voted no and the motion was defeated.
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346As a young woman, Jayawardena attended the London School of Economics in the 1950s, befriending many young politicians, including Ralph Milliband, and becoming a part of the anti-colonial left. Thus began an academic and activist career that continues today and that has been marked by pioneering achievements. She joined the faculty of the University of Colombo in 1969 and served there until 1985. Jayawardena’s commitment to both scholarship and activism can be seen in her efforts to establish the Worker’s Education Centre at the University. In 1978, she helped found a magazine called Voice for Women, published in three national languages in Sri Lanka. The Women’s Education Center was established in 1982 as a means to further develop the Voice for Women agenda of gender equality and to bring together South Asian feminists to share their experiences and activism. It also led to the creation of the South Asian Feminists Research Association (SAFRA). Jayawardena has held visiting professor appointments in different parts of the world, and was a fellow of the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe College, Harvard in the United States.
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348These of course are the points on a resume that make up the official account of Jayawardena’s work; its more crucial contribution is her commitment to the dissection of how histories, both global and local, are constructed to exclude women and underscore narratives of a dominant majority. When her compendium of essays Ethnic and Class Conflict in Sri Lanka was published in 1984, it was met with much criticism by Sinhala nationalists who took issue with her project of analyzing distortions in Sri Lankan history. It is but one example of the virulent backlash faced by feminist scholars who seek to underscore how narratives are manipulated by both imperial and colonizing powers as well as post-colonial nationalists. This two-front war, academic and activist, is the central theme of Jayawardena’s work and of this volume in particular.
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3501 December 2015
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356Preface
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359This book is a revised and expanded version of Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World in the 19th and early 20th Centuries, published in 1982 by the Institute of Social Studies in the Netherlands, for its Women and Development Programme.
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361Here, I have dealt with the early years of feminism and the emergence of the ‘new woman’ in several countries of the East. Later periods are referred to, but the study is basically historical, set in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and is intended as an introduction to the subject of feminism in the Third World. Many people in the Third World are not aware that their countries have a history of active feminism, or of early movements for women’s emancipation, that were supported both by women and men reformers. Moreover, as a result of a colonial-type education, many are not even familiar with the history of other Third World countries. I have, therefore, included some historical background in each of the country studies. Women’s participation in revolutionary and democratic movements is also emphasized. Although many of these have been highlighted in history books, the role of women in such struggles has not been given adequate attention; one hears only of the ‘heroes’ and little of the numerous ‘heroines’ of Asia.
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363In analysing contemporary Asian women’s movements, some understanding of the nature and content of feminist history in Asia is needed. This is important because those who want to continue to keep the women of our countries in a position of subordination find it convenient to dismiss feminism as a foreign ideology. It should, therefore, be stressed that feminism, like socialism, has no particular ethnic identity; further, any movement for liberation and social change in the Third World can be strengthened only by the participation of the women at all levels and, in so doing, they are able to free themselves from exploitation, oppression and patriarchal structures.
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365This book discusses the general issues of feminism, women’s emancipation and women in political struggles, against a background of increasing activity by the Asian peoples against the domination of their countries by colonial rulers. The struggle for women’s emancipation during this period was necessarily bound up with the fight for national liberation and formed an essential part of the democratic struggles of the period. It must also be emphasized that the book deals with a period when the bourgeoisies of some colonial or semi-colonial countries played a progressive role, and the women of this class, together with radical women of the petty-bourgeoisie and working class, came forward to fight in the various battles for democratic rights. Many of the ‘new women’ of the period, unfortunately, relapsed into their domestic roles or showed concern only with ‘equal rights’ struggles within the framework of capitalism and the post-colonial state in which the bourgeoisie retained power. Nevertheless, others continued the struggle, joined revolutionary movements for social and economic change, and brought a revolutionary feminist perspective into political movements. Their struggle still continues in many countries, where women militants participate in movements for national liberation, women’s liberation and socialism.
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367The material for this study has been gathered from a wide range of sources that are indicated in the bibliography. In compiling that material I had the invaluable assistance of Alem Desta (of Ethiopia) who unearthed several rare books from the Women’s Archives in Amsterdam and other libraries in the Netherlands. I am also grateful to those who commented on sections of the study, made valuable suggestions, and helped in finding material. I am particularly indebted to Maria Mies, who pioneered the women’s studies programme in the ISS and inspired many Third World feminists. I must thank Kamla Bhasin, Susan Ekstein, Swarna Jayaweera, Donovan Moldrich, Cecilia Ng, Chitra Maunaguru, Howard Nicholas, Rhoda Reddock, Rosalynd Tibalgo, N. Sanmugaratnam, and several other friends, as well as the students of the Women and Development Programme of the Institute of Social Science, and women in Sri Lanka with whom I had many discussions on issues concerning feminism and Third World women. They are, of course, not responsible for my errors. I would also like to thank Robert Molteno of Zed Books for his encouragement, and all those who, in many ways, have helped in the editing and publication of the book, especially Jean Sanders, Rosalynd Paine, M. Jacob, and other staff members of Zed Books.
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369Kumari Jayawardena
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371University of Colombo
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373Sri Lanka
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3791.Introduction
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383I see here the representatives of only half the population of Egypt. May I ask where is the other half? Sons of Egypt, where are the daughters of Egypt? Where are your mothers and sisters, your wives and daughters?
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385Bhikaiji Cama of India, at a meeting of the Egyptian National Congress at Brussels in 1910. (Kaur 1985: 102)
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389This study deals with the rise of early feminism and movements for women’s participation in political struggles in selected countries of the ‘East’ in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The developments in the countries chosen—Egypt, Iran, Turkey, India, Sri Lanka, China, Japan, Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia—show certain parallels and similarities of experience as well as some clear differences of strategy based on their specific historical backgrounds, and provide interesting material for comparative study.
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391The countries dealt with have one factor in common: they have either been directly subjected to aggression and domination by imperialist powers interested in establishing themselves in the region, or indirectly manipulated into serving the interests of imperialism. While India, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines became part of colonial empires, Egypt and Iran were reduced to semi-colonial status, the Turkish Empire was progressively dismembered, Japan was put under pressure from Western countries to open up the country to trade, and China became prey to the encroachments of foreign trading powers who wanted to exploit Chinese resources. Although all these countries fall into what, for the sake of convenience, has been termed ‘the East’, they also present certain specificities linked to their cultural and ideological backgrounds. Egypt, Turkey and Iran have an Islamic history that has shaped their attitudes and responses. India and Sri Lanka inherited civilizations based on Hindu and Buddhist doctrines and show similarities with, and differences from, one another. Further East, China, Japan and Korea have certain common characteristics that are partly due to their Confucian ideology. In between, such countries as Vietnam, the Philippines and Indonesia have felt at various times the pressures of the two dominant ancient civilizations of Asia: the Indian and the Chinese. In responding to the pervasive presence of imperialism, their attitudes showed the different influences of their ideological heritages—ideologies which had an impact on the position and role of women as well as on the modes and characteristics of women’s movements, as the detailed country studies in this book reveal.
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393The words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ have become emotive words that often evoke hostile reactions. Feminism is generally thought of as a recent phenomenon, rooted in Western society, and people tend to overlook the fact that the word was in common usage in Europe and elsewhere in the 19th and early 20th centuries, to signify agitation on issues concerning women. The meaning of the word has now been expanded to mean an awareness of women’s oppression and exploitation within the family, at work and in society, and conscious action by women (and men) to change this situation. Feminism, in this definition, goes beyond movements for equality and emancipation which agitate for equal rights and legal reforms to redress the prevailing discrimination against women. While such movements often advance the struggle for equality, they do not tackle such basic issues as women’s subordination within the family or challenge the existing framework of men-women relations in which the subordination of women is located. In this study the word ‘feminism’ is used in its larger sense, embracing movements for equality within the current system and significant struggles that have attempted to change the system.
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395The concept of feminism has also been the cause of much confusion in Third World countries. It has variously been alleged by traditionalists, political conservatives and even certain leftists, that feminism is a product of ‘decadent’ Western capitalism; that it is based on a foreign culture of no relevance to women in the Third World; that it is the ideology of women of the local bourgeoisie; and that it alienates or diverts women, from their culture, religion and family responsibilities on the one hand, and from the revolutionary struggles for national liberation and socialism on the other. In the West, too, there is a Eurocentric view that the movement for women’s liberation is not indigenous to Asia or Africa, but has been a purely West European and North American phenomenon, and that where movements for women’s emancipation or feminist struggles have arisen in the Third World, they have been merely imitative of Western models.
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397As a result of this, I have thought it necessary to take up some of these issues and to show that feminism was not imposed on the Third World by the West, but rather that historical circumstances produced important material and ideological changes that affected women, even though the impact of imperialism and Western thought was admittedly among the significant elements in these historical circumstances. Debates on women’s rights and education were held in 18th-century China and there were movements for women’s social emancipation in early 19th-century India; the other country studies show that feminist struggles originated between 60 and 80 years ago in many countries of Asia. In a way, the fact that such movements for emancipation and feminism flourished in several non-European countries during this period has been ‘hidden from history’. Only recently, with the rise of feminist movements all over the world, has attention been directed to early feminists and feminism in the Third World.
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399The movement towards women’s emancipation described and analysed in this book was acted out against a background of nationalist struggles aimed at achieving political independence, asserting a national identity, and modernizing society. During the period dealt with in this study, the countries under consideration were trying to shake off imperialist domination. All had faced the reality of foreign conquest, occupation or aggression. They had resisted in diverse ways, but their resistance had three common facets: first, the desire to carry out internal reforms in order to modernize their societies, it being felt that this was necessary if they were successfully to combat imperialism; second, the dismantling of those pre-capitalist structures, especially ruling dynasties and religious orthodoxies, that stood in the way of needed internal reforms; and third, the assertion of a national identity on the basis of which people could be mobilized against imperialism. These forces can be seen to be at work in all the countries studied.
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401The external and internal forces were thus closely interlinked. The forcible domination or opening-up of the countries to capitalist penetration had created unequal trading relations and promoted the expansion of a local class of merchants, commission agents and collaborators of foreign capitalists. In all the countries under consideration, some sections of the capitalists, primarily those who went into industry and whose products had to face foreign competition, conflicted with imperialism; their dissatisfactions were shared by intellectuals and professionals who had studied abroad or were products of the modern schools and colleges that had been started in the 19th century. This local bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie faced the continuing fact of foreign occupation and economic domination. In some countries, they attempted to throw out the occupiers and to develop on a basis of autonomy; in others, they tried to negotiate more advantageous positions for themselves. In all cases, however, they felt the need to sweep away crumbling ruling groups and monarchies which tended to submit to imperialism (the Qajars in Iran, Manchus in China, the sultanate in Turkey and the Shogun in Japan); this was considered a necessary step towards the modernizing, reforming and strengthening of internal structures which were essential if an effective opposition to imperialism were to be mounted.
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403This resistance, which used the paradoxical strategy of adopting Western models in order to combat Western aggression, reinforce cultural identity and strengthen the nation, took various forms. Japan, for example, industrialized rapidly, becoming a powerful country within the framework of a highly authoritarian imperial system and a traditional hierarchy. China, in contrast, swept away the feudal monarchy and challenged Confucian attempts in order to modernize the country, resist imperialism, and build up democratic forces. India, while purifying internal structures of the worst excesses, concentrated on the political struggle and achieved a political, but not a social revolution, and in Sri Lanka the emerging bourgeoisie successfully negotiated a transfer of political power which left the existing social structure unchanged. Turkey and Iran associated ‘civilization’ with capitalist development and Europeanization, programmes that were carried out by dictatorial regimes which imposed the necessary reforms on the people. Egyptian reformism and nationalism developed within the framework of the prevailing class structures and the monarchical system.
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405As nationalism grew, the struggle of the local bourgeoisie in most of these countries developed on two fronts simultaneously: internally against the pre-capitalist structures, and externally against imperialism. In this agitation, which took on a bourgeois democratic form, the bourgeoisie had to assert the national cultural identity in the form of patriotic appeals intended to unite and arouse the consciousness of the people, while also promoting reforms aimed at educational, scientific, technological and industrial advancement. The liberal slogans of democratic rights, including representative government, universal suffrage, the rights of man and the rights of nations, which were used in the struggle, thus had a material base in the striving of the local bourgeoisie to gain political and economic power.
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407The creation and assertion of a cultural identity was itself dialectically related to the growth of imperialism. One of the by-products of imperial aggression was a mutual interaction between the cultures of Europe and of the non-European world. Eighteenth-century Europe experienced a new wave of interest in the ‘Orient’, which led to voyages of further discovery and colonial conquest, and to an interest in Eastern cultures and social structures. The Orientalists, as the new scholars became known, were particularly active in India after Britain gained its initial foothold in the 1750s and the colonial scholar-officials began to ‘discover the East’, as well as in France, where Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt was accompanied by a shipload of French scholars who set about studying all aspects of Egyptian society. Similar studies undertaken in other Asian countries helped to uncover much of their history through archaeological and historical research; in the course of time they also led to the creation of a concept that became an instrument of cultural domination—a concept of non-European cultures seen through the prism of European cultural and intellectual development. This is the construct that Edward Said has called ‘Orientalism’:
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409The Orient is an integral part of European material civilisation and culture. Orientalism expresses and represents that part culturally and even ideologically as a mode of discourse with supporting institutions, vocabulary, scholarship, imagery, doctrines, even colonial bureaucracies and colonial styles … a Western style for dominating, restructuring and having authority over the Orient. (Said 1979: 2–3)
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413The interaction between cultures proved to be a two-way process, however. The beliefs that the older cultures of the East were the ‘source of civilization’, that the quest for origins lay in the East and that European languages were linked to Sanskrit, were to have a profound influence on Western political thinking in the 19th century. Similarly, in those countries of Asia and Africa which had been exposed to ‘Occidentalism’, the attempts to emulate Western economic development were associated with an appreciation of Western cultural values and specially of such concepts as natural rights, liberalism and parliamentary democracy, which were perceived as the foundations for such growth.
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415Within this framework, those nationalists who challenged foreign aggression had to tackle the problem of asserting a national identity by combating obscurantism, and by reforming and rationalizing existing structures and religious and cultural traditions. In short, they had to challenge and change the old order, sometimes radically, while reviving what were defined as the true and pristine traditions of a distant and independent past. In doing so, they were influenced by European Orientalists who had glorified Asian civilizations and cultural traditions, as well as by Western political thought. In particular, they were inspired by the slogans of liberty, equality and fraternity and the anti-religious views of French revolutionary thinkers of the 18th century.
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417In addition, the 19th-century flowering of liberalism, especially associated with the ideas of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill in Britain, and the socialist challenge of the French Utopians and later of the Marxists, were to strongly influence sections of Asian intellectuals. One must also stress the influence in Asia of Darwinism, the freethinkers, theosophy, and all the anti-Christian, anti-clerical movements of the 19th century, including the bitter political struggles between state and church, the separation of religion and politics, and the secularization of society which occurred in many European countries. In a colonial or semi-colonial context, resistance to Christianity and to missionary activities had anti-imperialist implications, and the challenge to Christianity in Europe gave an impetus to national movements of cultural revival that already existed (as in India and Sri Lanka). Similarly, European rationalism, Freemasonry, secularism and positivism were also to influence those liberal and socialist groups in Asia and Africa who were less concerned with religious revival than with social change.
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419Religious revival and opposition to tradition generally took the same form in most Asian countries, linking together the reinterpretation of sacred texts and the reform of clerical structures; this led, in some cases, to the reduction of clerical influence. In the Middle East, Islam as it existed was seen as an obstacle to nationalist political and economic development; much was written not only about the need to return to the ‘pure’ Islam of an earlier period, but also about the idea that Islam, if reinterpreted correctly, was a rational religion compatible with social advance. Similar movements were at work with regard to other religions in Asia. In India, there was an attempt to reinterpret Hinduism on the basis of the concept of one God and the unity of all humans; repugnant social practices such as caste and sati were seen as the result of accretions or misinterpretations. In Sri Lanka, reformers went back to the texts of Buddhism and reinterpreted them as being indicative of a rational system of ethics, totally compatible with modern scientific knowledge.
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421In many Asian countries, clerical authority was seen as retrograde and supportive of corrupt feudal regimes and, therefore, as conducive neither to the growth of nationalism nor to necessary superstructural reforms of the social system, such as measures to emancipate women. Efforts to reduce the power of clerical authorities were perhaps most marked in those countries with well-established hierarchies as in Islam. The drive towards a secular state was seen particularly in the ‘Young Turks’ movement of the early 20th century, which in turn influenced policies in the neighbouring Muslim countries. The anti-Brahmin content of religious and political reformism in India shows another facet of this same tendency.
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423We thus have a situation where Western secular thought is a crucial factor in fashioning a consciousness and in devising structures that would make possible an escape from the domination of Western political power. The traditional political and religious élites were well aware of the dangers of this emerging consciousness and tried to meet the challenge in various ways: total isolationism in some countries, a return to fundamentalism in others. But in almost all the countries under study, the new body of ideas was seized on by the bourgeoisie and used as an instrument in their attempt to forge a new national consciousness and modern secular political structures. It must be noted, however, that the early fervour with which such ideals were pursued has now somewhat diminished; the old precapitalist dogmas and religions have proved to be surprisingly enduring.
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425Another important factor in the formation of this consciousness was education. In almost all the countries under consideration, education had been closely linked with religion and generally confined to the religious and upper strata of society. Mass education was a concept of the bourgeois world, brought into these countries by the colonizing powers. Even though in most cases education began as a process of proselytization, and for the training of local administrative cadres, it paved the way for the spread of literacy among the masses. Ultimately this education also became the means of imparting a knowledge of modern science. The spread of literacy in turn formed the foundation on which newspapers and journals could be established. The specific ways in which women’s consciousness was fashioned by education will be made clear in the following case studies.
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427The spread of literacy and of newspapers had another far-reaching effect. Political events in one country can have a rapid effect on nationalists and revolutionaries in another. An important turning-point in Asian nationalism, for example, was Japan’s victory in 1905 over Tsarist Russia in the Manchurian war. Asians had admired Japan for the success of her rapid modernization and industrialization policies, and many students and political exiles had been attracted from neighbouring countries (especially China, Korea and Vietnam). Japan’s military victory showed that Asians were able decisively to challenge and defeat Europeans in armed warfare. Sun Yat-Sen claimed that the Japanese victory gave ‘unlimited hope’ and ‘raised the standing of all Asians’ (Spector 1962: 30), and Nehru declared that Japan was ‘the representative of Asia battling Western aggression. If Japan could make good against one of the powerful European countries, why not India?’ (Nehru 1949: 440–4). The Russian revolution of 1905 also gave Asian democrats and revolutionaries the conviction that absolute governments, however firmly entrenched, could be toppled:
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429The Russo-Japanese war underlined the possibility of the overthrow of Western imperialism. The Russian Revolution of 1905 indicated the feasibility of the overthrow of autocracy, native or foreign. In most Asian countries, where the two objectives were fused, Russia’s defeat and Russia’s revolution together produced a resounding and durable impact. (Spector 1962: 30)
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433Other striking events which evoked a strong response among Third World nationalists included the struggles of the Irish against British domination, especially the martyrdom of the freedom fighters and hunger strikers. Many Asians and Africans who were in Europe in the early 20th century made a point of visiting Ireland; Nehru did so in 1907, and the visit strengthened his ‘extremist sympathies’ (Gopal 1975: 22). Moreover, the political changes that occurred in some countries of Asia and Africa caused hope to grow in other areas where the struggles continued. The deposition of the Manchu dynasty and the proclamation of the Chinese Republic by Sun Yat-Sen in 1912 had a tremendous impact on nationalists in other countries. Similarly, the Young Turks’ revolution of 1908 and Mustapha Kemal’s declaration of the republic in 1922 were dramatic events which influenced other struggles, while news of nationalist upsurges in India, Egypt, Iran, Vietnam and many other countries, which were constantly highlighted in the newspapers, served to provide mutual encouragement. Perhaps the most influential event was the Russian Revolution of 1917 which caused reverberations throughout the non-European world, and in the colonized countries aroused hopes of major change. At the time, a Sri Lankan radical journal expressed the enthusiasm of young Asian nationalists and revolutionaries: ‘Czardom that for ages manacled human liberty has vanished from unhappy Russia with the heralding of the dawn of a better day’ (Jayawardena 1972: 227). Influenced by the events in Russia, Communist parties which had arisen in Asia by the early 1920s—in China, India, Japan, Iran, Egypt and Turkey among others—launched revolutionary movements for social and political change.
434
435It is in the context of the resistance to imperialism and various forms of foreign domination on the one hand, and to feudal monarchies, exploitative local rulers and traditional patriarchal and religious structures on the other, that we should consider the democratic movement for women’s rights and the feminist struggles that emerged in Asia. The country studies, in which we examine the situation of each country in detail, will show that struggles for women’s emancipation were an essential and integral part of national resistance movements. In all these countries, the ‘woman question’ forcefully made its appearance during the early 20th century. The debate on the role and status of women had of course started earlier, but in the era of imperialist and capitalist expansion the question assumed new dimensions; the growth of capitalism changed the old social order and gave birth to new classes and new strata whose women had to pose the old question in a new dynamic. In short the issue was one of democratic rights.
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437To foreign and local capitalists and landowners, women were the cheapest source of labour for plantations, agriculture and industry. To the colonial authorities and missionaries, local women had to be educated to be good (preferably Christian) wives and mothers to the professional and white-collar personnel who were being trained to man the colonial economy. To the male reformers of the local bourgeoisie, women needed to be adequately Westernized and educated in order to enhance the modern and ‘civilized’ image of their country and of themselves, and to be a good influence on the next generation; the demand grew for ‘civilized housewives’.
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439The importance of female labour under conditions of capitalist development in Asia has to be stressed. While it is true that women had toiled in the fields and plantations and domestic industries in the precapitalist phase, it was with the development of capitalism in a colonial or semi-colonial context, that they were to become available as potentially the largest and cheapest reserve army of labour. Women’s labour was therefore very important to local and foreign capitalists; traditions and practices which restricted women’s mobility or enforced their seclusion were thus detrimental to capitalism in its search for cheap ‘free’ labour. With the growth of industries—especially those associated with the textile trade—the demand for women’s labour grew in all the countries under consideration: China (silk and allied manufactures), Japan (textiles and consumer goods), Iran (carpets), Egypt (cotton), India (textiles) and Turkey (rugs and textiles). Women’s labour was also crucial in the plantation sector (tea, rubber, coconut, sugar, etc.) and in farm and domestic agriculture in these countries. Moves towards the further ‘emancipation’ of women to enable them to work and to better serve the needs of industrialists, planters and farmers were therefore to be expected.
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441The process of capitalist expansion also created an emerging bourgeoisie which arose partly from the needs of the imperial administration, i.e. local administrators and professionals, and partly from the needs of the new forms of economic organization that served foreign capital. The men of these emerging groups, however, saw the ‘woman question’ in a very different light. While the women of the peasantry and working class were being proletarianized, those of the bourgeoisie were trained to accept new social roles in conformity with the emerging bourgeois ideology of the period. For example, the bureaucrats, missionaries and male reformers of the local bourgeoisie were convinced that women had to be emancipated from the social abuses of a ‘savage’ past, from practices that were defined as repugnant by the prevailing norms of European society. Obvious areas of violence and oppression were highlighted, such as widow burning in India, veiling, polygamy, concubinage and seclusion in Egypt, Turkey, Korea, Vietnam, Iran and Indonesia, and foot-binding in China. But to these were added other so-called ‘barbaric practices’ that went against the Christian ideas of monogamy and sexual control that Europeans enforced upon their own women. For example, vestiges of matriarchy, tolerant sexual mores, polyandry and divorce by mutual consent, all of which existed in the Kandyan regions of Sri Lanka, were criticized not only by the foreign rulers and missionaries but also by men of the local bourgeoisie. Many of the reformers among the indigenous bourgeoisie were men who saw the social evils of their societies as threats to the stability of bourgeois family life, and who therefore campaigned for reform in order to strengthen the basic structures of society rather than to change them. There was thus an in-built conservative bias in many of the reform movements.
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443The nature of the resistance movements in these countries and of the feminist struggles within those movements varied with the balance of forces that resulted from capitalist expansion. In most countries, they were dominated by the local bourgeoisie. Again, there were two types: those in which the bourgeoisie found it necessary to mobilize the masses in the struggle, as in India and Indonesia, and others, in which the local bourgeoisie replaced the imperialist rulers through a process of negotiation and gradual reforms as in Sri Lanka or the Philippines. The women’s struggles associated with both types of resistance movements did not move beyond the sphere of limited and selected reforms: equality for women within the legal process, the removal of obviously discriminatory practices, the right to the vote, education and property, and the right of women to enter the professions and politics, etc. These were reforms which had little effect on the daily lives of the masses of women; neither did they address the basic question of women’s subordination within the family and in society. Even where women of the working classes were involved, the specific character of the struggles was determined by that of the larger struggle; equal pay and similar demands were usually their main objective.
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445In a few countries, however, the involvement of peasants and workers in the resistance movements pushed the struggle on to a broader front. Not content with replacing the pre-capitalist or imperialist regimes with a local bourgeoisie, they aimed at a more radical transformation of society, at the establishment of a socialist society, a trend that is illustrated by the country studies of China and Vietnam. The feminist element in these movements was able to become a revolutionary force that simultaneously helped to transform society and to improve the position of women. In this context, examples of revolutionary feminism during the early 20th century provide valuable evidence that feminism was not a diversion, a bourgeois aberration, nor a matter to be considered only after a social revolution; on the contrary, it was a process which had to be continuous and permanent during all stages of the struggle.
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447Women’s movements do not occur in a vacuum but correspond to, and to some extent are determined by, the wider social movements of which they form part. The general consciousness of society about itself, its future, its structure and the role of men and women, entails limitations for the women’s movement; its goals and its methods of struggle are generally determined by those limits. Mention will be made in the country studies of courageous women who consciously strove to move beyond those limits in the pursuit of goals that today would be defined as feminist, but who failed because of the lower levels of general awareness.
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449It is appropriate at this stage to discuss women’s consciousness as it emerged in the countries under study after the impact of colonialism and the experience of Western society and thought. Of all the religious ideologies discussed, Islam has the longest contact with Europe. From its very beginnings it has fought continuously with Christianity. What challenged Islam in the 19th century, however, was not Christianity but European secularism. As Bernard Lewis says:
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451A philosophy free from visible Christian connotations and expressed in a society that was rich, strong and rapidly expanding, it seemed to some Muslims to embody the secret of European success and to offer a remedy for the weakness, poverty and retreat of which they were becoming increasingly aware. In the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, European secularism and a series of political, social and economic doctrines inspired by it, exercised a continuing fascination on successive generations of Muslims. (Lewis 1982: 184)
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455Muslim travellers to Europe who tried to understand this secular society were particularly interested in the position of European women. The fact that women seemed relatively free of the social restrictions of Islamic society, that they were allowed to move about, that they were respected in society and deferred to by men, struck them forcibly. The institution of monogamous marriage and the fact that the family was the basic unit of society were also alien concepts that provoked discussion. Evliya Celebi, an 18th-century Turkish traveller and observer of European society, wrote:
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457If the emperor encounters a woman in the street … he halts his horse and lets the woman pass. If the emperor is on foot … then he remains standing in a polite posture … takes his hat off … and shows deference to the woman, and only when she has passed does he continue on his way. This is a most extraordinary spectacle. In this country, and elsewhere in the lands of the infidels, women have the chief say and they are honoured and respected for the sake of Mother Mary. (Lewis 1982: 287)
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461The freedom displayed by women in their social intercourse with men was commented on by many; witnesses to grand balls were compelled to think that such intimacy also meant sexual liberty. The 18th-century travellers were sometimes so struck by the ostensible freedom of women that they tended to exaggerate:
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463In France, women are of higher station than men, so that they do what they wish and go where they please; and the greatest lord shows respect and courtesy beyond all limits to the humblest of women. In that country their commands prevail. (Mehmed Said Effendi in Lewis 1982: 289)
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467These travellers were struck by the openness of a society that permitted some men and women to take part in easy social intercourse; it might be said that they found this so surprising because the Islamic élite at that time was accustomed to seclude its women in the zenana. However, non-Muslims were equally impressed. Yu Kil-Chun of Korea went to the USA at the end of the 19th century as his country’s ambassador and published an account of his travels in 1892. One of the things that struck him most was the position and status of women in American society and their employment in various activities and professions outside the home. Moreover, he was singularly intrigued by the marriage pattern which ideally permitted women to choose their husbands on the basis of love. Yu finished his account by advocating the equality of men and women. Even though he made it obvious that this was not due to any concern for the human rights of women, but rather because equality would promote the welfare of children, homes and country, it is still remarkable that he should single this factor out for particular attention. Asian women too were influenced by the myth that all Western women were ‘free’. To give one example, around 1900, Kartini, the pioneer of female education in Indonesia, was to envy the ‘free, independent European woman’ (Geertz 1964: 137).
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469Faced with societies that were sufficiently developed and powerful to subjugate them, and with the need to modernize their own societies, many reformers of Asia seized on the apparent freedom of women in Western societies as the key to the advancement of the West, and argued that ‘Oriental backwardness’ was partly due to women’s low status. For example, Fukuzawa Yukichi, an interpreter with the first official Japanese mission to Europe in 1862, advocated equality between the sexes. In The Encouragement of Learning, he criticized the traditional relationships between men and women, advocating monogamy and freedom of choice in marriage in order to make Japanese society more ‘presentable’ and ‘civilized’. Fukuzawa said frankly: ‘I shall attempt to make our society more presentable if only on the surface … I should like to put my future efforts towards elevating the moral standards of the men and women of my land to make them truly worthy of a civilized nation’ (Fukuzawa 1968: 306, 336).
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471Since the status of women in society was the popular barometer of ‘civilization’, many reformers agitated for social legislation that would improve their situation. In India, in 1818, Raja Rammohan Roy led a campaign against what the missionaries called ‘certain Dreadful Practices’. This was followed by actions led by many other social reformers, including Vidyasagar, K.C. Sen, Ranade and Phule. Similarly in the Meiji era, Japanese intellectuals such as Fukuzawa and Soho condemned Confucian traditions of family life and advocated rights for women. The Young Turks of the early 20th century, Ziya Gokalp and Ahmet Agaoglu, pleaded for women’s emancipation: Gokalp expressed the general current of opinion among male reformers when he wrote: ‘In the future, Turkish ethics must be founded upon democracy and feminism, as well as nationalism, patriotism, work and the strength of the family’ (Ahmed 1982: 155). Another Turkish writer, Tevfik Fikret, expressed the sentiment prevalent among Asian reformers of the time that ‘when women are debased, humanity is degraded’ (Ahmed 1982: 155). In China, reformers of the later 19th century such as Kang Yuwei and those of the early 20th century grouped around Sun Yat-Sen opposed the constraints on women that traditionally existed in Chinese society, as did nationalists Dr So Chae-p’il in Korea, and José Rizal in the Philippines who strongly advocated a secular education for women. Education and freedom of movement for women, and monogamy, were thus seen as marks of modernity, development and civilization. Reformers tried to embody these factors in their political platforms and activities, striving to make their own wives and daughters embodiments of the new ideal.
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473This new consciousness demanded an ‘enlightened’ woman. The new bourgeois man, himself a product of Western education or missionary influence, needed as his partner a ‘new woman’, educated in the relevant foreign language, dressed in the new styles and attuned to Western ways—a woman who was ‘presentable’ in colonial society yet whose role was primarily in the home. These women had to show that they were the negation of everything that was considered ‘backward’ in the old society: that they were no longer secluded, veiled and illiterate, with bound feet and minds, threatened with death on their husband’s funeral pyre. The concept and terminology of the ‘new woman’, so fashionable in Europe in the 19th century, was eagerly adopted by both men and women of the educated class. For example, Kassim Amin’s book on women’s emancipation published in 1901 was called The New Woman; in 1919 Egyptian women formed the ‘Société de la Femme Nouvelle’. In the same year an ‘Association of New Women’ was established in Japan, while in China and Korea, in 1919 and 1920 respectively, feminist magazines called The New Woman were published.
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475Though the terminology was similar, the various regions showed differences in this concept of the ‘new woman’. In certain Islamic countries the emphasis was on copying European styles of dress for women including the latest fashions, and discarding the traditional dress. The modernists saw the veil as a mark of women’s seclusion and backwardness; Jamal Sudki Azza Khawy who, in Iraq in 1911, advocated doing away with the veil, was imprisoned for sedition (Woodsmall 1936: 69). The act of throwing off the veil, regarded as a symbol of feudalism, was given great significance, and occasions when prominent women appeared unveiled became dramatic moments of defiance of the old order. Some examples include the fearless behaviour of the Babi woman leader of Iran, Qurrat ul Ayn, who fought in battles and caused a scandal in the 1840s by going unveiled; the first unveiled public appearances of Queen Surayya of Afghanistan in the 1920s and the Queen of Iran in 1936; the marriage ceremony of Mustapha Kemal at which his bride, Latife Hanem, was not veiled (1922); and Huda Sharawi’s boldness in publicly flinging her veil into the sea (1923).
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477In other Asian cultures defiant women sometimes wore masculine attire—a challenge to all traditional views of feminine conduct and deportment but not unknown in literature in which heroines lead men into war wearing male battledress (e.g. Mulan in the Chinese story of the 6th century). In real life, too, inspiring women warriors had fought on the battlefield wearing male clothing. One of the best known of these was the Rani of Jhansi who, in the war of independence against the British in India in 1857, led her troops into battle on horseback, Lord Canning remarking that ‘she used to dress like a man (with a turban) and rode like one too’ (Hibbert 1980: 385). Kalpana Dutt, the Bengali revolutionary, took part in the Chittagong Armoury raid of 1930 disguised as a man. In China, too, the tradition persisted: the Chinese revolutionary Jiu Jin (inspired by the Mulan story) often dressed in male attire during her stay in Japan (around 1905), and Chinese women fighting in the revolutionary liberation armies of the 1920s wore male army dress. The tradition of seeing women’s hair as a symbol of beauty also became an issue, and many feminists and ‘emancipated’ women in the Muslim world, Japan, China and Korea defied tradition and cut their hair short in keeping with modern fashion. During periods of counter-revolution, however, as in China and Iran in recent years, a backlash occurred and women who had discarded the old customs became targets for physical violence.
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479A striking example of the impact of Western ideas on the new consciousness concerning women’s emancipation is provided by Ibsen’s play The Doll’s House, written in 1879. The theme caused a scandal in both Europe and Asia for it challenged all accepted social norms concerning the role of women, In the play, Nora slams the door shut and walks away from her husband and children on the grounds that over and above her ‘moral’ duty as wife and mother she had a ‘sacred’ duty to herself. In the context of the times, Nora symbolized the struggle to break out of traditional constraints and orthodox morality and achieve a conscious identity of self. In China, Japan, Korea, India and many other Asian countries, Nora became a topic of discussion and a symbol not only for women, but for intellectuals struggling for emancipation from the ‘old order’. The play was translated into Chinese and in 1918, a special issue of New Youth was devoted to Ibsen; moreover, the word ‘Ibsenism’ was frequently used by Chinese intellectuals to express their ideological revolt, and Nehru, in 1928, mentioned The Doll’s House in a speech to women students. In China and in other countries where the debate went beyond bourgeois democracy, Nora’s defiance stimulated controversy among the revolutionaries. It was argued that her gesture was purely individualistic, meaningless unless social changes were introduced which would make real emancipation possible. For example, Lu Xun, in his 1923 article ‘What Happens after Nora Leaves?’, predicted that she would be compelled either to return home or to become a prostitute, since capitalist society would allow her no other alternative (Schwarcz 1975: 3).
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481But this was not the total picture. In their search for a national identity, the emergent bourgeoisies also harked back to a national culture: the new woman could not be a total negation of traditional culture. Although certain obviously unjust practices should be abolished, and women involved in activities outside the home, they still had to act as the guardians of national culture, indigenous religion and family traditions—in other words, to be both ‘modern’ and ‘traditional’.
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483To seek legitimacy for this position, many reformers idealized the civilization of a distant past, speaking of the need to regain the lost freedom that women were said once to have possessed in their societies. In Turkey, Gokalp, Ataturk and the intellectuals asserted a specific Turkish identity and ethnicity, and referred to pre-Islamic Turkey, where freedom for women was said to have existed among the nomads of Central Asia. Similarly, Iranian reformers spoke of the early history of the country and of its Zoroastrian traditions which accorded a high status to women; the Japanese referred to their sun goddess and empresses; Egyptians were proud of ancient Egyptian history when women had held high positions and the country was ruled by famous queens such as Nefertiti and Hatshepsut. In India, social reformers and politicians not only constantly harked back to the golden age of Vedic culture when women were said to have been free, but also frequently referred to the goddesses of mythology, warrior queens and famous women of history to show that India had a tradition of according women a high status in society. In Sri Lanka, the Sinhalese evoked a mythical Aryan past in which women had been held in high esteem and claimed that Buddhism had accorded women equal rights. In Indonesia and the Philippines, the reference back was to a tribal past in which some women were said to have held power.
484
485The objectives of the reformers were thus twofold: to establish in their countries a system of stable, monogamous nuclear families with educated and employable women such as was associated with capitalist development and bourgeois ideology; and yet to ensure that women would retain a position of traditional subordination within the family. This was an echo of earlier events in Europe where the development of the factory system during the Industrial Revolution had changed the nature of the home and the family which, in pre-capitalist times, had been a centre of production. Capitalism had drawn women of the poor from the home into the factory as wage labour, while the women of the bourgeoisie were confined to the home as housewives and the family was idealized in all the propaganda of the bourgeois media. The bourgeoisies of the Third World, as part of their strategy for achieving economic growth, ‘civilization’ and reform, also began to propagate the concept of a family system based on strict monogamy for women, monogamy in theory (if not in practice) for men, and the abolition of ‘feudal’ extended-family relationships. In India, reformers campaigned against the tortures and restraints imposed on widows and against polygamy and child marriage. In Sri Lanka, they called for an end to the ‘brutal’ practice of polyandry. In all Islamic countries, from Turkey to Indonesia, polygamy was denounced and laborious attempts were made to prove that the Islamic tenet that a man might have four wives was so hedged by conditions that fulfilment was impossible in a modern society. In China, Korea and Vietnam, concubinage was attacked as well as the tyranny of the Confucian family. In Japan, too, the reformers denounced Confucian family oppression and called for a nuclear, modern system of family life. Thus, the ideal of monogamy, with bourgeois women confined to a housewife’s role, became almost universal in reformist circles in the countries under study.
486
487Education then became a crucial problem. Many women of royal families, the aristocracy and the merchant class had earlier asserted themselves in the intellectual sphere, proving by their exceptional nature the rule that women in general were deprived of access to formal education. As the rise of the bourgeoisie in Europe brought demands for democratic rights, the issue of equal educational opportunities became a major demand of European bourgeois women. Similarly, with the growth of local bourgeoisies and the rise of nationalism in non-European countries, women’s emancipation and education became primary issues, both for the women of the bourgeoisie and for male reformers, including intellectuals and national leaders. The motives of the male reformers were varied but education was a crucial issue for the women; lack of it had denied them employment, income and social recognition, and had kept them intellectually subordinate to men.
488
489The first modern girls’ schools were established in India in 1820, in Sri Lanka in 1824, in China in 1844, in Egypt in 1846, in Turkey in 1863, in Japan in 1870, in Iran in 1874, in Korea in 1886 and in Indonesia in 1904. Girls began to move on to higher education: the first Sri Lankan girl sat for the Senior Cambridge Examination in 1881. Women graduates appeared in India from the 1880s onwards, and women in all these countries started to enter the professions as teachers, nurses, midwives, lawyers and doctors. Medicine was the first prestigious profession in which women made a breakthrough. The first Indian woman doctor qualified in 1886; the first woman student from Sri Lanka entered the Medical College in 1893, and from both these countries women went to Britain and the USA to qualify as doctors in the last decades of the 19th century. Similarly, the first Korean woman qualified abroad in medicine in 1896, and in 1900, the first women’s medical college was established in Japan. In later years the ultimate in female achievement and a symbol of courage and emancipation was to become a pilot and to fly single-handed. Those who did so became national heroines, e.g. Wang Guifen (daughter of the revolutionary Jiu Jin) who became China’s first woman pilot (Gipoulon 1976: 158); Mustapha Kemal’s adopted daughter was Turkey’s first woman pilot; and Lutfiya El Nadi became the first Egyptian woman to fly solo in 1934. The education of girls placed new emphasis on gymnastics, sports and other outdoor activities: in several Muslim countries such as Turkey, Iran and Egypt, where such activities had earlier been disapproved of, displays of gymnastics by girls’ schools were held in public, the first in Cairo in 1929.
490
491The content and nature of women’s education reflected the ambiguities inherent in the new concept of ‘woman’. The missionaries had been primarily concerned with producing Christian wives and mothers for the new male converts in order to prevent the latter from lapsing into their former beliefs, which was thought to be more likely if the women remained ‘heathen’. This kind of education was unable to satisfy the nationalists for long. Reformists stressed the democratic right to education for all, irrespective of sex, so as to achieve a strong, monogamous (and preferably nuclear) family system which would be the foundation of a stable society.
492
493But what type of education was advocated? To start with, it was class biased, since it was geared to providing good wives and mothers for those men who had risen on the economic and social ladder of colonial society. As in early 19th-century Europe, the education given to girls consisted of basic subjects and ‘accomplishments’ considered necessary for a girl to make a good marriage, as demonstrated in several countries. ‘Modernity’ meant educated women, but educated to uphold the system of the nuclear patriarchal family. The missionary schools not only trained girls to be good wives, but also introduced them to the 19th-century European code of female virtue and correct behaviour, a limited view that was contested by many women who were themselves products of the new education. Similar to European women who demanded equal access to higher education, bourgeois women in Asia began to agitate for further educational opportunities that would give them access to new avenues of income-earning opportunities and, hopefully, greater freedom. The bourgeois males of these countries were faced with the usual liberal dilemma: the democratic rights championed by followers of the Enlightenment in Europe, though ostensibly ‘universal’, were intended for bourgeois males to the exclusion of the workers, colonial peoples and women (Mies and Jayawardena 1981: 5). Similarly, the indigenous bourgeoisies, while willing to grant some concessions to women of their own class, had no intention of applying the concepts of natural rights, liberty, equality and self-determination to the masses of women or to the workers of their own countries.
494
495It is impracticable, however, to expect to launch slogans that are claimed to be universal and to mobilize people around these banners for political causes without the oppressed groups taking up the issues on their own behalf. In spite of efforts to ‘Westernize’ and educate women within the confines of a traditional patriarchal framework, further demands were made by those women who had already benefited from educational opportunities. Women reformers, for instance, were interested in emancipating women from certain social customs that were detrimental to them, and from legal, economic and political constraints which, in spite of their education, kept them in a subordinate position. But the more radical women were to take the struggle further, basically challenging the oppressive patriarchal structures of their societies and advocating revolutionary political and social alternatives.
496
497With the spread of education and literacy, feminist literature in the form of books, journals and magazines became an important aspect of the women’s movement. In several Asian countries, there was a flowering of books, novels, journals and articles in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, written both by women and men and dealing with issues concerning women’s role in society. While many of these publications discussed traditional ‘women’s’ topics, they could not avoid getting involved in the ongoing debate on women’s subordination. In many cases they reported developments in the sphere of women’s emancipation in other countries. Egyptian women, for example, were told of innovations and legislative reforms in Turkey; such journals also informed their readers about the suffragist and feminist struggles in Europe. They included Al Fatah in Egypt (1892), the Turkish weekly Newspaper for Ladies (1895), the Chinese Women’s Journal (1907), Knowledge, an Iranian women’s journal (around 1906), Yoja Chinam (‘Women’s Guide’) in Korea in 1909, Seito (‘Bluestocking’) in Japan (1911), and Nu Gioi Chung (‘Women’s Bell’) in Vietnam in 1918. These journals covered a wide range of views: the Turkish journal stressed women’s education and the need for women to be good mothers, good wives and good Muslims (Ahmed 1982: 155), while the Chinese Women’s Journal was both revolutionary and feminist in content. There were 15 Arabic journals for women in Egypt around 1914.
498
499While women’s magazines and writings helped to arouse women’s consciousness, male novelists, poets and journalists also wrote on issues concerning women. In several countries, concern about women’s role in traditional society was first expressed by male writers whose books on this theme achieved popularity and sometimes notoriety. In China in the 18th century Ch’en Hung-mou wrote a book on the need to educate women, and in 1825, Li Ruzhen wrote the first Chinese feminist novel (Flowers in the Mirror) in which sex roles were reversed in a society where women ruled and men had bound feet. In Egypt, too, the earliest book in support of women, One Leg Crossed over the Other, was by a male author El Shidyak (1855), while Kassim Amin’s books on women’s emancipation and the new woman, written in the 1890s, also created a stir. Amin’s books, with their liberal views, are looked upon in the Arab world as the seminal works on feminism, and can still rouse considerable hostility among conservative and religious elements (Ahmed 1982: 159). In India, the issue of the status of women occurs in Rabindranath Tagore’s novels as well as in other literature of the period dealing with social questions; Sarachchandra’s Biraj Bahu dramatized the plight of child widows, and Chandu Menon’s Indulekha the need for female education, preferably in English. In Turkey, many male writers, including Halil Hamit, Celal Nuri and Ahmet Agaoglu, wrote books in the early 20th century on women’s rights. Even more remarkable was the emergence of the new generation of Third World women writers and poets, the products of 19th-century educational reforms, whose writings reflect the feminism of the period. These included Malak Hifni Nassif and May Ziada in early 20th-century Egypt; Jiu Jin in China, author of a feminist book Stones of the Jingwei Bird written around 1904; the Filipino women writers of the 19th century such as Leona Florentina; Swarnakumari Devi’s novel An Unfinished Song of the late 19th century; the Turkish writer Fatima Aliye, whose novel Womanhood appeared in 1892; Halide Edip, author of several successful novels on women’s issues; the ‘new wave’ feminist writings of Yosano Akiko in early 20th-century Japan; the Korean women writers of the 1920s, Kim Won-ju, whose novels were on women’s liberation from male domination, and Na Hye-Sok, who wrote a poem on Ibsen’s Nora.
500
501The education of women also gave an impetus to the struggle for suffrage, which became an important issue in the campaign for democratic rights. The issue of voting rights had been one of the great battles fought by the European bourgeoisie against aristocratic privilege, and the question of suffrage rights for other groups, especially the working class, formed the next stage of the struggle. By the late 19th century, women’s suffrage had become a major issue, and prior to the outbreak of World War I the militancy and violent tactics used against the state apparatus by British women suffragists became world news. In several countries of the Third World the question of voting rights for women was posed, especially during heightened phases of the nationalist struggle, when the issues debated included the right to self-government and equality. Some of the early and unsuccessful attempts to obtain female suffrage were made by male reformers, for example in Iran (1911 and 1920) and the Philippines (1907), but the women themselves were also to lead the agitation as in China (1911), India (1917), Japan (1924) and Sri Lanka (1927). In some cases the agitation was peaceful, but in others it was less so. Women organized demonstrations and stormed the legislatures when these bodies failed to grant female suffrage; such militant agitation occurred in China in 1911 and 1924, and in Japan and Egypt in 1924.
502
503Education for women in Asiatic countries thus had a dual function. It brought bourgeois women out of their homes and into various professions, into social work, and into the political sphere claiming the right of suffrage. It transformed them in the image of the ‘emancipated’ women of Western society. On the other hand, as nationalist reformers took over, education also became a conservative influence; it began to hark back to traditional ideals, to emphasize the role of women as wives and mothers. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that this sort of education was by and large incapable of pushing the consciousness of women beyond the appearance of legal equality.
504
505In the country studies that follow, the specific situations under which mass education for women became a significant factor will be discussed. It needs to be said, however, that during the period under discussion, education remained largely the privilege of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. The role played by such women in contributing to the nationalist movements as well as to the social advancement of women, is discussed. But another class of woman was drawn into the movement, not by reason of education but by the very nature of their class position. These were the working-class women who, becoming aware of their exploitation within the colonial system, began to struggle for their economic rights, as well as against imperialism and the prevailing capitalist system. The achievements of women in working-class and revolutionary struggles have been recorded in some of the studies in this book. The apparent gap in other country studies is not due to the fact that there were no such women in those countries, but to the paucity of material. One has to remember that such women often belonged to left-wing movements which, in many of these countries, were crushed by repressive governments. The history of such movements has often been suppressed, and thus the history dealing with women in such movements also disappeared.
506
507While emphasizing the internal factors that led to the rise of the feminist movement in Asia, recognition has to be made of the role of Western women, who introduced various ideological strands of opinion which influenced Asian feminist consciousness. For example, women missionaries played a significant part in the process of education, in mitigating discriminatory practices and in putting forward alternative religious ideologies and social practices. From the early 19th century, women missionaries had been active in condemning social evils, in exposing ‘barbaric’ customs, and in setting an example (especially among Christian converts) of a lifestyle in which women were not secluded. Their behaviour and moral standards served as a model for respectable bourgeois housewives. Other European women who lived in Asia as the wives of colonial officials and professionals (doctors, nurses, teachers), as supporters of local religions or esoteric movements, or as feminists, suffragists, pioneers of birth control and activists in nationalist and revolutionary struggles, also played an important part. Many of these European women were dissidents in their own societies, such as socialists, theosophists and freethinkers who preferred to live in and participate in anti-imperialist movements in the colonies. These included Annie Besant, Margaret Cousins, Sister Nivedita (Margaret Noble) and many others. Moreover, the frequent visits to Asia by foreign women who belonged to feminist and suffragist movements) Mary Carpenter (Britain), Margaret Sanger (USA), Ellen Key (Sweden), Dr Aletta Jacobs (Holland) and Carrie Chapman Catt (USA)—provided Asian women with direct knowledge of the struggles experienced by women in other parts of the world.
508
509The contribution made by foreign women in leftist circles to revolutionary struggles and to the women’s struggle in Asia and Africa should also be mentioned. Dutch feminists in the socialist movement helped to arouse early feminism in Indonesia, the best-known being Ms Ovink-Soer, wife of a colonial official, who influenced Kartini, Indonesia’s pioneer feminist. Another outstanding woman was an American, Agnes Smedley (1892–1950), who worked with Vir Chattopadhyaya’s group of Indian revolutionaries abroad, spent many years in China with the revolutionary army, and was better known in China, Japan and India than in the United States.
510
511Among Japanese women participating in progressive political causes, Agnes Smedley was admired as a Socialist from humble origins who had grown up in a capitalist society, as a person who had spent her lifetime fighting oppression, as an adventurous woman, as a feminist, and as a foreigner who sympathised with the struggles of oppressed peoples in Asia. (Pharr 1981: 120–1)
512
513
514
515Foreign wives of several left-wing leaders also made remarkable political contributions. Evelyn Roy was an American radical who helped her husband M.N. Roy (India’s best-known Communist of the early years) to organize Indian revolutionaries in New York and later was active in Mexico; in 1920, she and Roy were members of the Indian delegation to the Second Congress of the Communist International in Moscow where, according to all accounts, she played an active part (Overstreet and Windmillar 1959: 27). An English woman, Doreen Wickremasinghe, née Young (wife of the Sri Lankan Communist leader, Dr S.A. Wickremasinghe), was active in the India League in London in the late 1920s and was a pioneer of the socialist and anti-imperialist movement of the thirties and of the first socialist feminist association in Sri Lanka, the Eksath Kantha Peramuna (United Women’s Front), formed in 1946.
516
517Mention should also be made of the influence that certain outstanding women in other countries had on Asian women. Popular examples were women of the French Revolution, such as Madame (Marie Jeanne) Roland (1754–93) who was active in politics and died on the guillotine, and Madame (Germaine) de Staël (1766–1817), a novelist and literary critic who was renowned internationally for her books and her love affairs with famous men of the time; both these women were frequently quoted by feminists in Japan, Vietnam and China. Similarly, heroines of the Russian revolutionary movement such as Sofia Perovskaya and Vera Figner were often cited in these countries; and the writings of other Western women, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emma Goldman, Olive Schreiner and British and American suffragists, were known in Asian feminist circles. Among Asians themselves, Pandita Ramabai of India was to influence Kartini in Indonesia; articles by Jiu Jin of China were translated into Tamil; the Japanese women’s university made an impact in India; the Turkish experience influenced women all over the Muslim world; and in Vietnam, inspiration was drawn from feminists in Japan and China.
518
519From the time of Mary Wollstonecraft and Flora Tristan, European feminists were great travellers within their countries and abroad (Mies and Jayawardena 1981: 17 and 61). Likewise the pioneer feminists of the Third World, despite all constraints placed on their physical mobility, were able to find the resources and opportunities to travel widely at home and abroad, and contact women’s associations and political groups. To give a few examples: Pandita Ramabai travelled widely in India and went to Europe and North America, returning in the 1880s via Japan, after having met many foreign feminists during her travels. In the early 20th century, Bhikaiji Cama travelled in Europe and the USA, and lived in Paris where she became a focal point for organizing revolutionary Indian groups in Europe, and in the same period, Jiu Jin was one of several Chinese feminists who studied in Japan, as did many Korean women writers. Around 1920 Mao Zedong was active in organizing groups of Chinese radical women to study in France, while many Egyptian, Turkish, Iranian, Japanese and Filipino feminists of the time also travelled to other countries.
520
521During the Second Congress of the Communist International (Comintern) in Moscow in July 1920, a Communist Women’s International was formed on the initiative of Clara Zetkin. Its secretariat included the leading women Communists of the period such as Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) and Alexandra Kollontai. The conference adopted resolutions on future work that was to be done among women; these were presented by Zetkin to the full session of the Comintern and approved. Clara Zetkin’s dynamism kept the movement alive in the 1920s and it is interesting that several Asian women participated in its activities. The subject has yet to be researched, but their journals of the years 1921–25 include material on China and on women in Muslim countries. Varsenika Kasparova, a Bolshevik militant from Armenia, headed the Eastern section of the Women’s Secretariat, and Lu Tain (China), G. Nasarbekowa (Armenia), S. Zalukidse (Georgia), Mussabekowa (Azerbaijan), Nam-Mantschun (Korea) and Dcevad-Sade (Persia) were all members of this Communist Women’s International (Kommunistische Fraueninternationale 1921–25).
522
523The most important development in Asian feminism during that period, however, was the emergence of autonomous women’s organizations and associations of women linked to political groups which played an important part in nationalist struggles. In some cases, the women were merely involved in promoting handicrafts made by women (e.g. Sakhi Samiti in Bengal in 1886); in the colonial period, however, even such simple activities had political overtones since local products were encouraged in order to counteract the import of goods from Europe. In Korea in 1898, a women’s organization that was linked to the liberal political movement agitated for women’s rights, especially for education. In 1905, an organization for women’s education and suffrage was formed in the Philippines, significantly called Asociacion Feminista Filipino. The first Turkish women’s club, named Red and White (1908), was associated with the politics of the Young Turks movement; the Persian Women’s Society (1911), which came into being during a period of heightened political agitation and was linked with those struggles, was in contact with British suffragists; the Japanese women’s association, Seito (Blue Stocking, 1911), had a strong feminist bias, while the earliest Egyptian women’s group, Mabarat Mohamed Ali (1909), was concerned solely with establishing health clinics for women. In contrast, the first Chinese women’s association formed by Jiu Jin and other Chinese women revolutionaries studying in Japan in 1904, was consistently feminist and simultaneously agitated for the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty.
524
525The most striking factor about early nationalist and revolutionary agitation in all these countries is that women of all classes went out into the streets to demonstrate on issues of national concern; for example, in India in the nationalist struggles of 1905, 1909 and 1930; in Iran, in 1906 and 1911, during constitutionalist agitation; in China, from 1907 to 1911, during the democratic revolution; in Egypt, China, Turkey, Iran and Korea, in the 1919 nationalist upsurges after their betrayal by Western powers in the post-World War I treaties; and in Japan, when socialists and anarchists demonstrated in the streets. The Third World in that period produced many pioneering women—including Huda Sharawi (Egypt), Halide Edip (Turkey), Sadiqa Daulatabadi and Khanum Azamodeh (Iran), Kanno Suga and Hiratsuka Raicho (Japan), Pandita Ramabai and Bhikaiji Cama (India), Kartini (Indonesia), Jiu Jin and Xiang Jingyu (China), Minh Khai and Nguyen Thi Nghia (Vietnam), Agnes de Silva (Sri Lanka), and Trinidad Tecson and Conceptión Felix (Philippines)—whose courageous activities have not been adequately recognized but unfortunately remain confined to the footnotes of history. In many cases, their achievements are barely known even in their own countries and their names are seldom commemorated alongside male national heroes.
526
527The development of capitalism in Asia brought the participation of women in the labour force, and women’s emancipation struggles were geared towards further acceptance of such participation in all major sectors of the economy. As Shah Reza Khan stated, when promoting measures to bring women out of seclusion, ‘one half of the population has not been taken into account … one half of the country’s working force has been idle’ (Elwell-Sutton 1955: 34; emphasis added). The presence of women wage-workers in the labour forces of the countries under consideration led to their incorporation into trade unions and other associations of workers, and to their participation in strikes and industrial disputes.
528
529The 1918 Rice Riots in Japan were triggered off when women port workers refused to load rice and were joined by other workers; this led to a long struggle and a political crisis. In China in 1922, many thousands of workers in 70 Shanghai silk factories went on strike, calling for increased wages and a ten-hour working day; this was the first important strike by Chinese women workers. In India and Sri Lanka, in the years after World War I women workers were active participants in militant industrial agitation and strikes. To give only one example from the region, the most militant activists of the Ceylon Labour Union which led the strikes in Sri Lanka in the 1920s were women factory workers in Colombo; they used to dress in red, were the most vociferous of the strikers and picketers, and formed a bodyguard for male trade union leaders during demonstrations. In Iran, Egypt and Turkey, women were to join with men in the formation of left-wing political groups and trade unions, in spite of repression and adverse conditions for mobilizing the people.
530
531Finally, this study attempts to examine a period of Asian history from the perspective of women’s participation in feminist movements for emancipation and their simultaneous involvement in struggles for national liberation and social change. This has included an evaluation of the contribution and motives of male reformers and political leaders who championed ‘women’s rights’. The study is limited in scope, being necessarily confined to countries for which material is available. I must also emphasize that a comprehensive history of the participation of the poverty-stricken masses of women in various forms of agitation in Asia has yet to be attempted. While material is available on movements that involved women of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie of Asia, an intensive search would be necessary to unearth detailed information on the participation of women of the working class and peasantry in class struggles and anti-imperialist agitation. (This is a task which perhaps can be done only by motivated researchers in their own countries.) It will be evident that in each of the country studies, certain specific aspects have been highlighted and discussed at some length in this book, for example, education in Sri Lanka, social reform movements in India, revolutionary struggles in China, and the struggle against religious constraints in Turkey. This has enabled particular aspects to be discussed in greater depth, according to material available.
532
533Another area on which there is insufficient research is the role of women in the pre-capitalist societies of Asia before the impact of colonialism. There are some studies that deal with the impact of ideology on women, but such conclusions as can be drawn from these studies remain rather abstract. The level at which ideology affected women in real life and was really operative are matters on which our knowledge is insufficient.
534
535The women’s movements in many countries of Asia achieved political and legal equality with men at the juridical level, but failed to make any impression on women’s subordination within the patriarchal structures of family and society. Feminist consciousness did not develop, except in rare exceptions, to the point of questioning traditional patriarchal structures. The conclusion to the book is an attempt to assess the basis of these successes and failures.
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540
5412.‘Civilization’ Through Women’s Emancipation in Turkey
542
543
544
545I see women covering their faces with their head scarves or turning their backs when a man approaches. Do you really think that the mothers and daughters of a civilised nation would behave so oddly or be so backward?
546
547Mustapha Kemal (Minai 1981: 64–5)
548
549
550
551The movement towards women’s emancipation in Turkey was closely integrated with successive waves of modernization and secularization and with the ideology of Westernization and social reform. The political ideology of the country had passed through several phases. The intellectuals and reformists of the 19th-century Ottoman Empire were inspired by liberal, Masonic and internationalist ideas, derived from their links with France. The Young Turks, the reformers of the early 20th century, were also strongly influence by currents of opinion in France, especially of the positivist school, and also by Islamic and Turkish nationalism. When Mustapha Kemal took power in the 1920s, the dominant ideology became one of secular modernization. The ways in which women’s rights were closely linked with these changes will be considered in the following pages.
552
553At the end of the 19th century, the Ottoman Empire, which had at one time threatened Central Europe, was in the process of disintegration. Externally, it faced pressure from the European powers who wished to expand their influence into the Middle East; internally, the pressure came from two sources: growing feelings of nationalism among the non-Turkish population of the Empire (Greeks, Armenians and people of the Balkans), and a desire for modernization and democratic institutions among the Turks themselves.
554
555Its proximity to, and domination over, parts of Europe had brought Turkey under the influence of European thought from an early period. The strongest influence in the 18th and 19th centuries was that of France, the impact of the French Revolution being felt in the post-1789 period: ‘while the Revolution itself was still in progress, the first vital penetration of ideas took place, opening the way to the great flood, which … transformed the outlook, thought and self-awareness not only of Turkey but of all Islam’ (Lewis 1965: 55). The dangers of such heresies from France were clearly recognized by the ancien régime in Turkey. A memorandum drafted in 1798 by the Ottoman Chief Secretary for the High Council of State said:
556
557The known and famous atheists, Voltaire and Rousseau and other materialists like them, had printed and published various works consisting, God preserve us, of insults and vilification against the pure prophets and the great kings, of the removal and abolition of all religion, and allusions to the sweetness of equality and republicanism, all expressed in easily intelligible words and phrases, in the form of mockery, in the language of the common people. (Lewis 1982: 182–3)
558
559
560
561These ideas were further pursued in a warning proclamation to the Sultan’s subjects: ‘They assert… that all men are equal in humanity and alike in being men, none has any superiority of merit over any other and everyone himself disposes of his soul and arranges his own livelihood in this life…(Lewis 1982: 183).
562
563Nevertheless, a conscious effort was made to modernize along European lines. In 1792, Sultan Selim III established a ‘New Order’ (Nizam-i Cedid) in administration and in the armed forces, the latter being reorganized on the European model with military and naval schools where instruction was given in French by French officers.
564
565The result … was to create a new social element—a class of young army and naval officers, familiar with some aspects of Western civilisation through study, reading and personal contact, acquainted with at least one Western language—usually French—and accustomed to look up to Western experts as their mentors and guides to new and better ways. (Lewis 1965: 59)
566
567
568
569The reforms also included the appointment of ambassadors to the major capitals of Europe; they were instructed to acquire foreign languages and knowledge that would be useful to the empire. Gradually, however, propaganda from orthodox and conservative sources against French influence and against the reforms increased, until, in 1807, a backlash occurred when a section of the Turkish army revolted, deposed the Sultan, and massacred many of the people who had foreign inclinations.
570
571The second wave of reform, which began during the rule of Mahmud II (1808–39), was intended to strengthen the state apparatus against foreign invasion. Naval and military students were sent to France and other European countries for training: ‘the first outriders of a great procession of Turkish students to Europe, who on their return played a role of immense importance to the transformation of their country’ (Lewis 1982: 82). In 1827, an army medical school was established, followed by a music school, and in 1834 a school of military sciences, modelled on the lines of St Cyr in France. In 1839, preparations were made for civilian education and two grammar schools were established to produce civil servants. In 1838, in his speech at the opening of a new medical college, the Sultan stated: ‘You will study … in French … my purpose … is not to educate you in the French language; it is to teach you scientific medicine and little by little to take it into our language (Lewis 1965: 83–4).
572
573The reform of feudal and religious privileges and reform in dress were also attempted in the early 19th century. In 1828, the fez was introduced from North Africa into the Turkish army together with European-style tunics and trousers; in 1829, officials had to wear the fez with trousers, frock coats and boots. The Sultan set an example and even adopted European protocol when receiving foreign diplomats; he ‘gave receptions and chatted with his guests, and even went so far as to show deference to ladies’ (Lewis 1965: 98–101).
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578
579The Tanzimat (Reorganization)
580
581
582When Mahmud II died in 1839, he was succeeded by his son, Abdul Majid, who, under the influence of Mustafa Rashid Pasha, former ambassador to France and Minister of Foreign Affairs, inaugurated a further set of reforms. These reforms, promulgated in 1839 and known as the Tanzimat, marked a fundamental change in Turkey from a theocratic Sultanate to the beginnings of a modern state. The security of the subject’s life, honour and property, and fair and public trials were guaranteed, and a new penal code was formulated. The principle of equality of all persons of all religions before the law was considered a very bold move for the times (Lewis 1965: 105). The tax structure was reformed, tax farms were abolished, and a new provincial administration based on the centralized French system was set up, replacing the earlier semi-feudal system.
583
584Controversy arose, however, over a new commercial code derived from French law on grounds that it did not conform to holy law. ‘The Holy Law has nothing to do with the matter’, was Rashid Pasha’s reply to the ulemas (religious leaders). In this instance, however, the ulemas proved more powerful; Rashid Pasha was dismissed and the reforms appeared to suffer a setback. But ultimately the processes of modernization were to prove stronger. Rashid Pasha returned as Grand Vizier in 1845. With the help of some convinced and Westernized supporters, he made a great effort to enforce the new principles in every sphere of government. The reforms were extended into the educational structure. A Council of Education established primary and secondary state schools alongside the religious schools, and tried to unify the system. Progress was slow, however, and by 1850 there were only six secondary schools with 870 pupils. In 1847, the creation of a Ministry of Education effectively took away the ulemas’ power of sole jurisdiction in this field (Lewis 1982: 111–12).
585
586In the years following Rashid Pasha’s death in 1858, two younger reformers, Ali Pasha and Fuad Pasha, continued the policies of the Tanzimat; both had acquired some knowledge of French and had been diplomats before holding high office in government. As Lewis has shown, in Turkey at that period ‘the new elite of power came not from the army, not from the Ulema, but from the Translation Office and the Embassy secretaries’ (Lewis 1965: 116).
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588Abdul Aziz became Sultan in 1861 and in 1867 visited London, Paris and Vienna. In 1868 a French lycée was opened, giving Western secondary education in French. The most important reform of the period, however, was the new civil code completed in 1876 and drafted by Ahmed Cevdet, who ‘preferred to remain within the Islamic tradition, and to prepare a code, which while modern in form and presentation would be firmly based on the Seriat … It remained in force in Turkey until … 1926’ (Lewis 1965: 121).
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592
593
594The Young Ottoman Movement
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597At the time that European ideas were spreading in Turkey, a new literary movement arose which broke from the classical Turkish style and was inspired to some extent by French writing. The pioneers were Ibrahim Sinasi (1826–71), Ziya Pasha (1825–80) and Namik Kemal (1840–88), all writers who tried to reconcile the Turkish Muslim identity with the pressure for modernization. Sinasi had studied in Paris, and is said to have taken part in the 1848 revolution there; in 1862, after returning to Turkey, he began a journal which influenced Turkish intellectuals. Ziya Pasha, also a student of French, was exiled in Europe because of his criticisms of the regime. He constantly wrote about the need to learn from the West while not imitating Western models and was a fierce critic of his own society. In 1870 in Geneva, he wrote: ‘I passed through the lands of the infidels, I saw cities and mansions; I wandered in the realm of Islam, I saw nothing but ruins’ (Lewis 1965: 22). Namik Kemal also studied French; he went into the Translation Office and also worked for Sinasi’s journal. In exile in Europe, he published journals that opposed the regime. His principal ideas, expressed in poems, plays and novels, were of freedom and the fatherland ‘in a form adapted to Muslim traditions and attitudes’ (Lewis 1965: 138). These liberal reformers, known as the ‘Young Ottomans’, had to live in exile while opposition against them increased in Turkey, but their influence was felt and they paved the way for the more radical reformers of later years.
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603Women and Education
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605
606The issue of women’s education was the subject of much debate in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, and the decision was taken that education should be extended to women. Sultan Abdul Aziz opened middle-level schools and a teachers’ training college for girls in 1863, but the education provided was a very basic one, mainly religious in orientation, with the aim of creating good Muslim wives and mothers. Some upper-class girls, however, were given a cosmopolitan education at home by foreign governesses, or attended foreign schools in Turkey. In 1871, for example, the American College for Girls was started; for two decades attendance was restricted to Christians, the first Muslim girl to complete her studies there being Halide Edip, a future women’s leader. Thus with the emergence of a Western-educated Turkish aristocracy and bourgeoisie in the 19th century, the issue of educated wives had already arisen:
607
608Though Turkish fathers … had their women wear the best Paris fashions … and took them to the most elegant capitals of Europe, they expected the governesses to give their daughters much more than charm-school training. They wanted their daughters to have serious Occidental and Oriental education, as befitted the future spouses of important men. (Minai 1981: 49; emphasis added)
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612Many women educated in this manner were to make their mark as novelists and writers on women’s emancipation.
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614Unlike their mothers, who expressed themselves through the nightingales and roses of formal Turkish poetry, the daughters wrote letters, memoirs, newspaper articles and novels … prose freed women’s thoughts … it created a psychological climate for social change, all the more powerfully because their writings could be printed and circulated to help unite harem-bound women. (Minai 1981: 50)
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616
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618The first woman novelist of this epoch was Fatima Aliyé (born in 1862), daughter of Ahmet Cevdet, a historian who was also active in politics; she was educated at home in French and first achieved success as the translator of a French novel in 1890. In 1892, she wrote a novel Muhadarat (‘Womanhood’), a story of a gifted woman whose development was stunted by traditional society. This was followed by another publication, Nisvani Islam (‘Islamic Women’), which denounced the misinterpretation of Islam and urged women to become educated and to participate in society. In 1895, Aliyé published and wrote extensively in A Newspaper for Ladies, ‘one of Turkey’s first and longest-lived newspapers for women by women’, which was an outlet for a spate of women writers and journalists. Another woman writer, Zeyneb Hanoum, who had travelled in France and Britain, wrote of the contradictions faced by those Turkish women who had received a European-style education but yet remained confined by tradition. The details of harem life that she gave to Pierre Loti, the French writer, led to his novel Les Désenchantées (published in 1906) which ‘describes the malaise of a Turkish woman whose brain had leaped to the twentieth century while her body remained imprisoned by medieval customs’ (Minai 1981: 52–4).
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620
621
622
623
624The Young Turks Movement
625
626
627Opposition to the Sultan’s despotism manifested itself in 1889, when the ‘Young Turks’ group was formed by four medical students; this group, officially called the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), soon had within its ranks many minor officials, small traders and Istanbul students. Groups of exiled Turks were also organized in Europe and Egypt. Young Turks were active among the army officers; one group, set up in Damascus in 1906, had Mustapha Kemal, the future Turkish president, among its members. In France, the Young Turks were led by Ahmed Riza (1859–1930), who had come under the influence of the positivist French philosophy of Auguste Comte (1798–1857). Writing in a period of rapid industrial transformation of society, Comte rejected supernaturalism and the orthodoxy of the church and advocated the adoption of the positive or scientific method, emphasizing the need for a basic social science which would study society and explain social organization (which he called ‘sociology’). He rejected the Christian god in favour of a new, secular religion of humanity and a new social system based on political, social and economic justice. The emphasis was on universal education, the monogamous family and the use of empirical data rather than metaphysical speculation. Moreover, positivism with its scientific perspective, replacing religion with notions of social progress, influenced many social reform and secular movements in Europe, and had an impact on students from Asia who were challenging their own religious and feudal hierarchies.
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629One of the principal tenets of the Young Turks was the need for modernization and Westernization, and they expressed themselves forcibly against the orthodox elements. To some, it was a matter of survival and not choice: ‘Either we westernize, or we are destroyed’ was the view of Ahmed Muhtar the scholar and soldier, who formed the government in 1912. Similarly, Abdullah Cevdet, one of the founders of the movement, wrote: ‘There is no second civilization; civilization means European civilization and it must be imported with both its roses and thorns’. This civilization meant a new status for women; a journal edited by Cevdet published an interesting article in 1912, describing a vision of the future Westernized Turkey, where, among other things, the Sultan would have one wife and no harem, the fez would be abolished, women could wear what they wanted and could choose their spouses, and matchmaking would be prohibited (Lewis 1965: 231–2).
630
631It must be remembered that the process of Europeanization was not only ideological; it also meant the forging of economic links with the capitalist countries of Europe. In the 50 years between the Tanzimat reforms and the Young Turks revolution of 1908, according to Keyder: ‘central authority was strengthened while the country fell gradually under the political control of the imperialist powers’ but ‘the successive waves of modernization could not achieve a permanent balance in favour of a modern state mechanism conducive for the sustained development of capitalism’ (Keyder 1979: 4–5).
632
633The Young Turks’ actual take-over of power began with a mutiny in the Turkish army in Macedonia in July 1908; this was led by Major Niazi and Mustapha Kemal was one of its participants. The revolt spread through all major cities, and Sultan Abdul Hamid was compelled to restore the Constitution and grant certain democratic rights. He attempted a counter-coup in 1909; but this failed and resulted in his deposition and succession by Mohamed V. This was the last attempt to restore absolutism in Turkey.
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635The Young Turks initiated many political and administrative reforms with the intention of modernizing the empire. The financial administration was reorganized and measures were taken to extend the education of women. However, their reforming zeal was contained by the Balkan wars and by the World War of 1914–18. The great powers of Europe, which had contemptuously referred to Turkey as ‘the sick man of Europe’, took this opportunity to dismember the Ottoman Empire. They not only attacked Turkey but also fomented revolts among its non-Turkish elements. Under the Treaty of Sèvres (1920), Turkey lost all its European and Arab possessions, while the Dardanelles and the Bosphorus were internationalized.
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637Although they visualized a modernized empire within which its many peoples could live, the Young Turks were essentially Islamic and supportive of the sultanate. The growth of nationalism among the non-Turkish peoples, however, and the nation’s defeat in war, caused a new group to emerge among the Young Turks, a group which advocated the building of a modern Turkish national state that was ‘republican, secular and non-imperialist’ (Keyder 1979: 9). Following the Sultan’s capitulation to the Western powers, this new group led various protests and uprisings.
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641
642
643The Young Turks and Women’s Emancipation
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646During the period of Young Turk dominance, more high schools and teachers’ colleges for women were established, and the first university for women was set up in 1915. With the spread of education for women and with greater concern for a democratic reorganization of the state, the issue of women’s emancipation was extended beyond the question of education. Their status in both the domestic and political spheres was widely discussed in journals, literature and drama. Many leading intellectuals became involved in these discussions. In 1910 Halil Hamit published Feminism in Islam which supported women’s suffrage; in 1915, Celal Nuri wrote Our Women, in which he urged that polygamy be banned. Another leading politician and intellectual of the period, Ahmet Agaoglu, who had studied in Paris, argued in favour of women’s rights and encouraged his daughter, Sureyya, to become Turkey’s first woman lawyer. Like many other intellectuals in Muslim countries, Agaoglu associated the denial of rights for women with backwardness, and claimed that women’s rights were ‘in accordance with the tenets of pure Islam cleansed of misinterpretations’ (Minai 1981: 48).
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648The country’s best-known writer and sociologist, Ziya Gokalp (1876–1924), often referred to as the theoretician of Turkish nationalism, writing around 1915, also advocated equality in marriage, divorce and succession rights for women (Abadan-Unat 1981: 9). He further argued that women’s emancipation was part of an early Turkish tradition of the free nomads of Central Asia (Minai 1981: 48). Expressing himself in poetry, Gokalp wrote:
649
650All must be equal, marriage, divorce, wealth
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652No nation can ever bloom if its daughters
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654Are not given the weight they deserve.
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656We have fought for and won all our other rights.
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658Only the family is still in its dark age.
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660Why do we still turn our backs on women?
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662Tell me, have they not a part in our struggles?
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664
665
666In this period, when the role of women was eagerly debated in intellectual and reformist circles, there was also a flourishing feminist press. Between 1908 and 1919, nine women’s papers were published, some in both French and Turkish. They catered to educated women and highlighted the freedom that women were said to have had in the days of the Prophet. In their advocacy of women’s emancipation in Turkey, these papers were motivated by their Western bias and knowledge of European feminist movements. They
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668interpreted Western ideas for Turkish women’s consumption, [and] they also became a forum to unite the readers, each of whom had thought that she was alone in her frustration and confusion. The women enthusiastically took up the chance to communicate with one another. ‘For the first time I feel proud to be a woman’ wrote one of them. (Minai 1981: 61)
669
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672From the early years of the century Turkish women began to be active in the social, political and economic life of the country, as well as in education and journalism. The deposition of the Sultan in 1908 gave an impetus to their activities. In that year, the first women’s club was formed in Salonika, with the name Red and White (the colour of the Young Turks); other women’s organizations of the period included The Association for the Betterment of Women, led by Kadriye Ihsan, and the more radical Ottoman Association for the Defence of Women’s Rights led by Nuriye Ulviye Mevlan, who in 1913 began a journal Women’s World (Abadan-Unat 1981: 7–8).
673
674This period also witnesses renewed intellectual and cultural activity among the Turkish intelligentsia. The journal Türk Yurdu (‘Turkish Homeland’), edited in 1912 by Ziya Gokalp, became the rallying point for Turkish nationalists. Associated with this, the Türk Ocaği (‘Turkish Hearth’) movement was formed in 1912 to ‘advance national education and raise the scientific, social and economic level of the Turks, who are the foremost of the peoples of Islam, and to strive for the betterment of the Turkish race and language’. Many such clubs were formed throughout the country and became centres of debate and educational and literary activity. Women participated in the gatherings on terms of equality with men, and for the first time were able to speak on a public platform as well as to perform in amateur dramatics (Lewis 1965: 344).
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676In general conformity with the ideology of the Young Turk movement, however, the question of women’s emancipation was debated within the limits laid down by Islam and by Turkish nationalism. Some proponents of women’s rights based their case on a rereading of Islamic texts: it was argued that the severe limitations on women in the Ottoman Empire resulted largely from various misinterpretations of Islam. Even Ziya Gokalp found it necessary to locate his arguments for women’s emancipation in the context of the nomadic ancestors of the Turkish nation. Thus, the basic thrust for women’s rights based on the needs of a modernizing society and its demands for women’s participation, was given legitimacy by reference to religious and nationalist traditions.
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681
682The Kemalist Revolution
683
684
685The leader of the Turkish nationalists was Mustapha Kemal (1881–1938), an army captain who had fought in the Turkish army during World War I but had opposed the Sultan’s defeatist policies and set up a revolutionary government in Ankara in 1920. Kemal’s men forced the French, Italians, Greeks and British to terminate their occupation of parts of Turkey, and a peace treaty was signed with the British in 1922. Soon afterwards, the Sultanate was abolished and the Turkish Republic was established in 1923 with Kemal, the leader of the Republican People’s Party, as President. He remained in this office until his death in 1938.
686
687Mustapha Kemal (referred to subsequently as Atatürk, ‘the father of the Turks’) began a more deliberate process of Europeanization which meant not only economic development along capitalist lines, but also an effort to secularize and modernize the state by separating politics from religion, attacking tradition, Latinizing the alphabet, promoting European dress, adopting the Western calendar, introducing civil marriage and divorce, and banning polygamy.
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689The fetish of Europeanization, which had existed in Turkey in earlier periods, was to become part of the new ideology. To be European was equated with being ‘civilized’, and Turkish ‘backwardness’ was contrasted with Western ‘progress’. The country’s leading nationalist intellectual, Ziya Gokalp, urged the Turks to ‘Belong to the Turkish nation, the Muslim religion and European civilization’; in similar vein, another Turkish writer, Sadri Etem, asserted: ‘We are Europeans, to be European is our ideal’ (Rodinson 1974: 127). To be European also meant taking the capitalist road of development. In the absence of entrepreneurs, the state had to assume the task of developing industry in order to pave the way for capitalist growth. As Gokalp wrote in 1923:
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691If the new Turkey is to be a modern state it must above all develop a national industry. Just as we have done in the field of military technique, so in industry we must reach European levels by an effort undertaken on a national scale. (Rodinson 1974: 126)
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695The promotion of a national economy built on capitalist lines was advocated, the principal beneficiaries of this effort being naturally the commercial bourgeoisie. In spite of a burst of rapid accumulation during the war, however, this class was not well developed in Turkish society, and when the ‘difficulties characteristic of a trade-oriented peripheral capitalism, hit the economy’, the state stepped in ‘to act once again as the redistributing centre which collected and disposed of the surplus according to its own conceptions of the national economy’ (Keyder 1979: 11).
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697The Turkish state became totally secularized with the abolition in 1926 of the sharia (Islamic holy law), which freed the civil and penal codes of their last vestiges of religious influence. In Turkey, as in many Asian countries, clerical authority was seen as retrograde and supportive of corrupt, feudal regimes, and therefore as not conducive either to the growth of nationalism and capitalist development or to (what were considered) necessary superstructural reforms of the social system, such as measures to emancipate women. The tendency towards secularism and rationalism was seen not only in the Young Turks movement of the early 20th century but also in many of Mustapha Kemal’s reforms in the 1920s which, in turn, influenced policies in Iran, Afghanistan and other Muslim countries. In 1930, Mustapha Kemal made it clear that he associated secularism with progress:
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699The Turkish Republic has no official religion. In state affairs, all legislation is drafted and applied according to the spirit, form and universal necessity as seen by science and contemporary civilization. Since religion is merely a matter of personal conviction, the Republic sees in the separation of religious ideas and affairs of State a principal factor in the progress of our nation. (Aksan 1981: 49)
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703Dissident views of minorities and leftists, however, were vigorously suppressed by Kemal. When the Kurds revolted in 1925, he took the opportunity to crush not only this minority uprising but all opposition to his regime. This included the left, which Kemal had tried to eliminate from the early years of his regime, while maintaining a policy of friendship with the Soviet Union. The Turkish Communist Party had been formed in 1920 in the Soviet Union and was led by Mustapha Suphi; before it could develop, however, ‘Turkish communism was stifled at birth by the prior success of Kemal Ataturk’s independence movement’ (Samin 1981: 64–5). Kemal did not hesitate to liquidate such opposition. The ‘Green Army’, a guerrilla peasant force whose objective was to expropriate the village rulers, had at first allied with Kemal, but was later crushed by his troops in January 1921. In the same month Suphi and other Turkish Communists were trapped into visiting Turkey, only to be killed by drowning. As Samin writes: ‘Thus both the founding Turkish communists as well as the most militant class force were cut down within weeks.’ He adds that the Turkish Communists ‘instead of recognizing the “Bonapartist” character of the Ataturk regime, with its state-organized primitive accumulation … insisted on seeing the Kemalist movement as a petty-bourgeois force which could be influenced in radical directions. In fact, it was Ataturkism which made use of them, not the other way round.’ It must be noted, however, that men and women of the left did play a political role in subsequent years. Nazim Hikmet, ‘Turkey’s supreme poet’, was a Communist Party member from the 1930s, and much of the creative input into modern Turkish culture has been ‘socialist or Left-populist in character’ (Samin 1981: 64–5). Hikmet, who was tried and imprisoned in 1938 for his political views, expressed sentiments in favour of women’s equality and ‘was the first Turkish poet to attribute to woman such qualities as friendship and solidarity’ (Altiok 1981: 224).
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709Kemal and the Emancipation of Women
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711
712An important element of Mustapha Kemal’s vision of the modernization of Turkey was the emancipation of women from the rigid shackles of orthodoxy. He had been particularly impressed by the courage and militancy of Turkish women during the Balkan wars and World War I. Turkish women had then taken up new avenues of public employment as nurses on the war fronts, and had worked in ammunition, food and textile factories, as well as in banks, hospitals and the administrative services. Political events caused their involvement in militant activities. For instance, the occupation of various parts of Turkey by European troops in 1919 aroused protests in which women joined, and women in Anatolia were part of Mustapha Kemal’s army which had launched a war against the invaders. In 1919, the ‘Anatolian Women’s Association for Patriotic Defence’ was formed with many branches: ‘They became the female counterpart of the core group of Mustapha Kemal’s bureaucrats, soldiers and merchants’ (Abadan-Unat 1981: 10).
713
714In his speeches in later years Kemal constantly referred to the role played by Anatolian women in the nationalist struggle. In his speech, ‘The Turkish Woman’, made at Konya in 1923, he said:
715
716The Anatolian woman has her part in these sublime acts of self-sacrifice and must be remembered with gratitude, by each one of us. Nowhere in the world has there been a more intensive effort than the one made by the Anatolian peasant women.
717
718Woman was the source of a vital dynamism: who ploughed the fields? She did. Who sowed the grain? She. Who turned into a woodcutter and wielded the axe? She. Who kept the fires of home burning? She. Who, notwithstanding rain or wind, heat or cold, carried the ammunition to the front? She did, again and again. The Anatolian woman is divine in her devotion.
719
720Let us therefore honour this courageous and self-sacrificing woman. It is for us to pledge ourselves to accept women as our partners in all our social work, to live with her, to make her our companion in the scientific, moral, social and economic realm. I believe that this is the road to follow. (Atatürk)
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723
724Kemal’s ideas about the position of women in society were quite advanced. In a speech at Izmir in 1923 he said, ‘A civilisation where one sex is supreme can be condemned, there and then, as crippled. A people which has decided to go forward and progress must realise this as quickly as possible. The failures in our past are due to the fact that we remained passive to the fate of women.’ (Atatürk)
725
726He kept reverting to this subject in his speeches and was tireless in spreading his views on the equality of women. Speaking to the people at Kastamonu, he said:
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728Let us be frank: society is made of women as well as men. If one grants all the rights to progress to the one and no rights at all to the other, what happens? Is it possible that one half of the population is in chains for the other half to reach the skies? Progress is possible only through a common effort, only thus can the various stages be by-passed. (Atatürk)
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731
732While having advanced views on the one hand, Kemal also continued to stress the importance of motherhood. In 1923 he said:
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734History shows the great virtues shown by our mothers and grandmothers. One of these has been to raise sons of whom the race can be proud. Those whose glory spread across Asia and as far as the limits of the world had been trained by highly virtuous mothers who taught them courage and truthfulness. I will not cease to repeat it, woman’s most important duty, apart from her social responsibilities, is to be a good mother. As one progresses in time, as civilisation advances with giant steps, it is imperative that mothers be enabled to raise their children according to the needs of the century. (Atatürk)
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737
738But Kemal was also adamant that Westernized Turks should have wives who were equally ‘civilized’ and modern in outlook and appearance. He followed this precept in his own personal life. His wife Latife Hanem (whom he married and divorced in the early 1920s) was educated in Britain and France, and appeared with him, unveiled, on public occasions.
739
740In keeping with these views, Kemal was a great supporter of the movement for a modern secularized education for women. He argued that society could not function efficiently if women remained uneducated: ‘if only some of the members of a social body are active while others remain inert, the social body is thereby paralysed’. He claimed that if Turkey was to become a strong modern nation, the education of women was necessary since children receive their first lessons from their mothers: ‘hence, our women have the obligation to be more enlightened, more civilized and wiser even than the men’ (UNESCO 1963: 45–50). His campaign resulted in the expansion of educational opportunities for women, with coeducational university education being allowed in 1921. In 1924, an Education Bill brought religious schools under government control, secularized education, and made provision for equal educational opportunities for both sexes. These measures were not enacted without opposition. In 1921, the Minister of Education was forced to resign after being criticized in the National Assembly for holding a Teachers’ Congress, attended by male and female teachers (Toprek 1981: 286–7). Some women, however, benefited from these measures: the first woman doctor in Turkey, Safiye Ali, opened a clinic in Istanbul in 1922, and by the 1930s many others had entered the well-paid professions; but women’s education in Turkey has remained class-bound and very uneven. In the 1970s women formed 20% of the legal profession and 17% of the medical profession; these figures are higher than those in the USA, France and many other European countries, yet the general illiteracy rate for Turkish women was as high as 52% (Öncü 1981: 181).
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742Another reform of the Kemalist period which had great significance for women was the introduction of a new civil code in 1926, based on the Swiss model. Under the new law, polygamy and marriage by proxy were declared illegal, women were given equal rights regarding divorce, custody of children, and inheritance, while minimum ages for marriage were raised to 18 for men and 17 for women. More daringly, a Muslim woman could legally marry a non-Muslim, and adults were legally allowed to change their religion. The courts also accorded equality to women in respect of testimony, instead of the earlier practice whereby the testimonies of two women equalled that of one man. The separation of property and goods, and the right of the woman to freely dispose of her property, were also introduced (Abadan-Unat 1981: 13–14).
743
744The reforms caused a sensation at the time, and Turkey became the first Muslim country to adopt a civil code in place of the sharia, or Muslim legal code. In his speeches, Kemal had referred to the need to ‘reach a level of contemporary civilization’, and this was to be the keynote of the discussion justifying the changes. In introducing the code, Mahmud Esad, the Minister of Justice, stated that ‘the Turkish nation has decided to accept modern civilization and its living principles without any condition or reservation’ (Rodinson 1974: 127). Another speaker stated: ‘The new law incorporates such principles as monogamy and the right to divorce—principles, which are required for a civilized world’ (Öncü 1981: 181).
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746Kemal had indicated that it was not the reform of the God-given religious law, but its replacement by a new family law that the country needed. In 1924 he declared, ‘The basis of civilization, the foundation of progress and power, are in family life. A bad family life leads inevitably to social, economic and political enfeeblement’ (Lewis 1965: 266–7). It was on the legal front that the religious authorities suffered their most serious defeat, the whole sphere of family law being taken away from them. In 1925, in an attack on these conservative forces, Kemal said:
747
748The efforts made by the Turkish nation for at least three centuries to profit from the means and benefits of modern civilisation have been frustrated by painful and grievous obstacles … the greater and … most insidious enemies of the revolution are rotten laws and their decrepit upholders. It is our purpose to create completely new laws, and thus to tear up the foundation of the old legal system. (Lewis 1965: 268–9)
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752Thus, the whole system of law was changed in Turkey and in addition to the new commercial, maritime and criminal laws, a new system of civil law was introduced. However, those reforms involving personal law did not question the continuation of patriarchy. For example, the husband remained the head of the family, alone entitled to choose domicile; the wife had to obey him and needed his consent to work outside the home. The new laws proved insufficient to change the force of tradition which ruled in the countryside. Even with such limitations, Turkish women intellectuals claim that the reform ‘was a great step forward as far as women’s status was concerned’ (Tekeli 1981: 297). The code was certainly a step forward, as was the subsequent enfranchisement of women in local elections in 1930 and in the national elections in 1935. In the 1935 elections, 18 women (4.5% of the Assembly) were elected, the highest number of women deputies in Europe at that time, when many European countries, including France and Italy, did not even have female franchise (Tekeli 1981: 299).
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757
758Dress Reform
759
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761The imposition of dress reform was an integral part of Mustapha Kemal’s policy of ‘Westernizing’ and thereby ‘civilizing’ the country and abolishing some of the superstructural symbols of the caliphate; for example the fez, which was introduced in Turkey only in 1828, had become a symbol of the Ottoman Empire and of its Islamic heritage. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, many Turks had adopted European clothes but ‘even among the immaculately trousered and jacketed dandies of the capital, one badge of distinctness had remained—the fez’ (Lewis 1965: 262).
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763Kemal consistently emphasized the issue of dress in his tours around Turkey. In Kastamonu he exclaimed:
764
765I see a man in the crowd in front of me; he has a fez on his head, a green turban on the fez, a smock on his back, and on top of that a jacket like the one I am wearing. I can’t see the lower half. Now what kind of outfit is that? Would a civilised man put on this preposterous garb and go out to hold himself up to universal ridicule? (Lewis 1965: 264)
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769The issue of the fez and Turkish dress became a political one and Kemal used the prevailing emergency laws to pass decrees on dress reform. ‘We did it while the law for the Maintenance of Order was still in force … the existence of the law made it much easier for us and … prevented the large-scale poisoning of the nation by certain reactionaries’ (Lewis 1965: 265). Kemal not only hit at symbols of the old Ottoman society, but also enforced a ‘secular’ dress which did not proclaim religion or ethnicity. He led the way, wearing a European hat and clothes and giving orders that the Turks, including religious leaders and government servants, should discard the fez and wear European-style hats, on the grounds that ‘we have to resemble the civilized world in our costume’ (Bisbee 1951: 23). In a defiant mood, Kemal stated that the dress of the ‘civilized’ world was suitable for Turkey and declared:
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771We will wear boots and shoes, trousers, shirts, waistcoats, collars, ties … we will dress in morning coats and lounge suits, in smoking jackets and tail coats. And if there are persons who hesitate and draw back, I will tell them that they are fools. (Wortham 1931: 193)
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773
774
775Women’s dress also became a controversial issue. Turkish women were requested, but not compelled, by the government to abandon the veil and to wear Western clothes. Even Kemal hesitated to flout traditional opinion by using emergency laws to abolish the veil, but he campaigned vigorously on the issue. The women of the bourgeoisie did not hesitate to adopt the latest European fashions, but the dress reform hardly affected the rural women.
776
777Kemal’s view of ‘civilized’ behaviour also included discarding old forms of salutation (the salaam), encouraging Muslim women of good families to become actresses, discouraging Turkish music and propagating Western music, and popularizing European social etiquette, including ballroom dancing. Kemal himself gave regular dances and ordered his officers and their wives to dance; this resulted in a craze for ballroom dancing in the major cities, which outraged the traditionalists. In his personal life, too, Kemal challenged Muslim orthodoxy by marrying in a ceremony where no religious imam was present and the bride was unveiled, and encouraging his adopted daughter to become a pilot. It is interesting to note that Kemal is supposed to have considered his wife to have had ideal feminine virtues such as the ability ‘to talk, dance, and drink cocktails’ (Wortham 1931: 167).
778
779This forcible imposition from above of Western dress and social graces on a population with its own distinct culture caused only a superficial change, however. It was not easy to revolutionize social customs by decree, especially customs that involved religious orthodoxy, although a powerful cultural organization was used to make propaganda in favour of the new changes through schools, books, dramas and films. In addition, an inquisitional committee was formed, called the Tribunal of Independence, which went from village to village punishing those who did not conform to the new dress regulations: ‘the rumour of its approach might cause the veils to disappear and the baggy Turkish trousers … to vanish until these dreaded gentry left the neighbourhood. Things could then return to their comfortable ways’ (Wortham 1931: 203).
780
781Several other reforms represented major attacks on tradition and orthodoxy. In 1928, the clause in the Constitution of 1924 that ‘The religion of the Turkish State is Islam’ was deleted by a vote in the Assembly, thereby finally disestablishing Islam and making Turkey a secular state. The other assault was on a remaining symbol of Islamic identity, namely the Arabic script. In 1928, the Latin script was introduced and the Minister of Education stated: ‘The adoption of Latin letters is for us a necessity. The old literature is doomed to moulder away.’ Again, Kemal made the point that the changes were part of the ‘civilizing’ process; announcing the new script he said:
782
783Our rich and harmonious language will now be able to display itself with new Turkish letters. We must free ourselves from these incomprehensible signs that for centuries have held our minds in an iron vice. You must learn the new Turkish letters quickly. Teach them to your compatriots, to women and to men, to porters and to boatmen … for a nation to consist of 80 per cent of illiterates is shameful. Now is the time to eradicate the errors of the past … Our nation will show, with its script and with its mind that its place is with the civilised world. (Lewis 1965: 272; emphasis added)
784
785
786
787
788
789Halide Edip
790
791
792The effects of the Kemalist reforms on women in Turkey can be illustrated by the life of Halide Edip (1883–1964), the woman nationalist who had served in Kemal’s forces. Edip came from a traditionally influential family, her father being at one time the Sultan’s secretary. She had received a European education, both at school and at home, and was a frequent contributor to liberal journals on literary subjects and on women’s issues. Her greatest successes were as a novelist and political agitator. In her novels, which are mainly concerned with women’s rights (the best-known being Sinekli Bakkal), she tries to synthesize the two prevailing ideologies of the time, Turkish nationalism and the Westernization ideal:
793
794As she began writing in the pre-republican period and continued to do so during the period of Ataturk’s reforms, the problems she approached and the images of women she created show great variety … images of nationalistic women, modernised women, women with a strong personality, women rising up against oppression and idealistic women striving to educate the masses. (Altiok 1981: 226)
795
796
797
798Halide Edip was active in the nationalist movement in the years 1910–12 and was the only woman member of the council of Ojak, the nationalist organization which had branches all over Turkey. During World War I, she organized schools and orphanages in Syria and Lebanon. She joined the army, becoming one of the leading writers and public speakers in Mustapha Kemal’s forces, and was one of several nationalists to be sentenced to death by the Sultan’s government. That the daughter of a former palace official should challenge the system made her a target for attack and praise. ‘As an eloquent public speaker and an adviser to Kemal, she was the most visible woman of the revolution’ (Minai 1981: 62). Her writing and activism had an important impact at the time and also in later years:
799
800During Halide Edip’s lifetime her influence was great; it continues to be today. Her novels are still read in Turkey. Her life spanned one of the most dramatic periods in Turkish history, from the crumbling of the old Ottoman Empire to the emergence of an independent nation. Her example helped prepare the way for the appearance of a new kind of Turkish woman. (Fernea and Bezirgan 1977: 167–8)
801
802
803
804
805
806Conclusion
807
808
809The Kemalist reforms in Turkey were cited all over the world as successful attempts at achieving women’s emancipation by decree from above. As we have seen, the reforms were an integral part of an attempt to force Turkey into the 20th century through the modernization of all its institutions. The reforms covered not only economic activities and the legal structures, but were extended into areas of ideology and even dress and social behaviour.
810
811These changes have been analyzed by many women political scientists of Turkey, who were themselves the products of these reforms. Dr Nermin Abadan-Unat, a professor of political science, claims that though Kemal ‘focused his attention mainly on the elimination of polygamy, sex-differentiated legislation and traditional ethical norms’, an assessment of these changes ‘indicates that revolutionary efforts through law have only resulted in partial changes both in the status and role of women in Turkish society’. She adds that the principal progressive changes were not fought for but were given by the government in order to prove that, in granting equal rights to women, the new Turkey was ‘reaching a level of contemporary civilization’, and was ‘a symbol to the world’. Abadan-Unat concludes that ‘the major rights conferred on Turkish women were much more the result of unrelenting efforts of a small revolutionary elite, rather than the product of large-scale demands by Turkey’s female population’ (Abadan-Unat 1981: 12–13).
812
813Another woman academic, Dr Sirin Tekeli, a political scientist who analysed Kemal’s reforms, has shown that the model followed was one based on capitalist ideology. She writes:
814
815The objective of the revolutionaries was to create a modern Turkey and ‘modernity’ was defined as the social organisation prevalent in the West, i.e. capitalist social formation. The forces of production that the new state inherited from the Ottoman Empire were not developed enough to be historically determining: therefore one had to start with modernising the superstructures. The new ‘civil code’ adopted in 1926 reorganised civil and property relations on the basis of the model relationships dominant in capitalist states. (Tekeli 1981: 294)
816
817
818
819Despite the undoubted breakthrough in Turkey, the reforms remained class-bound, barely affecting the masses of Turkish women. As Dr Fatma Mansur Cosar has written:
820
821The sudden changes … thrust upon Turkish society in the early 1920s were made bearable and did not dislocate the social structure because, in the final analysis, only a very small number of women were able to use the rights granted to them by Ataturk. The vast majority of women are still tied to the land and under the social control of men. (Cosar 1980: 138)
822
823
824
825Nevertheless, however class-determined in the final analysis and limited in their scope, the Turkish reforms created an international sensation. Just as Japan had inspired wonder at the rapidity of its transformation from feudal society to industrial capitalism, Turkey’s political transformation from the sultanate to the republic and its attempts at drastic social reform caught the imagination of the ‘modernizers’ and nationalists of other Middle Eastern and Asian countries. The example of Turkey, especially in respect of women’s rights, became one of the most discussed issues in the Muslim world, and efforts were made to emulate it in Iran and Afghanistan.
826
827
828
829
830
8313.Reformism and Women’s Rights in Egypt
832
833
834
835To leave our girls a prey to ignorance, and taken up with stupid pursuits, is indeed a great crime.
836
837Mohamed Abduh (1849–1905) quoted in El-Saadawi 1980: 171
838
839
840
841Egypt was, in many respects, the forerunner of ‘Eastern’ countries in the spheres of modernization, reform and education, as well as in developing movements of nationalism, of resistance to imperialism and of feminism. It also took the lead in the reform of Islam. Situated strategically between Europe and Asia, and exposed to radical movements of change including the French Revolution, Cairo had become a cosmopolitan centre of new ideas and movements. The stirrings of reformism and feminism in Egypt were linked to attempts by successive rulers to modernize the country’s educational, cultural and administrative structures, and also to the growth of nationalism and anti-imperialism under British occupation in the post-1882 period. The early debates on women’s rights in Egypt, the emergence of male reformers championing women’s rights and the role of ‘the new women’ who pioneered ideas of female equality must be assessed in the background of these historical events.
842
843Egypt can lay claim to one of the oldest civilizations, as attested to by the remains of numerous temples, cities and burial sites as well as by sculptures, paintings and writings. The people of Egypt had a developed religion, in which female gods played a role almost equal to that of male gods. Goddesses like Mut (the goddess of Truth), Isis and Hathor ruled over and controlled many areas of human activity. The existence of such goddesses has been seen by some scholars as a reflection of the high status of women in Pharaonic society. Records generally depict women as highly cultured, practising such sports as swimming and acrobatics in the same way as men. Paintings of the earlier eras show men and women as being of equal size; it is after about 2000 BC that women are often depicted somewhat smaller than males, probably indicating a diminution of their status. Socially and politically, women appear to have enjoyed a relatively equal status. Egypt has been ruled by many queens, such as Nefertiti and Hatshepsut, as well as Cleopatra in later times (1st century BC); women are also recorded as having occupied positions as ministers and rulers of provinces.
844
845From the time of Cleopatra’s death (in 30 BC) up to AD 642, Egypt was under Roman domination except for brief periods, as in AD 270, when it was annexed by Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. In the 7th century, the Arab conquest and the consequent Islamization of Egypt took place and in 1517 the country became part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. From being an independent sultanate, it became a province of the Ottoman Empire, but this caused little change to its traditional administrative or power structures. Moreover, the change to Ottoman suzerainty had very little influence on Egyptian society and culture, and commercial and trading links with European countries were continued more or less on an autonomous basis.
846
847It was with the intention of consolidating these links that Napoleon Bonaparte and the French army invaded Egypt in 1798. Their occupation lasted three years, opened up a two-way interaction between the countries, and marked the beginnings of the modernization of Egypt. Napoleon had brought with him 120 scholars and scientists who embarked on a comprehensive study of Egyptian society and culture. To this end, the French established the Institut d’Égypte in Cairo in order to study the country’s antiquities, languages, agriculture and medical knowledge; the institute’s library was open to Egyptians and printing presses turned out publications in both Arabic and French. As the Egyptian historian al Jabarti (1745–1825) wrote:
848
849The French were particularly happy if a Muslim visitor showed interest in the sciences. They immediately began to talk to him and showed him all kinds of printed books with pictures of parts of the terrestrial globe and of animals and plants. They also had books on ancient history … (Lewis 1982: 295)
850
851
852
853The first French-language journal in Egypt, Courrier de l’Égypte, was also started during this period. French intellectual activities also brought the publication in Paris, between 1809 and 1828, of an encyclopaedia Description de l’Égypte which was responsible for arousing interest in Europe in Egyptian civilization and Islamic studies, and also the first Arabic-French dictionary written by an Egyptian Copt in 1828.
854
855The influence of France caused a rapid flow of European ideas into Egypt, including the ideology of the French Revolution. The position of women was affected in this way and some intermarriages even occurred. General Menou married an Egyptian woman and is said to have treated her with the French ‘chivalry’ of the period; he ‘led her by the hand into the dining room, offered her the best seat at the table … if her handkerchief fell to the ground he would hurriedly pick it up’. This caused other women to petition Bonaparte ‘to have their husbands treat them in the same manner’. When the French left Egypt, however, repercussions occurred and a French observer of the time reported that ‘women were massacred, poisoned, or drowned in the Nile’. The historian al Jabarti wrote of the ‘pernicious innovations’ and ‘corruption of women’ caused by the French occupation, and related how the daughter of a leading religious figure, Shaykh al-Bakri, was killed because she had dressed in the French style and mixed with the French (Ahmed 1982: 154). It is significant that one does not hear of such violence being used against Egyptian men who had adopted European ways.
856
857
858
859
860
861Reformism in Egypt
862
863
864The French were compelled to evacuate Egypt after their defeat by the British navy at Abukir, their departure being followed by a period of instability during which the British, the sultans of Egypt, and representatives of the Ottoman Empire vied with each other for control of the country. The British were in turn compelled to leave Egypt in 1805, and authority was finally established by the Albanian General Mohamed Ali, under the suzerainty of the Ottomans. Mohamed Ali ruled Egypt from 1805 to 1848, introducing a series of reforms which gave the various departments of state a recognizably modern form. The country was given a Constitution and a consultative council was established, action being taken simultaneously to reduce the powers of provincial lords. In the economic sphere, tax-farming was abolished and a system of fixed taxes introduced; foreign trade was taken over by the state, which resulted in increased agricultural and commercial revenues, and agricultural wages were increased. The cultivation of export crops such as cotton was encouraged and many industries started up, including armaments, textiles, machine tools and glass.
865
866Mohamed Ali’s reforms also extended to education. A Ministry of Education was established and the first schools of engineering and medicine were set up. Those who needed skills that could not be acquired in Egypt were sent abroad. In the years between 1813 and 1849,311 Egyptian students were sent on state scholarships to France, England, Italy and Austria (Hitti 1961: 433). However, Mohamed Ali generally conceived of education as a means of fitting young men for the public service and his reforms have to be seen in this context. Another of his innovations was the establishment of a government printing press whose output was not confined merely to government gazettes and returns, but included works of learning in Arabic, Turkish and Persian. He also started publication of the first Middle Eastern newspaper and established a translation bureau which, between 1822 and 1842, published 243 books, mostly translations. This programme was mainly responsible for the spread of European thought in Egypt during this period. It was reinforced by the experience of students and diplomats who went to Europe and became influenced by France and French culture. By the end of Mohamed Ali’s reign, ‘Egypt consisted of a rich, alien ruling class and a bureaucracy which was also largely alien, a substantial … population of foreign traders and technicians, and a subservient population of Egyptian farmers and peasants, labourers, craftsmen and petty traders’ (Little 1967: 36).
867
868Female education also became a significant issue during this period and many advances were made. The daughters of rich families had been educated at home; girls from poor families could attend the kuttabs where the Koran was taught by rote together with some reading and writing. In 1832, Mohamed Ali built a school at which girls (mainly slaves and orphans) were taught to be midwives. The missionaries were also active, opening schools such as the ‘Dame du Bon Pasteur’ in 1846, followed by an American Mission School for girls in 1859.
869
870Another area of reform was among the armed forces. By 1826, Mohamed Ali had created a powerful army, French-trained and well-equipped, as well as a small naval force. The armed forces successfully extended the national territory and restricted Turkish inroads into Egypt’s relative autonomy. Eventually, however, they became a drain on the country’s revenues and exposed Mohamed Ali to renewed intervention by the British, who had begun to be apprehensive of his power, particularly because he demanded commercial independence from the Ottoman Empire with which Britain had beneficial trading concessions. The Treaty of London of 1841 reduced Egypt’s army to a force of 18,000 and restricted his independence within the Ottoman Empire. Egypt, though nominally a province of the Empire, anticipated many of its Tanzimat reforms of 1839 to which we referred when discussing Turkey.
871
872The process of modernization continued and economic development accelerated during the rule of the Khedive Ismail (1863–82) who introduced strategies of modernization, the diffusion of technology and scientific knowledge, and made changes in education, administration, irrigation and public works. Modernization was considered to be the panacea for Egypt’s ‘backwardness’ and necessary for the country’s greater prosperity and power (Vatikiotis 1980: 117–18). But the Egyptians who had studied abroad, especially in France, were from the higher echelons of society, and on their return they continued to work within the framework of an authoritarian state structure and monarchical system, which they did not challenge.
873
874The Khedive Ismail continued the educational policies of his predecessor with some beneficial results for women. In 1873, his third wife, Jashem Afet Hanum, started the Suyfiyya Girls School which soon had 400 pupils, and provided instruction in arithmetic, geography, history and religion as well as needlework and domestic skills; in 1875, the government opened another such school, giving girls a Western-style primary education. The purpose of female education was restricted to preparing girls to be efficient mothers and good wives, however, and it was mainly the girls of urban bourgeois families who benefited (Abdel Kader 1973: 118–19).
875
876The last decades of the 19th century, a period of aggressive imperialism and competition among European powers, saw the re-establishment of British control over Egypt. In the 1870s, the financial problems of Khedive Ismail’s government led to several political changes. To avoid bankruptcy, new and unpopular taxes were devised which mainly burdened the peasantry; the Khedive’s shares in the Suez Canal were sold to Britain, and British and French officials were allowed to oversee the economy.
877
878Economic developments during this period brought into existence an Egyptian urban middle class, influenced by European political thought. This class became the basis of a popular nationalist movement: dissatisfaction with the rule of the Khedive and resentment of foreign control brought matters to a head, resulting in the revolt led by Arabi Pasha in 1882. This was crushed by an Anglo-French force, after which Egypt was occupied by the British forces. This was to last until 1922, when after a series of protracted struggles, a nominal independence was granted; Egyptians were allowed administrative power but effective military and political control remained in the hands of the British.
879
880
881
882
883
884The Influence of Al-Afghani
885
886
887The transformation of the country into a semi-colony of the British, together with the influence of liberal thought, the movement for reform and the growth of nationalist consciousness, formed the background to the intellectual debates that took place in Egypt in the late 19th century. Great influence was exercised over the intellectuals of the period by Sayyed Jamal al-din al-Afghani (1839–97), who was born in Iran, educated in the rationalist tradition of Avicenna, and became the best-known radical agitator, social reformer and pan-Islamist of the Muslim world. Afghani lived in turn in India, Afghanistan, Turkey, Egypt, Russia and Europe, and was expelled from many of these countries because of his agitational activities against their regimes. In Paris, in 1884, he edited an anti-British, pan-Islamic journal which was influential among the Arab intelligentsia; he also distinguished himself by indulging in polemical discussions on Islam with French academics. Returning to Iran, he became involved in bringing together Iranian reformists and in conspiracies to overthrow the Shah. He was also a stern critic of the absolutist monarchy in Turkey. Afghani advocated the reform of traditional beliefs and structures; he argued for a return to the ‘pure’ Islam of an earlier period, explaining that Islam, if interpreted correctly, was a rational religion capable of providing an ideological basis for social advance and for the unity of all Muslims. He promoted alliances of religious and radical forces in society, and opposed feudal oppression and corrupt governments. His role in the reformation of Islam cannot be overemphasized:
888
889As in all the countries attacked by Europe, people were looking for the secret of European success. Jamal al-din [al-Afghani] believed that the key to this secret was modern science and technology. He argued that a return to primitive Islam, the rational and reasonable religion which had subsequently been so grossly distorted and rigidified, would enable the Muslim world to adapt to the new conditions. But the old structures were upheld by the European powers who benefited from their sclerosis. The independence of the Muslim world and a struggle against the European imperialists were therefore necessary if Islam was to be purified. (Rodinson 1979: 79; emphasis added)
890
891
892
893Afghani’s consistent anti-imperialist and nationalist stand, as well as his inclination towards socialism, made him the most inspiring of the Muslim reformers of the 19th century and his ‘appeals to unity around Islam to fend off the West had a multi-class appeal’ in the Muslim world (Keddie 1981: 189, 65).
894
895Afghani’s ideas gained him followers in all Muslim countries. His views on the modernization and liberalization of Muslim societies, on the promotion of Western science and technology, and on the establishment of Islamic unity under one empire with the strength to resist European imperialist domination and exploitation, were of great appeal to young reformers. In Egypt, Turkey and Iran, many leading intellectuals became his collaborators and disciples. Afghani’s influence in Egypt was particularly crucial. He had lived in Cairo and taught at Al-Azhar University in 1871. His nationalism and ideas of resisting European domination through the adoption of Western methods gained popularity and even inspired Arabi Pasha’s 1882 revolt against the British.
896
897
898
899
900
901Male Reformers and Women’s Rights
902
903
904Although nationalism grew in Egypt during the late 19th century, it did not take on any radical form, but operated within the framework of the existing structures. Several moderate reformers and nationalists appeared on the scene, one of the best-known being Mustapha Kamal (1874–1908), who had been educated in France and was a Francophile; he was a talented writer and speaker, and formed the National Party which demanded constitutional government and independence for Egypt. However, the movement co-operated with the conservative religious leaders and with the ruling Khedive, while supporting French interests against the British. Kamal published a newspaper (Al-Lewa) in English and French: ‘he became the most powerful influence among the literate Egyptians and through Al-Lewa he raised enough money to start a number of independent national schools which became hotbeds of schoolboy extremism’ (Little 1967: 62). Kamal was against any idea of women’s emancipation but his contemporaries were to take up the issue.
905
906It is not surprising that during the second half of the 19th century, a period of intellectual discussion and reformist activity, the debate on women’s rights was also heard in Egypt, its first advocates being male reformers. These included Ahmed Fares El Shidyak who, in 1855, had published One Leg Crossed Over the Other, one of the first books to support women’s emancipation. Others, like Rifaa Rafii El-Tahtawi (1801–71), wrote on the need for women’s education and for the redress of injustices to which women were subjected. Tahtawi, a high-ranking government official, had studied in Paris from 1826 to 1831 and was a leading Egyptian intellectual and reformer. In France he had been influenced by the writings of Voltaire, Rousseau and Montesquieu. On his return to Egypt he became part of the campaign to modernize education, helping in 1835 to establish the School of Languages which trained translators, jurists and administrators. In his own writings, Tahtawi popularized concepts of secularism in politics and in law, and also ideas of liberty and political rights.
907
908He was the first Egyptian to report fairly systematically and intelligently to his compatriots on the general outlines of European political institutions, the ideas of the enlightenment and the French Revolution … Above all he advanced the idea of the rule of law and a stable order as the most important manifestations of a civilised society. (Vatikiotis 1980: 115)
909
910
911
912Tahtawi was also a pioneer of women’s education in Egypt, putting forward his views on the need for female education in A Guide to the Education of Girls and Boys which he published in 1872. This was a period when the debate on women was in full swing: ‘Every shade of opinion regarding the emancipation of women was represented and nationalists were far from agreeing on the matter. The issue was an essential one, directly touching the life of everyone. An increasing flow of books and articles about the topic gives evidence of its importance’ (Philipp 1978: 278).
913
914As in many Asian countries, the Egyptian reformers tried to show that it was not the tenets of religion that subordinated women, but rather an incorrect interpretation of that religion, and corrupt practices and additions which later contravened the purity of the original faith. Muslim reformists started a debate on religion and on the rights of women in Islam, one of the pioneers being Sheik Mohamed Abduh (1849–1905), who had studied in Paris and had come under the influence of Afghani. Abduh and Afghani together formed the Free National Party in Egypt which attracted many prominent soldiers, officials and teachers. However, its views on pan-Islamism did not find favour with the authorities who suppressed the party, expelling Afghani in 1879 and Abduh in 1882. The two joined forces again in Paris where they published a journal, al-Urwat al-Wuthqua (‘The Indissoluble Bond’), which attacked British imperialist intervention in Islamic countries and called for an Islamic revival. Though banned in Egypt, the journal achieved a wide circulation and influence. After returning to Egypt, Abduh became a leading reformer, influencing a generation of intellectual nationalists. Like many others of this period, however, he was essentially a moderate rather than a revolutionary reformer. ‘His ideology aimed at a gradual transformation of Egyptian society by means of an education programme geared to slowly changing the people it reached, through free universities, benevolent societies and organs of the Egyptian state, still controlled by the British’ (Rodinson 1979: 24).
915
916Abduh was outspoken on women’s status, denouncing polygamy as against Islam and condemning the prevalent practices of concubinage and women’s slavery. Citing the Koran as in favour of women’s education, he claimed that the backwardness of Arab women was detrimental to the future of the Arab peoples (Philipp 1978: 278). He stated:
917
918We wish that our daughters should be educated. For Allah the Almighty has explained, “To them are due the same goods that we expect from them”. There are many sacred verses that … clarify that both man and woman share in fulfilling the same duties towards life and towards religion. (El-Saadawi 1980: 171)
919
920
921
922Abduh pioneered a flexible interpretation of the Koran in the light of modern thought, and his work became known in other Muslim countries, including Indonesia. Rather than denouncing religion, reformers like Abduh tried to separate religious and political questions, and attempted to find new explanations of traditional texts which were in keeping with the times. Abduh founded the Salafiyah movement which called for a return to the purity of primitive Islam and for a restatement of its teaching in terms of modern science. In Egypt he was bitterly attacked by religious leaders and conservatives who opposed not only the foreign occupation in their country but also the encroachment of Western civilization: ‘But he did not retreat or hesitate to continue propagating his ideas. He maintained that one of the most important sources of the weakness and passivity which had assailed the Arab peoples was the backwardness of women’ (El-Saadawi 1980: 171).
923
924It was Abduh’s disciple, Kassim Amin (1865–1908), educated in France and a judge by profession, who created a furore in 1899, with his book Tahrir al Mara (‘Women’s Emancipation’). On the basis of religious texts, Amin argued that female seclusion, the veil, arranged marriages and the prevalent divorce practices were un-Islamic. He advocated women’s right to work as well as legal reforms to improve their status, claiming that there could be ‘no improvement of the state of the nation without improving the position of women’ (Philipp 1980: 279). Amin stressed the importance of women’s education not only for bringing up children but also for creating a better relationship between husband and wife on the basis of mutual respect (Abdel Kader 1973: 11). Not unexpectedly, his book was denounced in orthodox Muslim circles and his views were refuted. Opposition was also voiced by those nationalists who held that issues of women’s emancipation weakened and diverted the campaign against foreign domination. Kassim Amin answered his critics in a second book, Al-Mara Al Jadida (‘The New Woman’), basing his arguments less on religion than on the doctrine of natural rights and the concept of progress (Philipp 1978: 279).
925
926The debate was carried further by such male reformers as Lutfi Ahmed El-Sayed (born in 1872), and a group of intellectuals who expressed their liberal views on women’s rights in Al Gareeda, a paper which was edited by Lutfi (El-Saadawi 1980: 172). This discussion of the position of women took place within the context of a debate on secular reform and religious orthodoxy. Lutfi El-Sayed, who had known al-Afghani, was a liberal writer and teacher who advocated not only British withdrawal from Egypt but also a limitation of the Khedive’s powers. He favoured a secular state, and did not link progress to a reform of Islam. Like Taha Husein, another intellectual of the period, he sought to reform and modernize the Muslim University of Al-Azhar, and expressed these views in the journal Weekly Politics, which not only criticized Al-Azhar but advocated a separation between religion and politics (Little 1967: 129).
927
928
929
930
931
932Nationalism and Protests by Women
933
934
935The turn of the century saw a growing national consciousness and the emergence of a group of politicians, led by Saad Zaghlul, who demanded self-determination for Egypt. These demands intensified after World War I when the victory of the allies raised the issue of Egypt’s political future. Zaghlul and his group of Egyptian lawyers, officials and landowners, and those with interests in commerce and the cotton industry, formed a delegation to present Egypt’s case to the British. This group, which emerged as the Wafd Party, had the support of intellectuals, teachers, students, peasants and women. The British refusal to negotiate and their exile of the Wafd leaders led to demonstrations, strikes and assassinations. In 1922, the British eventually recognized Egypt as an independent state but they retained absolute control of the Sudan and of Egyptian defence, imperial communications and foreign interests. After a period of difficulties and a new Constitution, the 1924 elections gave the Wafd 90% of the seats in the Egyptian parliament, with Zaghlul forming the government and Fuad I as king.
936
937This was the political background to the rise of women’s activity in Egypt before and after World War I. Saad Zaghlul and his group, who were secularists, had earlier been identified with the promotion of women’s education, and many influential women writers used their talents to write extensively on feminist issues in the first decades of the 20th century. They included Malak Hifhi Nassif (1886–1918), the most forceful woman writer of her time, who, under the pen-name of Bahissat El Badia (Searcher in the Desert), wrote in the contemporary press on marriage, divorce, veiled seclusion and women’s education. Her father, a university lecturer in Arab studies, had been a disciple of Mohamed Abduh, and she was one of the first women in Egypt to qualify as a teacher in 1900. After her marriage, she moved away from Cairo and lived near the desert where she began to criticize the seclusion and patriarchal subjection under which women lived. A victim of her husband’s polygamy, she was particularly articulate on the evils of the system. Her fame was such that in 1911 she spoke in the Egyptian Legislative Assembly, putting forward a programme for the improvement of the situation of women. This included demands for universal elementary education for girls, with emphasis on religious education, hygiene, first aid and child rearing, and the training of women as doctors and teachers to fulfil their medical and educational needs. El Badia’s work was praised by contemporary male reformers. Kassim Amin supported her ideas on women’s liberation, and Lutfi El-Sayed described her as ‘a true example of those women authors who have surpassed many of the men writers living during the same period’ (El-Saadawi 1980: 172).
938
939Another woman writer of the period was May Ziada, who held a literary salon in Cairo in 1915–16 and led a life of independence. ‘She was able to impose her personality on literary circles in Egypt, to mix and talk freely with men, and to correspond regularly with them at a time when the veil still hung heavily over the faces of many Egyptian women in the same sector of society’ (El-Saadawi 1980: 122). The proliferation of women’s journals and of women who wrote on various issues was striking: prior to 1914 there were 15 Arabic women’s magazines, many of which were edited by Syrian Christian women (Philipp 1978: 280).
940
941Another area of activity for middle-class women was philanthropy. For example, Hidiya Afifi (1898–1969), the daughter of a high-ranking official, educated at a French convent and related by marriage to the nationalist leader, Saad Zaghlul, is best known for her work in health-related charities. In 1909, together with other wealthy women, she formed the Mabarat Mohamed Ali which ran a network of women’s clinics. In 1919, the same group formed the Société de la Femme Nouvelle, concerned with girls’ schools, orphanages and child-care centres (Marsot 1978: 272).
942
943Open political agitation and action on the part of women began with their participation in the nationalist movement against the British after World War I. British repression and the exile of Zaghlul and other Wafd leaders in 1919 led to violent demonstrations which marked the beginning of militant nationalist agitation. The dissatisfaction was not only political but also economic:
944
945Discontent had accumulated during the war. In the cities inflation had hit the lower classes, and in the villages the peasants had suffered from such measures as mobilization of draft animals, forced labour, and confiscation of products. The tax burden had increased. The frustration and disaffection of the various classes found an outlet in the general demonstrations of 1919. (Philipp 1978: 288)
946
947
948
949It was during this nationalist upsurge, in which all classes participated, that political demonstrations by women occurred on four occasions in 1919. The women were organized by many of the wives of the Wafd founders, and middle-class women were seen protesting for the first time in public. Particularly active was Huda Sharawi (1882–1947), who came from a wealthy family, had been educated at home in French, Turkish and Arabic, and was widely read. In 1910 she had opened a school which provided a general education for girls. Sharawi’s husband was a founder member of the Wafd and she moved in nationalist circles; she organized women to demonstrate during the agitation of 1919, and collected women’s signatures to a petition to the British High Commissioner in which they condemned the shooting of demonstrators and the exiling of Egyptian leaders: ‘We the women of Egypt, mothers, sisters and wives of those who have been the victims of British greed and exploitation … deplore the brutal, barbarous actions that have fallen upon … the Egyptian nation. Egypt has committed no crime except to express her desire for freedom and independence’ (Fernea and Bezirgan 1977: 193–6).
950
951There are many contemporary accounts of women’s participation in the 1919 demonstrations. Sir Valentine Chirol (to whom there were only two categories of women: ‘good’ and ‘bad’), wrote in the London Times:
952
953In the stormy days of 1919 [the women] descended in large bodies into the streets, those of the more respectable classes still veiled and shrouded in their loose black coats, whilst the courtesans from the lowest quarters of the city, who had also caught the contagion (of political unrest) disported themselves unveiled and arrayed in less discreet garments. In every turbulent demonstration women were well to the front. They marched in procession—some on foot, some in carriages shouting ‘independence’ and ‘down with the English’ and waving national banners. (Philipp 1978: 288–9)
954
955
956
957The presence of both bourgeois and poor women has been noted by many writers: ‘The veiled gentlewomen of Cairo paraded in the streets shouting slogans for independence and freedom from foreign occupation. They organized strikes and demonstrations … boycotts of British goods and wrote petitions… protesting British actions in Egypt’ (Marsot 1978: 269).
958
959It was not only the ‘veiled gentlewomen’ who participated in the upsurge but also working women in both industrial and agricultural occupations who were active in the 1919 struggles:
960
961They went on to the rural roads, side by side with the men, cut the telephone wires and disrupted the railway lines in order to paralyse the movement of British troops. Some of them participated in storming the improvised camps and jails in which many of those who had led the uprisings or participated in them had been imprisoned. Women were killed or injured when British troops fired on them. Some of them are known such as Shafika Mohamed, Hamida Khalil, Sayeda Hassan, Fahima Riad and Aisha Omar. But hundreds of poor women lost their lives without anybody being able to trace their names. (El-Saadawi 1980: 176)
962
963
964
965In Egypt in the 1920s there were also small groups of socialists and Communists who were active in the period of post-World War I political and industrial unrest. During these years, there were strikes over wages and hours of work among factory workers as well as among other groups such as tram drivers, waiters and lamplighters, culminating in demonstrations in Cairo and Alexandria and a general strike in 1924. The Socialist Party founded in 1920 by Joseph Rosenthal (an Alexandrian jeweller of Jewish origin), which became the Communist Party in 1922, came under suspicion and its leaders were frequently arrested. While the Communist Party remained an urban-based movement of intellectuals, professionals and trade union leaders, its leadership was mainly based on minority support. There is also evidence of participation of at least one woman in the leadership of the movement, for in 1925, when the party leaders were arrested, they included Charlotte Rosenthal (Laqueur 1956: 36), wife of Joseph Rosenthal.
966
967
968
969
970
971Huda Sharawi
972
973
974In 1923, when the female militancy of the earlier phase had died out, Huda Sharawi and other middle-class women formed the Egyptian Feminist Union, which became the main women’s association concerned with education, social welfare and changes in private law, to provide for equality between the sexes. Sharawi is best remembered for the gesture she made against tradition by throwing her veil into the sea on her return from Rome, where she had attended the International Conference of Women in 1924. ‘This naturally caused a scandal, particularly as Huda was an eminent pasha’s wife. Undaunted, other prominent women cast off their veils, one after another’ (Minai 1981: 69).
975
976In drafting the new Constitution of 1924, Egyptian politicians chose to ignore the question of women’s political rights, making only changes such as raising the age of marriage for girls to 16, but not giving women the right to vote or to divorce. A protest demonstration was held in March 1924 at the opening of Parliament, when some feminists demanded the right to vote, but this seems to have been the last spark of revolt on the issue (Philipp 1978: 289).
977
978In 1925, Huda Sharawi started a journal in French, L’Égyptienne, edited by Ceza Nabarawi, who had also been at the women’s conference in Rome. The élitist nature of the venture is clear in that it catered only to the French-speaking women of the Egyptian bourgeoisie. Nevertheless, the issues discussed included Turkish reforms regarding women, which had also influenced Egyptian women, and the question of Islam. The journal’s editor stated in 1927 that ‘We, the Egyptian feminists, have a great respect for our religion … In wanting to see it practised in its true spirit … we are doing more for it than those who submit themselves blindly to the customs that have deformed [Islam]’ (Minai 1981: 72). The issue of polygamy also evoked little response from the legislators. In 1928, a new law limited it to those who could look after ‘the family they already have charge of—a measure which could hardly be seen as a restriction.
979
980Egypt, although the intellectual leader of the Muslim world, remained very conservative with regard to the reform of personal law, and on the question of polygamy did not reach the level of progress achieved in Turkey. In 1935 when Huda Sharawi lectured at the American University of Cairo on the status of women and called for the abolition of polygamy, two sheiks from Al-Azhar University protested; but it was perhaps a sign of changing educated opinion that the audience sided with Sharawi. Her speech on this occasion was ‘received with enthusiasm in the university gathering … was printed in full in a leading newspaper and thus widely circulated through the Arabic-speaking world’ (Woodsmall 1936: 121–2).
981
982But the rise of feminism was stunted by the climate of political opinion and the class bias of the women’s movement. As Nawal El-Saadawi has written of the reformist women’s activities:
983
984The movement was not representative of the overwhelming majority of toiling women, and its leadership ended, just as the political leadership did, by seeking accommodations with the British, the Palace and the reactionary forces in the country. The women’s movement… kept away from an active involvement in the national and political life of the country and limited its activities to charitable and social welfare work. (El-Saadawi 1980: 176)
985
986
987
988The activism of the earlier phase thus petered out. The admission of a few women to the University of Cairo in 1928 caused an outcry in orthodox circles and a crisis within the government. It was only in 1962 that Al-Azhar University admitted women students. Nevertheless, new generations of educated Egyptian women arose, making inroads into some of the professions. In 1934, Lutfiya El Nadi, a graduate of the American Girls’ College of Cairo, was the first woman pilot to make a solo flight (Woodsmall 1936: 81). But the majority remained unschooled; in 1975, 25% of the girls attended school as opposed to 49% of boys. Religious interests and masculine opposition remained strong and it was not until 1956 that women obtained the right to vote; in 1979, Parliament reserved 30 of the 392 seats for women, and in the same year marriage and divorce laws were liberalized to benefit them (Minai 1981: 74, 78).
989
990In conclusion, the earlier democratic and nationalist struggles in Egypt gave rise to an intellectual debate on the status of women, to moves to give women access to education, and to the rise of a feminist consciousness which expressed itself in a feminist press, in women’s organizations, in demands for suffrage and other rights, and in the appearance of women of all classes in agitations and street demonstrations against the British. However, expectations of the early years were not fulfilled and feminism did not survive into the 1930s. Although Egypt had been among the first countries of Africa and Asia to be exposed to European currents of thought, the internal structures of traditional society—including the monarchy and religious orthodoxy —continued to dominate during the period under consideration and attempts to achieve radical changes for women were therefore unsuccessful.
991
992
993
994
995
9964.Women’s Struggles and ‘Emancipation from Above’ in Iran
997
998
999
1000Because women in these states are not being fitted for any of the human virtues it often happens that they resemble plants.
1001
1002Ibn Rushd (Averroes), 12th century Persian scholar
1003
1004(Fischer 1978: 190)
1005
1006
1007
1008Women’s participation in political struggles and the question of their emancipation first arose in Iran in response to foreign domination and as part of the nationalist reaction both to the foreign powers and to the ruling dynasty. Although Iran was not colonized during the imperialists’ expansion in the 19th century, it nevertheless came under their ‘sphere of influence’, the two notable foreign powers exercising such control being Britain and Tsarist Russia. Russia was continuously involved in aggression against Iran, including the annexation of territory and the extraction of concessions, while British policies were based on the belief that imperial supremacy in India required control of Iran and of the Gulf.
1009
1010Due to its geographical location Iran had always been exposed to invasions and cross-currents of influence from Europe and Asia. During the phase of European colonial expansion, the Portuguese were the first to make their appearance in the Gulf, capturing the island of Hormus and part of the mainland in the early 16th century. The British were also active in the area trying to promote trade, and in 1599 Shah Abbas I was able to enlist the help of British adventurers in reforming his army. Abbas also gave trading rights to the Dutch and British East India Companies and later, with British help, expelled the Portuguese from his domains. The Russians made their presence felt in the early 18th century: their invasion of northern Iran in 1721 under Peter the Great gave rise to an agreement between the Ottoman Empire and Russia by which the latter was allowed to occupy parts of Iran.
1011
1012Monarchs of the Qajar dynasty who ruled the country from 1794 until 1925 were constantly involved in intrigues and manoeuvres with foreign powers. This was a period of expansion for imperialism, and Iran, being on the overland route to India, became an important area of conflict among rival European powers, especially Russia and Britain.
1013
1014The winds of modernization which swept the Islamic world in the 19th century and led to some internal reforms were also felt in Iran. Attempts towards some kind of liberal reform were made during the rule of Shah Nasir ud-Din (1848–96) who had absorbed liberal ideas from his vizier Mirza Taqi Khan, who in turn had been influenced by liberal movements in Turkey. Under this regime, some progress was made towards modernization: the army was reformed and the sale of offices and titles was stopped; the first Farsi newspaper was established, and an école polytechnique at which science and other subjects were taught along modern lines was opened in Tehran; communications were also improved through roads, a postal system and the telegraph. These reforms proved unpopular in certain quarters, however, and Taqi Khan was executed on the grounds that he was becoming too powerful. By this time the reform movement in Turkey had also failed; Sultan Hamid had reverted to absolutist rule and the Shah Nasir ud-Din followed his example.
1015
1016In the 1870s and 1880s, the Shah made three visits to Europe. He made no attempt, however, to implement the reforms demanded by liberals who had begun to agitate from abroad and who were influenced by Afghani’s reform movement. Under his successor, Shah Muzzaffar ud-Din (1896–1907) agitation for reform spread rapidly and by the early 20th century had become a serious challenge to the regime. The Qajar rulers maintained feudal structures and despotic rule and had bartered the country away to foreign interests. The resistance movement and agitation that began in the 19th century was aimed both at opposing the monarchs’ habit of acting alternately as agents of Tsarist Russia and of imperialist Britain, and at opposing their autocratic powers.
1017
1018In economic terms Iran was reduced to semi-colonial status, forced to give concessions to foreign entrepreneurs and unable to protect its own markets from foreign competition. Between 1885 and 1900, 15 countries extracted concessions from Iran: ‘The effect of foreign competition was greatly increased by the concessions that were granted to foreigners by virtue of their political predominance, while in turn, the country’s state of economic underdevelopment caused it to be politically helpless in relation to the West’ (Rodinson 1974: 125).
1019
1020As in other Asian countries, contact with Europe led to the growth of technical education. The polytechnic, which opened in 1851 and whose students came mainly from aristrocratic families, gave courses in military science, engineering, medicine and pharmacy. The director was Reza Quli Jhan, an Iranian scholar, and the teachers were Austrians, assisted by Iranian translators. For about 50 years, Western ideas were transmitted mainly through this institution (Hitti 1961: 410). In the latter half of the 19th century, many translations, including the works of Molière, Alexandre Dumas and Jules Verne, were published, and writing of a high standard also began to appear among exiled Iranians abroad.
1021
1022Around the turn of the century, an Iranian bourgeoisie emerged, as a result of activities such as importing foreign goods, exporting domestic produce, investments in mining, and a few industrial activities. Sections of this bourgeoisie thus developed contradictions not only with foreign capital over the home markets, but also with the feudal interests that ruled the country. The agitation that took place between 1906 and 1909 is seen by some as ‘bourgeois democratic’ in character while others disagree.
1023
1024The weakness of the bourgeoisie in tackling the bases of feudalism and its lack of decisiveness in facing colonialism, the absence of a properly formed working-class movement as well as the absence of peasants in the Revolution, do not exclude it from being regarded as a bourgeois democratic revolution, albeit in its elementary form as was the case with the Turkish revolution of 1908 and the Chinese Revolution of 1911. (Jazani 1980: 6)
1025
1026
1027
1028The agitation for democratic rights was led by the Constitutionalists who included sections of the bourgeoisie, the clergy and urban intellectuals; the movement drew inspiration from the Russian revolution of 1905 against the Tsar.
1029
1030In 1906, popular demonstrations were organized by the Constitutionalists throughout the country: merchants, bankers, ulemas and others took part. The Shah arrested many of the leaders but was unable to quell the protests. Eventually, he was compelled to accede to some of their demands, including the establishment of a national assembly (Majlis). The first Majlis was convened in October 1906 and drew up a Constitution which was enacted as a fundamental law. Five days after signing the law the Shah died, to be succeeded by his son Mohamed Ali who was bitterly opposed to the reform movement and attempted to subvert the Constitution. This led to conflict with the nationalists who retaliated. It was at this point that Britain and Russia, faced with the growth of the new nationalist forces in Iran, got together in a bit of horse-dealing which resulted in the Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907. This pact ostensibly recognized and guaranteed the independence and integrity of Iran, but in reality was an excuse to keep the unpopular monarch on the throne and to divide the country into two spheres of influence: Russian in the north and British in the south-west.
1031
1032Using this opportunity, the Shah renewed his efforts to turn back the tide of reform, and attacked Parliament. This led to an armed struggle with the nationalists in which the Shah was supported by Russian forces. Almost the entire country rose in protest, however, and Tehran was recaptured and the Shah replaced by his son. But the Russians again invaded the country in 1911 and served a further ultimatum on the Constitutionalists who were forced to acquiesce in Russian domination of the north. In the south, the British position was strengthened by the discovery of oil.
1033
1034During the 1914–18 War, Iran became a battleground for Turkish, British and Russian forces, and after the 1917 Russian revolution, White Russian and Bolshevik forces also fought each other on Iranian soil. Iran sent a delegation to the 1919 peace conference to demand political and economic independence for the country and the abrogation of the 1907 convention, but it was not even given a hearing. In 1919, the British imposed the Anglo-Persian Treaty on the country, which was in a state of economic collapse, thus turning it into a British protectorate. The Soviet government renounced all Tsarist claims on Iran, and Iranian rebels, led by Kuchik Khan, formed the Soviet Republic of Gilan in the north. It was at this point that an army officer, Reza Khan of the Iranian Cossack Brigade, deposed the brigade’s Russian commander and led the successful march on Tehran in 1921. Reza Khan reorganized the armed forces, crushed the Soviet in Gilan, suppressed tribal revolts and, making himself Prime Minister, established his rule over the country. In 1925, rule by the Qajar dynasty was brought to an end by parliamentary decision. After some hesitation as to whether the country should be declared a republic following the example of Turkey, it was decided to preserve the monarchy; the religious leaders, noting the action of the Turks in divesting Islam of some of its traditional characteristics, strongly opposed the idea of a republic. Reza Khan was therefore crowned Shah of Iran, founding the Pahlavi dynasty which was overthrown in 1979.
1035
1036
1037
1038
1039
1040Women Leaders
1041
1042
1043As in many parts of Asia and the Arab world, the 19th century and early decades of the 20th century saw the emergence of women activists in Iran during a period of increased national awareness which culminated in the constitutional agitation of 1905–11. Even in earlier periods, however, there had been queens, women religious leaders (both saints and heretics), women warriors and militants who had challenged the existing norms of society. In fact, the early religion of Iran, Zoroastrianism, gave certain rights to women over property and in the performance of religious ceremonies, and equal status in law. In the Sassanian period of Iranian history (AD 224–651) there had been two famous queens, while the country’s national epic deals with the bravery of Gordafarid, a woman warrior who led the Iranians against a Turkish invasion (Sanghvi et al. 1967: 10). In the 12th century, there seems to have been a discussion on the status of women during which the Iranian scholar, Ibn Rushd, criticized their restriction to child-bearing on the grounds that this denied the country half its labour power and the potential for a better standard of life (Fischer 1978: 190).
1044
1045Ancient Persia was a country of many beliefs and heresies which gave rise to women saints and legendary women who inspired religious fervour amongst the masses. The Zoroastrians had many shrines for female saints and many holy women were worshipped by the Shiite Muslim believers. For example, Fatimeh (daughter of the Prophet and wife of Ali) is ‘constantly invoked in prayer and parable’; Bibi Shahrbanu (wife of the Iman Hosein) has a shrine at Rey that is open only to women; Fatimeh Hazrat-e Masumeh (sister of the Imam Reza) has a shrine in Qum and there is another shrine for the Forty Virgins (Chehel Dokhtaran) who had been ‘miraculously taken into the earth to escape Zoroastrian armies’ (Fischer 1978: 213).
1046
1047Women’s participation in religious heresies has been observed in many countries. In Iran, too, in the 1840s, a heretical movement, Babism (later known as Baha’ism) advocated reforms including greater social justice, freedom of trade and rights of personal property, the reduction of unjust taxes, a higher status for women, limits on polygamy, a prohibition on violence against women and measures for their education (Keddie 1981: 50). The Babi movement was founded in Iran by Muza Ali Mohammed of Shiraz (1820–50) who proclaimed himself the ‘Bab’ (gate) to the truth; since Shiite Islam believed in the coming of great religious leaders or imams, the Bab was able to gather a following among the people. This reformist movement was seen as a threat by orthodox Muslims and by the government, and the Bab was arrested. A wave of violent uprisings followed, and the Bab and about 28 of his followers were executed in the early 1850s. His authority passed to another disciple and Babism, though subject to persecution, continued to attract support among dissident Iranian minorities, intellectuals and women.
1048
1049The best-known woman of the movement was Qurrat ul Ayn (1815–51); she came from a family of mullahs, was a poet, well-versed in religious questions, who took part in intellectual debates with religious leaders. She joined the Babi movement, leaving her husband and relatives, and became active in the cause, preaching in public, fighting on the battlefield, and ultimately dying a martyr.
1050
1051She was apparently quite a remarkable, intelligent woman … she devoted her life to missionary activism, not only converting but also assuming leading roles on the battlefield when the Babis revolted … her memory and especially the poems she wrote kept alive the Babi spirit of revolt. (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 296)
1052
1053
1054
1055Qurrat ul Ayn evidently attracted much attention at the time; the French diplomat Comte de Gobineau, writing in 1866 on religions and philosophies of Central Asia, mentioned the Babist crusade of Qurrat ul Ayn:
1056
1057Not content with a mere passive sympathy, she publicly professed her master’s faith. She turned not only against polygamy but also the veil, and she appeared with face unveiled in public places, causing much fright and scandal amongst her kin and amongst pious Muslims. Her public preaching, however, was applauded by an already great number of persons who shared her enthusiasm and [helped] widen the circle [of followers]. (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 296)
1058
1059
1060
1061
1062
1063Male Reformers and Women’s Rights
1064
1065
1066Babism, along with Freemasonry, also attracted several male intellectuals and radical reformers of the 1880s and 1890s, who took up the cause of women’s rights. Many of them were associates of the famous scholar al-Afghani, and included Mirza Malkom Khan (1833–1908), an anticlerical Armenian Iranian who had been educated in Paris and had been exiled from Iran for forming a society based on Freemasonry. While in London in 1890, he edited Qanun (‘Law’), a journal to which al-Afghani contributed. In an issue of Qanun in 1890, Malkom Khan contributed an article advocating women’s education (Bayat-Philipp 1980: 306). The journal called for democratic rights: ‘It stressed the people’s grievances and in unmistakable terms spelled out their demands: a fixed code of laws and a parliament wherein people’s representatives would be free to discuss all matters related to the welfare of the state’. Another important writer of the period was Mirza Aqua Khan Kermani, a Babi who had become a radical freethinker. As editor of the newspaper Akhtar and collaborator of al-Afghani, he was forceful in his criticisms of conditions in Iran: he glorified the pre-Islamic past, criticized orthodox Islam and represented the current of anti-religious nationalism which existed at that time. Linked with similar activities was Shaikh Ahmad Ruhi, also a Babi and a writer, teacher and freethinker who, in 1891, together with Kermani, grouped together the Iranian reformist supporters of al-Afghani, who was then in Istanbul. Another influential writer was Fathali Akhundzadeh, an Iranian of Azerbaijan origin who lived in Russian Transcaucasia. In the late 19th century, Akhundzadeh wrote a series of letters in which he denounced conditions in Iran: these formed part of the considerable output of critical writings by Iranian radicals in exile (Keddie 1981: 68, 71, 191).
1067
1068These four writers favoured women’s emancipation, supported their right to education, and were opposed to polygamy. ‘Their primary concern seems to have been the necessity to breed a new generation of Iranian patriots, and they felt that only with a proper “healthy” family environment where the mother is educated and given a prominent role as the first educator of the child, could this be achieved’ (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 296–7).
1069
1070Iranian writers and poets of the early 20th century rejected the tradition of Persian poetry in which women were portrayed as beautiful playthings and also as devils, snakes and dragons; they took up the theme of women’s equality and emancipation, challenging the prevailing view that woman was inferior to man, and especially criticized polygamy and the veiling of women. Muhammed Hashim Mirza Afsar (born 1880) made the point:
1071
1072Thy left hand is not inferior to the right;
1073
1074had it worked it would have been as strong as the right;
1075
1076if woman is not like man, the fault is yours;
1077
1078we should demand education and art for women.
1079
1080(Bayat-Philipp 1978: 304)
1081
1082
1083
1084Iraq Mirza, a Qajar prince, wrote on similar themes: ‘Are women not human amongst us, or is there in women no power of distinction between good and evil?’ ‘You and I are both human after all, equal in creation’ (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 304).
1085
1086The poet Lahuti rejected the classical view of female beauty and projected a new image for women: ‘I don’t appreciate the beauty of one who is ignorant; fascinate me no more by beauty, rather show thy worth.’ Together with many other poets of the period, Lahuti campaigned for the removal of the veil. ‘O Lift thy veil … I long to see thee free in the community’ (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 304). Similarly, the poet Ishqi wrote of the need for action:
1087
1088If two or three speakers join their voice with me,
1089
1090an agitation will gradually start in the country,
1091
1092and by this agitation the faces of the women will be unveiled.
1093
1094Pleasure will be derived from social life.
1095
1096Else, so long as the women hide their heads in this shroud,
1097
1098half of the Persian nation remains dead.
1099
1100(Bayat-Philipp 1978: 305)
1101
1102
1103
1104The intellectuals of the early 20th century, many of whom had studied in Europe, were at the forefront of the nationalist and democratic agitation and established secret societies to debate political issues. As Bayat-Philipp has written:
1105
1106They were used as platforms to sound the alarm and to call for revolt against the corrupt Qajar government, as well as for the dissemination of new concepts and ideas … The new mood of rebellion caught and met a corresponding and equally legitimate desire for change among a small but then growing number of Iranian women. (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 296)
1107
1108
1109
1110
1111
1112Education and Agitation
1113
1114
1115It was in such a climate of opinion that education for women was expanded. In 1874, an American Presbyterian Missionary School had been started in Tehran and was attended at first by non-Muslims; two Muslim girls entered the school in 1891, however, and their numbers rose to 120 in 1909. In 1907, the first Iranian girls’ school, and in 1908 a French girls’ school were founded in Tehran. By 1910, there were 50 girls’ schools in Tehran and increasing numbers of women teachers, journalists and activists in women’s organizations (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 300). One of these was Khanum Azamodeh whose husband held liberal views and believed in education for women. In the early 20th century, Asamodeh started a school in her home for 20 girls; this grew into a large middle school for girls with 400 pupils (Namus School), a venture which inspired the creation of many more girls’ private schools in Iran (Woodsmall 1936: 145–6).
1116
1117As in other countries, women in palace circles and in the royal harem were involved in political intrigue and protest, harems being ‘rarely the dens of idleness and iniquity imagined by Westerners’ (Keddie 1981: 34). It is claimed that Anis Ud Daula, Shah Nasir ud-Din’s third wife, conspired to secure the downfall of the Prime Minister whom she held responsible for her recall from Europe in 1872, where she had been on a visit with the Shah. Since the Prime Minister was also under attack for selling the country to British interests, the incident was politically important. ‘Thus … a member of the Qajar harem became involved in one of the first important nationalist political movements’ (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 297). The harem was also active in the first expression of Iranian opposition to foreign economic domination in 1890 when the entire tobacco monopoly, including the production, sale and export of the country’s tobacco crop, was given to G.F. Talbot, a British capitalist (Rodinson 1974: 126). The protests included a boycott of tobacco launched by the women of the royal harem: ‘The successful boycott was to be a prelude to the constitutional revolution in 1905’ (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 298).
1118
1119During the constitutional agitation that erupted in 1905, women joined the protests on the streets and were very effective in this form of demonstration. They also took part in the agitation against the Shah in 1906, when they demonstrated in the streets, surrounded the Shah’s carriage and handed him a petition with their demands. One woman gave him a letter saying ‘Fear the time when we shall finally take away the crown off your head and the royal cane off your hand’. It is hardly surprising that such activities brought hostile reactions and that when Iranian women marched unveiled in Tehran shouting, ‘Long live the Constitution, long live freedom … We must free ourselves from religious obligations to live the way we want!’, they were denounced as prostitutes hired by reactionaries to discredit the 1906 revolution (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 298, 302).
1120
1121The new Constitution of 1906 did not grant suffrage to the women. Article 10 stated that ‘Those deprived of the right to vote shall consist of all females, minors … fraudulent bankrupts, beggars, murderers, thieves and other criminals punishable under Islamic law’ (Sanghvi 1968: 300). During this period a number of women’s secret societies came into being, whose prominent members included Malikiya-yi Iran, Safia Yazdi, Sadiqa Daulatabadi and Badri Tundari, wives or relatives of constitutionalist leaders. One of these societies published a weekly paper, Danish (‘Knowledge’), which was edited by the wife of a doctor and was said to be ‘the only newspaper written exclusively for women, and discussing topics of special interest to women’. One of the principal activities of the women’s groups was propaganda regarding the need for education for girls and the opening of girls’ schools. The nationalist and feminist nature of their agitation can be seen in the appeal against Russian threats to Iranian independence made by the Persian Women’s Society in 1911 to British suffragettes: ‘The ears of the men of Europe are deaf to our cries; could you women not come to our help?’—to which the British women replied: ‘Unhappily, we cannot make the British government give political freedom even to us, their country women. We are equally powerless to influence their action towards Persia’ (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 298, 307).
1122
1123When conservative forces attempted to destroy the constitutional government, however, women joined the resistance, demonstrated on the streets and fought in battle. In the second attempt against the Majlis in 1911, the women’s participation in mass protests was noted by the London Times:
1124
1125The patriotic demonstrations continue. A curious feature is the prominent part taken in them by women. At a large meeting of women held in the great mosque … addresses were delivered by female orators; it is said that they were very eloquent. One lady announced that, although the law of Islam forbade it, the women would … take part in a holy war. (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 303)
1126
1127
1128
1129The participation of women in the 1911 demonstrations after the Russian invasion of North Iran is of particular interest because they staged separate demonstrations of their own. Their revolutionary zeal during this period of crisis, though hidden in official history, has been documented by eyewitnesses. For example, Morgan Shuster, the American financier whose employment by the Constitutionalists had caused a Russian ultimatum for his removal and thus provided a pretext for the Russian invasion, witnessed the women’s action. In his book The Strangling of Persia, he recounts that when rumours spread that the deputies of the National Assembly had capitulated to Russian demands, the question arose of what could be done to prevent this humiliation.
1130
1131The Persian women supplied the answer. Out from their walled courtyards and harems marched three hundred women … many held pistols under their skirts or in the folds of their sleeves. Straight to the majlis they went and gathered there, demanding of the President that he admit them all … they confronted him… exposed threateningly their revolvers, tore aside their veils and confessed their decision to kill their own husbands and sons and leave behind their own dead bodies, if the deputies wavered in their duty to uphold the liberty of the Persian people and nation. (Sanghvi et al. 1967: 15–16)
1132
1133
1134
1135Among the women activists of the period, Sadiqa Daulatabadi, an early pioneer of women’s education, was particularly important. Her father, a leading mujahid of Isfahan, was said to have ‘advanced’ ideas and she attended her brother’s school dressed as a boy. In the early 20th century, she opened the first girls’ school in Isfahan and later became a government inspector of girls’ schools. Sadiqa Daulatabadi was also active in women’s journalism; she published a bi-monthly ‘The Tongue of Women’ (Zabaun-i-Zanan) in Isfahan, which took a strong nationalist stance on political issues and protested very strongly against the treaty with Britain in 1919; this ‘stirred up such strong opposition that the magazine was finally closed’ (Woodsmall 1936: 145, 365).
1136
1137An interesting factor is that as early as 1911, when the Constitution was being discussed, Hadji Vakil el Roaya proposed in Parliament that women should be allowed to vote. According to a report in the London Times, he asked why women were deprived of the vote: ‘are they not human beings, and are they not entitled to have the same rights as we have? I beg the ulema for a reply’. The religious leader Sheikh Assadollah replied, ‘we must not discuss this question, for it is contrary to the etiquette of Islamic Parliament. But the reason for excluding women is that God has not given them the capacity needed for taking part in politics’ (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 301).
1138
1139The activities of Iranian women during this period were noted by foreign correspondents. ‘The movement is in its infancy, but the fact that last April for the first time Persian women held a large meeting in Tehran to discuss problems of education seems to suggest that the education of women will play an important part in the future evolution of Persia’ (London Times, quoted in Bayat-Philipp 1978: 300); an American writer commented on the role of the ‘veiled women who overnight became teachers, newspaper writers, founders of women’s clubs’, rapidly absorbing ‘absolutely new ideas … with the elan of the crusader who has a vision’ (Shuster, quoted in Bayat-Philipp 1978: 300).
1140
1141The defeat of the Majlis in 1912 led to a period of reaction, but the lessons of women’s participation in the agitation of the period, though ignored by historians, were not forgotten. An Iranian woman scholar, Dr Mangol Bayat-Philipp, has commented:
1142
1143In most of the historical accounts of revolution subsequently published, the women’s role is either severely underestimated or overlooked altogether. Their participation in the 1905–1911 political events seems to have been a spontaneous, free move on their part … the role of women clearly reveals not only a new nationalist feeling that suddenly overwhelmed them and spurred them to action, but also a nascent though strong desire for official recognition … The revolution therefore turned out to be a fertile ground for their experimental struggle for emancipation. It did not bear immediate fruit, but the seeds were planted. (Bayat-Philipp 1978: 305–6)
1144
1145
1146
1147In the years after World War I there was an upsurge of reformist and revolutionary feeling in many countries of Asia and it seems that certain Iranian women had also hoped for radical changes:
1148
1149The fact that great post-war changes abroad were making no difference to women’s status in Iran disappointed Mohtaram Khanum (a woman pioneer) even more and convinced her that it was her duty to intervene directly in the struggle. She contacted a small number of other freedom-seeking women, and in 1922 they formed a society which they named the Patriotic Women’s League. (Yeganeh 1982: 30)
1150
1151
1152
1153
1154
1155The Policies of Reza Khan
1156
1157
1158In the next historical phase, Reza Khan, the soldier who became Shah in 1924, ruled despotically, crushing dissent, preserving the internal class structures in the 1930s taking the country towards Fascist Germany in his effort to steer clear of the traditional enemies, Britain and Russia. In his career, Reza Khan had been influenced by the Turkish experiment in secularization and modernization. In 16 years of autocratic rule, his policies were to strengthen his hold on the country by modernizing the state apparatus, especially through army reforms—introducing conscription and establishing military academies, medical corps, military police and other ancillary services. With the aid of the army and police, rebellions were crushed and nomadic tribes were disarmed and forcibly settled. The Shah’s dictatorial policies included repression of his political opponents, especially the Communists.
1159
1160The proximity of Iran to the USSR and the presence there of migrant Iranian workers in the early 1920s meant that events in the USSR influenced Iran. The Iranian Communist Party, formed in 1920, was mainly active in Gilan province where a Soviet republic under Kuchik Khan had been proclaimed. But the crushing of the Gilan republic weakened the Communist movement and many activists died in the struggle. A renewed attempt to develop the party occurred after 1922 when a legal party paper Haqiquat (‘Truth’) was started and achieved considerable success. The Communists also set up women’s and youth societies as well as trade unions and cultural groups and tried to cooperate with nationalist forces. The women’s section had contact with Clara Zetkin’s Communist Women’s International (formed in 1920) and an Iranian woman, Ms Dcevad-Sade was on its committee (Die Kommunistische Fraueninternationale, 1921–25).
1161
1162But Reza Khan’s repressive policies after 1925 weakened the party. In 1931, the Communist Party was banned and a period of severe repression followed. Many women were among the militants thrown into jail during this period, among whom were Jamileh Sadiqui and Shokat Rousta who earlier had established an organization in Rasht (the capital of Gilan province) advocating the abolition of the veil for women (Roshanak and Faramarz 1982: 159). In 1932, Taqi Arani and other students who had been influenced by Marxism while abroad formed a study group of 53 intellectuals and writers; they were arrested and imprisoned, but some later joined with Communist activists to form the Tudeh Party.
1163
1164During Reza Khan’s regime, a rigid bureaucracy was enforced to keep the people under control; financial and tax reforms as well as judicial reforms were introduced and a network of major roads and the Trans-Iranian railway were built. Policies for industrializing and modernizing the country were implemented through the imposition of new structures on the traditional economy and society. Consumer industries (textiles, soap, glassware and matches) were begun and by 1939 there was an industrial workforce of 650,000 (Roshanak and Faramarz 1982: 158). Interaction with the West influenced the direction of change. In addition to pressures from the small middle class, ‘modernisation from above was seen by Reza Shah and those around him as the only way to make Iran a strong, self-respecting nation that could hold its own in the modern world’ (Keddie 1981: 93).
1165
1166Paradoxically, the Shah’s policy of crushing all opposition was executed simultaneously with his efforts to ‘free’ women and to bring them out of seclusion and into society and the workforce. Inspired by Mustapha Kemal, Reza Khan, who had visited Turkey in 1934, made efforts towards modernization which included the separation of religion from politics, law and education, and the emancipation of the women of Iran through a few reforms from above, which included the encouragement of women’s education and measures of dress reform such as a ban on the veil. Twelve women were permitted to enter the university for the first time in 1935. Delivering an address to the students of the first women’s college, the Shah said, ‘The women of this country, because of their being aloof from society, could not show their abilities and personal qualities. They could not play their role in the building of their beloved country and as a result they could not perform their duties towards their country’ (Sanghvi et al. 1967: 25).
1167
1168Not surprisingly, the issue that aroused hostility among religious interests was the Shah’s efforts to compel women to give up wearing the chador (veil). An apocryphal story runs that the Queen Mother appeared at a shrine in Qom in 1928, wearing a light veil in place of the orthodox black chador. The religious ulema reprimanded her, and so Reza Shah beat the ulema after striding into the mosque with his boots on. In 1934, women teachers and students were ordered to appear unveiled, and in February 1936 the wearing of the chador was prohibited. This made Iran the first Muslim country to outlaw the veiling of women officially. Government officials were not allowed into cinemas and public places if their wives wore the chador, and ‘taxi and bus drivers were liable to fines if they accepted veiled women as passengers’ (Savory 1978: 98).
1169
1170It was in 1936 that a concerted effort was made to highlight the issue, the intiative being taken by the palace. In January that year when the Shah attended the presentation of awards at the Normal School in Tehran, the Queen and princesses appeared in public unveiled and in European dress—a fact that was publicized as an important milestone in women’s emancipation. The Shah spoke to an audience of 500 women and declared: ‘we must never forget that one-half of the population of our country has not been taken into account, that is to say, one half of the country’s working force has been idle.’ However, he stressed the familiar theme of the need for women’s education in order to benefit the next generation: ‘The happiness of the future is in your hands. You are the educators of the coming generation, you have the possibility to become good teachers and to bring up good citizens’ (Elwell-Sutton 1978: 34).
1171
1172A contemporary account of the event states that all the women present on this occasion were unveiled, and that the streets were lined with crowds of unveiled women who had come to see the royal procession:
1173
1174The repercussion of this event was felt all over Iran. Emulating the Shah’s example, in many places the Governor with the Chief of Police and School Superintendent held meetings in girls’ schools to promote the progress of women … and pupils threw off their veils. The Iran Press after the eventual day of emancipation (8 January 1936), was filled for days with news articles and pictures on women’s advance. Photographs of schoolgirls’ athletics, Girl Scouts, Women’s Club activities, held the front page. The forward movement was also promoted through the theatre by a special play depicting social advance with two Iranian girls in the contrasting roles of the old and new women of Iran. (Woodsmall 1936: 44)
1175
1176
1177
1178In 1935, at the Shah’s insistence, a ‘Ladies Centre’ was formed to organize ‘lectures, adult classes, exhibitions and sports clubs for women, and … to promote the abandonment of the veil’ (Yeganeh 1982: 32). The following years saw an active campaign to encourage women to discard their traditional clothes in favour of European styles. There was such a demand for women’s coats, dresses and hats that rules against profiteering by Tehran tailorshops had to be introduced. Newspapers kept women informed of ‘correct’ social etiquette linked to the new fashions.
1179
1180Ladies in public meetings should not remove their hats; they may or may not take off their coats and gloves … Those who have always put their handkerchiefs, cigarette cases and other articles up their sleeves must now use their hand-bags for such things … To take fruit or sweets with gloves on is forbidden. (Woodsmall 1936: 45)
1181
1182
1183
1184Although the legal abolition of the veil was a superstructural change which did not reflect any basic change in society, for most women it represented a welcome reform. The country’s leading woman poet, Parvin-i I’tisami (1907–41), wrote a poem on this occasion called ‘Woman in Iran’ (Zan dar Iran):
1185
1186It is as if the woman in Iran was not an Iranian before.
1187
1188She had no pursuit other than misfortune and distraction.
1189
1190She lived and died in a solitary corner.
1191
1192What else was a woman in those days if not a prisoner?
1193
1194No one like a woman dwelt in darkness for centuries.
1195
1196No one like a woman was sacrificed in the temple of hypocrisy.
1197
1198(Bayat-Philipp 1978: 306)
1199
1200
1201
1202However, measures from above that affect social customs can also have negative long-term results. Writing of the outlawing of the veil, an Iranian woman scholar commented: ‘The brutal enforcement of this law until 1941 was one reason for a later pro-veil backlash, and many now doubt that legislation is a useful approach to veiling.’ She added that the measures taken during Reza Shah’s regime nevertheless introduced some changes:
1203
1204There was a de facto decline in upper-class polygamy and in inequality in marriage and divorce in the modernised classes, and a rise in paid work for women. These trends affected primarily middle and upper-class women, who nevertheless did not obtain political rights or complete economic and social equality, though their advanced in a decade was considerable. (Keddie 1981: 108–9)
1205
1206
1207
1208Under the Pahlavi dynasty, women’s emancipation remained a purely bourgeois urban phenomenon. Unfortunately, the militancy of the early 20th century, when the question of women’s rights was keenly debated and women formed organizations, started newspapers and came out in public demonstrations, gave way to a period of reaction under Shah Reza Khan and his son, Shah Mohamed Reza Pahlavi. Nevertheless, some gestures were made: in 1963, the Shah gave franchise rights to Iranian women, and the Family Protection Law of 1967 made polygamy a possible reason for divorce and gave women more opportunities to initiate divorce. But even the right to vote in a situation where women had few other rights meant little to the majority of Iranian women. Their first experience with feminist activity in the years before 1920 were shortlived; the reforms of the following period were class-biased, and the association of ‘women’s emancipation’ measures with the Shah’s unpopular and repressive regime led to further deterioration in the position of women under the new rulers, after the Shah was deposed in 1979.
1209
1210
1211
1212
1213
12145.Attempts at Women’s Emancipation in Afghanistan: A Note
1215
1216
1217Turkey’s and Egypt’s attempts at modernizing their economies and social structures, and consequently the movement towards women’s emancipation, had an influence on other countries in the region, including Afghanistan. Lying geographically at the crossroads between Central Asia, the Middle East and India, Afghanistan has been a battleground for centuries. Islam became the predominant religion in the 10th century AD, but it was not until the 18th century that Afghan tribes tried to assert their own identity and establish their national independence. This process was hampered by the interests of various outsiders, the Turks and the Persians at one level and the British and Russians at another. These powers encouraged and sponsored various tribal groups, and continuous warfare among them was the result, with various expeditions being sent out, particularly by the British from India, in support of their nominees.
1218
1219This state of affairs was brought to an end by Amanullah Khan who succeeded in uniting many of the tribes and seized the throne in February 1919. One of his first acts was to declare the complete independence of Afghanistan in its internal and external affairs. The British were not happy with this declaration of independence and tried to negate it by force. However, the British could not defeat the Afghan armies and were forced by the peace accords signed at Rawalpindi to accept Afghanistan’s independence.
1220
1221As in Turkey and Egypt, Amanullah Khan then set out to modernize the country. He developed close ties with Turkey, Iran and the Soviet Union, visited these and other countries, and referred to himself as a ‘revolutionary’; in 1921 he signed a treaty with the Soviet Union calling for ‘the liberation of the peoples of the East’, and attempted several internal reforms. These included general conscription (to replace tribal levies), legal reform and in 1923 a proposed new Constitution with a national assembly and voting rights for women (in this respect he was ahead of Mustapha Kemal and Reza Khan). Claiming that ‘the keystone of the future structure of the new Afghanistan will be the emancipation of women’, he introduced a Family Code in 1921 forbidding child marriage; he also encouraged girls’ schools, sent some Afghan girls to Turkey for education, banned polygamy for government employees, and ordered them to wear Western dress; in 1928, his wife Queen Surayya appeared unveiled in public and it was decreed that women should in future discard the veil (Halliday 1978).
1222
1223Afghan society was, however, still organized on tribal lines and conservative in its attitudes. Tribal leaders were rigidly opposed to the process of modernization and reform because it affected their powers. Civil war resulted and Amanullah was dethroned and forced into exile. The swift pace at which he tried to introduce reforms was, in a sense, counterproductive. Some aspects of the reform, such as those regarding dress, were seized upon by the reactionaries as weapons: Amanullah himself offended the traditionalists by wearing European dress; he is reported to have attended the Azhar mosque ‘in a grey top hat of fashionable shape in which to the scandal of the ulema he performed the ritual genuflections of Muslim prayers’. It was also said that in religious centres like Kandahar, ‘the news that the Queen was appearing unveiled and in European evening dress caused much resentment’ (Fraser-Tytler 1953: 208, 210). When tribal conflicts broke out, Amanullah, who had not built up a strong army, was easily ousted and exiled in 1929. Reaction set in and the succeeding kings, Nader Shah (1929–33) and Zaher Shah (1933–73), annulled the measures beneficial to women in order to please orthodox religious opinion; schools for girls were closed, women were refused the vote, wearing the veil was made compulsory, Islamic law was stressed and the power of the mullahs over the legal system was reestablished (Halliday 1978: 10–14). The failure of the Afghan experiment resulted in some Islamic countries exercising caution on reforms affecting the status of women.
1224
1225
1226
1227
1228
12296.Women, Social Reform and Nationalism in India
1230
1231
1232
1233I should like to remind the women present here that no group, no community, no country, has ever got rid of its disabilities by the generosity of the oppressor. India will not be free until we are strong enough to force our will on England and the women of India will not attain their full rights by the mere generosity of the men of India. They will have to fight for them and force their will on the menfolk before they can succeed.
1234
1235Jawaharlal Nehru, speech at Allahabad, 31 March 1928
1236
1237
1238
1239The issue of women’s emancipation in India under British colonial rule, which also included today’s Pakistan and Bangladesh, was closely linked with two important movements: one, a political movement of challenge and resistance to imperialism, and the other, a social movement to reform traditional structures. Both these movements were, however, integrally connected with the concept of a free and modern India.
1240
1241The religious base on which these traditional structures rested was Hinduism, which had more or less acquired its present form in the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Hinduism has some characteristics that set it apart from other religions: it is not derived from a historical person, nor does it spring from any divine revelation. Instead it ‘grew and evolved from a variety of cults and beliefs’ (Thapar 1966: 132). Some of these cults had their origins in the Vedic religion practised by the first immigrants into India from the north-west. Others had flourished among the people and were gradually absorbed into organized religion.
1242
1243Hinduism was basically monotheistic, but this was expressed in a tri-murti or trinity of gods: Brahma who creates the universe, Vishnu who preserves it, and Shiva who destroys it when it becomes degenerate and has run its course. This concept was a reflection of the natural order with its cycle of birth, life and decay. However, at a later period, Brahma lost his prominence and Hindu devotees were followers of either Vishnu or Shiva, both seen as manifestations of the Absolute. Together with this trend, there also evolved the cult of bhakti or personal devotion to the God.
1244
1245The doctrine of karma is of central importance in Hinduism, a person’s actions conditioning his status in succeeding lives. Whether an action is morally correct and results in good is dependent on its conformity with dharma, the sacred law. If one does one’s duty as prescribed by the dharma, then the result is good. The social organization of Hinduism was based on the four caste structure: Kshatriyas (warriors and aristocrats), Brahmins (priests), Vaisyas (commoners—in the agrarian economy, cultivators) and the Shudras. A late hymn from the Rg-veda legitimizes, in a myth, the origins of the hierarchic caste system:
1246
1247When they divided the man, into how many parts did they divide him?
1248
1249What was his mouth, what were his arms, what were his thighs and his feet called?
1250
1251The brahmin was his mouth, of his arms were made the warrior
1252
1253His thighs became the vaisya, of his feet the shudra was born.
1254
1255(Basham 1954: 240–1)
1256
1257
1258
1259As society developed, various sub-castes grew up in association with different types of work; the continuance of the system was ensured by caste being made hereditary, and the performance of one’s caste duty being synonymous with righteous action. Inter-caste commensality and marriage were forbidden. With occupation and caste being linked, social mobility within the hierarchic structure became severely restricted. The accent on heredity made the family the unit of society. Since the family was patriarchal, women were generally subordinate to men. Male children were greatly prized, for important religious rituals could be carried out only by a son. The practice of self-immolation by a woman on the death of her husband seems to have been merely symbolic at the early stages, for there are references to widow remarriage, but later, the practice of a widow burning herself on the husband’s funeral pyre became real and widow remarriage was forbidden; women appear to have had some degree of choice in marriage in the early periods, as the story of Sita choosing Rama at a svayamvara (self-choice ceremony) would appear to indicate. Later developments, however, restricted this practice and made the choice of husband subject to caste and parental control. It was against most of these highly ossified caste and ritual practices that the Hindu social reformers were to struggle in diverse ways, which are considered later in this chapter. However, it cannot be forgotten that a sizeable section of the population of India was not Hindu, having converted to Islam.
1260
1261Muslim dynasties from Afghanistan and Turkistan had occupied the Punjab in the 10th century and had extended their control to Delhi by 1192. Most of the rulers of this period in North India were zealous Muslims, ardent warriors against the Hindus, whom they regarded as idolatrous heretics. However, the real foundations of Muslim rule were laid in the middle of the 16th century, when Babur occupied Delhi and created the basis for the Mogul Empire that was to cover a large part of the Indian sub-continent. Religious policy under the Moguls assumed a different aspect. Akbar realized that it was impossible to rule over India as an orthodox Muslim potentate whose basic role was to spread the Islamic faith; instead he adopted a policy of reconciliation and even toyed with the idea of creating a new syncretic amalgam of the two religions. Various sections of Hindus converted to the new faith, some under force, but many voluntarily; the latter included those who converted because of the privileges and positions to which Muslims had access, those who wished to avoid the poll tax on non-Muslims, and some members of the lower castes who wished to escape from their disadvantaged position in society. Despite some clashes, coexistence in the same society forced Islam to adopt some of the features of Hinduism and Hindu society, including caste and some forms of ritual worship. This cultural cross-fertilization also made some difference to the status of Islamic women. Practices such as the wearing of the veil were not very widespread among Indian Muslims although the institution of purdah or seclusion did apply, at least at the level of the higher groups; yet Muslim women became subject, just as much as Hindu women, to all the oppressions of a patriarchal, caste-bound society, and 19th-century Islamic reformers fought against many of these practices side by side with Hindu reformers.
1262
1263The other movement which influenced the growth of feminism in India was the struggle to assert and obtain national independence from Western imperialism. European aggression in India dates back to the 16th and 17th centuries when Portuguese, Dutch, French and British trading posts were established in the coastal regions. British involvement in India was through the East India Company, founded by royal charter in 1603. At first the East India Company was primarily a trading concern; it had no territorial interests beyond its trading posts, although it made use of military power to keep the trade routes open. The victories at Plassey over the Nawab of Bengal in 1757 and at Buxar over the Mogul emperor brought enormous territory into the hands of the company, some of which it held independently and some under the nominal sovereignty of the Moguls. Pitt’s India Bill, introduced in 1784, separated the trading activities of the East India Company from the political administration of the country, and policies of expansionary conquest and control were followed.
1264
1265By 1823, almost all of India had either been directly annexed by the British or was under their indirect control through their alliances with princely states. The last aggressions were the conquest of Sind in 1843 and of the Punjab in 1849. In order that the sub-continent might be more easily exploited and controlled, the British army was strengthened, roads and railways were built, a civil service was formed to administer the country, and the infrastructure of a colonial economy was established. The administration of these vast territories required local officials, and an English educational system was introduced to create this class. The first province to be subjected to these policies was Bengal, where the Hindu (later Presidency) College was established in Calcutta in 1817.
1266
1267That English education and involvement in government would favour the creation of a Westernized élite was to be expected. To quote Macaulay in 1835: ‘We must do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions we govern; a class of persons Indian in blood but English in taste and opinion.’ Two factors worked against the wholehearted adoption of this policy: first, job opportunities for the British had to be kept open, and second, the British feared that education of Indians would in the long term be detrimental to the continuation of their own control.
1268
1269However, it was necessary to recruit Indians at least for the lower rungs of the administration. By the early 19th century, an English-speaking Bengali petty bourgeoisie and bourgeoisie had arisen, sections of whom sponsored movements of reform, cultural revival and nationalist agitation, in which both liberal and orthodox Bengalis played an important part. Education had exposed Bengalis to the late 18th-century European ideas of the Enlightenment which emphasized the inalienable rights of man, and opposition to tyranny; they were also influenced by the views of political thinkers on government by consent, representative parliamentary government, and the right to opposition and rebellion. These ideas gained popularity in Bengal, first through the impact of Rammohan Roy (1772–1833) who had been influenced by the thinking of James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham whom he met in London in 1831. Bengalis were also introduced to radical thought by Henry Vivian Derozio (1809–31), a Eurasian teacher at Calcutta’s Hindu College who had an ‘academic association’ (on the line of Plato’s Academy) where continuous discussion among Bengali students took place. Derozio popularized the work of Bacon, Locke, Hume, Paine and the French 18th-century thinkers, and encouraged his students to doubt and question everything and accept no authority but reason. He became the ‘youthful prophet of the new youth’, the founder of the iconoclastic movement known as Young Bengal which attacked religious orthodoxy. Throughout the ‘stormy decade’ of the 1830s after Derozio’s death, his disciples continued the movement, promoting rationalism, individualism and nationalism, even going to the extent of welcoming the July Revolution in France in 1830 by planting the French tricolour on a building in Calcutta (Haldar 1972: 21).
1270
1271
1272
1273
1274
1275Forms of Resistance
1276
1277
1278Resistance to British imperialism was long and continuous, lasting almost 200 years. In 1757, the ruler of Bengal attacked the foreign aggressors, and the British under Robert Clive won their first major victory at the famous Battle of Plassey. In 1764 the princes of Bengal and Oudh joined in, unsuccessfully challenging the British, and in 1780 the King of Mysore (Hyder Ali) also tried to oust them. In the late 18th and 19th centuries, there were frequent skirmishes under the leadership of the Mahrattas who opposed foreign rule, and bitter warfare between 1846 and 1848 in the Punjab which ended in its annexation. But resistance against the imperialists climaxed in the 1857 Indian ‘Mutiny’—the first war of independence—which started when Indian soldiers in the British army mutinied and then spread to a large area of North India covering Meerut, Delhi, Cawnpore, Lucknow and Allahabad. Peasants joined in the struggle and managed to evict the British from many of their strongholds. The struggle failed to spread to other parts of India, however; also, it was opposed by many of the landholders and tax-gatherers who had been appointed by the British. The struggle was crushed by the British, who retaliated severely and brutally against combatants and civilians alike; there was general and indiscriminate burning and pillaging of villages and numerous executions. One result of this struggle was the end of the East India Company; the Indian Act of 1858 abolished the company and established the direct rule of the British government.
1279
1280The challenge of imperialist domination and the attempted imposition of an alien culture, ideology and religion on India produced, in its turn, several movements of religious and social reform among Hindus and Muslims. These reformist movements—such as the Brahmo Samaj which started in Bengal in 1828—were intended to cleanse Hinduism of certain corrupt and decadent practices and to counteract missionary propaganda by presenting the Hindu religion as one that was compatible with progress and change. Social reform also became a popular issue among Indian intellectuals, who, inspired either by liberal views of social change or in the hope of preventing drastic social change, were to launch movements to abolish or correct some of the worst abuses that prevailed in the society of the period.
1281
1282The political response to imperialism was initiated late in the 19th century with the growth of Indian nationalism, centred on the Indian National Congress (formed in 1885). In the early years, the Congress was led by moderates, but by 1900 more militant elements, inspired by B.G. Tilak in Maharashtra and Aurobindo Ghosh in Bengal, had become influential. Mass-based nationalist agitation spread throughout Bengal after its partition in 1905, including a campaign for swaraj (home rule) and swadeshi (promotion of local products), and a boycott of British-run institutions and British goods (the boycott of British imports having a special appeal to the Indian bourgeoisie). The militants in Bengal also had recourse to violent actions, labelled ‘terrorist’. In the following years there were several waves of agitation, notably after Gandhi’s return to India in 1915 and his assumption of the leadership of the Congress. Another period of political upheaval occurred in 1919 after the Congress rejected reforms proposed by the British. Gandhi launched a campaign of non-cooperation which included hartals (mass work stoppages), the boycott of all legislatures, foreign goods and official functions, and the refusal to pay taxes. The subsequent repression, including the massacre of an unarmed crowd at Amritsar in 1919, and the imprisonment of Gandhi, Nehru and other leaders in 1921–22, served only to strengthen the movement in the 1920s. By the beginning of the next decade, the agitation climaxed again over the issue of swaraj; Gandhi led the famous Salt March in 1931, thereby launching a movement of civil disobedience, non-cooperation and non-violent resistance. From then until independence was achieved in 1947, the nationalist struggles were continuous and involved large masses of men and women.
1283
1284
1285
1286
1287
1288Agitation Against ‘Certain Dreadful Practices’
1289
1290
1291The status of women in India has varied in different historical periods and in the different regions of the country, and has also been subject to differentiation according to class, religion and ethnicity. The general situation, however, was one of suppression and domination within the bounds of a patriarchal system. Whether the woman in question belonged to a peasant family and was compelled to drudgery in the field and home or to a high-caste family and living a life of leisure, she was the victim of a set of values that demanded implicit obedience to male domination, and of many other social practices that circumscribed her life.
1292
1293In the early 19th century, the glaring social evils that affected women were subjects of discussion among administrators, missionaries and concerned members of the local bourgeoisie. The Europeans emphasized the low status of Indian women as a reflection of the general backwardness of the country, but the Indian reformers were keen to show that, whatever the current position, women’s status had been high in ancient India and many outstanding women had made their mark on Indian history. These included the warrior-queens: Sultana Razia, who succeeded to the throne of her father, the King of Delhi, in the 13th century and led her troops into battle, and Nur Jehan who exercised real power and led the army to war in the early 17th century during the reign of her husband, the Emperor Jehangir. The best-known, however, was the legendary Lakshmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi who, during the war against the British in 1857, rode on horseback in fierce battles against the foreigners and died in combat. ‘It was the Rani of Jhansi’s custom to lead her troops dressed in military uniform … a crimson jacket, crimson trousers and a white turban, which made it impossible to tell her sex’ (Madhavananda and Majumdar 1953: 397).
1294
1295Movements of reform against the social evils that affected women began in India in the early 19th century. They have usually been attributed to external factors such as the impact of English education, missionary activities, the promotion of the nuclear, monogamous family, and liberal ideas from the West, and to internal movements such as the nationalist agitation against imperialism and a religious-cultural resistance to the challenge of Christianity and Western culture.
1296
1297From early on, the missionaries were active in drawing attention to what a Baptist had, in 1796, termed ‘certain Dreadful Practices’ (Potts 1967: 140). These included infanticide, self-torture, exposure of the sick and dying on the banks of the holy rivers (Ghat murders) and sati, the practice of burning Hindu widows on the funeral pyres of their husbands. The latter practice, in particular, provoked continual protest from the missionaries; William Carey of the Baptist mission in Serempore studied the prevalence of sati around Calcutta in 1803 and recorded 430 cases that year (Potts 1967: 146). In Britain, the support of William Wilberforce, the slave abolitionist, and of other social reformers of the period was enlisted and missionary agitation also evoked, in turn, a response from Indian social reformers who were anxious to redeem the reputation of their society.
1298
1299The issues tackled by the reform movement—including sati, widow remarriage, polygamy and women’s property rights—were problems of a certain stratum of society, being mainly confined to Hindus of the higher castes and classes. They were raised by bourgeois, male social reformers from urban areas who tended to idealize women’s role as wife and mother in the context of patriarchy. Whether, like the orthodox reformers, they looked back to a Vedic golden age, when women were supposed to have had high status, or whether they looked forward to a new society based on liberal principles which negated the ‘barbaric’ heritage of the past, their basic assumptions were that social reform and female education would revitalize and preserve the patriarchal family system, produce more companionable wives and better mothers, and therefore have a stabilizing effect on society.
1300
1301Some reformists also felt that middle-class family structures were endangered by the prevailing social evils. The fact that some high-caste widows who had been ill-treated and prevented from remarriage had turned to prostitution was an example of such a threat. One reformer commented that, ‘Social rigidity, child marriage with its necessary consequences, child-widows, the social taint involved in widow remarriage, all combine to create in society a new class of women whom we are prone to call fallen’ (Asthana 1978: 8). This concern to prevent the disintegration of family life, which existed among the English-educated and also among the non-Westernized intelligentsia, was a theme in the literature of North and South India. As Vina Mazumdar writes:
1302
1303With increasing urbanisation, prostitution became more commercialised … the large number of young high-caste widows, helpless victims of family neglect and even torture, was an obvious recruiting ground. This was a threat that could not be ignored by those who wanted to preserve the family and its economy from destruction. The debate on ill-treatment of widows, the denial of re-marriage, child marriage and polygamy … which raged in the newspapers and journals of the 19th century bear ample testimony to this fear among reformers (Mazumdar 1976: 49).
1304
1305
1306
1307Under the influence of liberalism or using slogans of cultural revival, the bourgeoisie in India were thus enabled, through the reform movement, to prohibit the more extreme abuses affecting women. But the questions were taken up individually and fought as single issues, with success measured by each legislative act that was passed. Since all areas of social reform concerned the family, the effect of the reforms may have been to increase conservatism and, far from liberating women, merely to make conditions within the family structure less deplorable, especially for women of the bourgeoisie. It is clear that, while some Indians fought for social reform on the principle of liberal values, many conservatives felt otherwise; for example, the famous reformer, M.G. Ranade (1841–1901) who was a lawyer, judge and legislative councillor in Bombay, expressed the view that social reform was in the ‘great Hindu tradition’ of ‘seeking out ancient principles in order to restate them’. Instead of destroying the structure, the reformer should ‘lop off the diseased overgrowth and excrescences and … restore vitality and energy to the social organism’ (Mazumdar 1976: 43). Moreover, many social reformers themselves condoned child marriage and opposed widow remarriage in their own families. Even before the nationalist movement had become politically active in India, the social reformers had started to agitate on two of these issues—the practice of sati and the ban on widow remarriage. These could safely be tackled because they had not existed in very early times, were confined to the upper castes and classes and, if remedied, would given India the appearance of being ‘civilized’ without endangering the traditional family structures.
1308
1309Apart from attempting to persuade people to give up such practices, the reform movement also sought the help of the British administration in India, hoping to prohibit them by law. Initially the British administration followed a policy of non-interference, but its attitude changed in 1817, when Mrikyunjaya Vidyalankar (the Chief Pandit of the Supreme Court) announced that sati had no religious shastric authority, and other Bengali intellectuals joined in the clamour for legislation against sati (Potts 1967: 142–8).
1310
1311
1312
1313
1314
1315Raja Rammohan Roy
1316
1317
1318The poineer in the agitation for women’s rights in India was Raja Rammohan Roy (1772–1833), a Bengali who had been influenced by Western liberal thought and had attempted to reform and revitalize Hinduism. His family were Radi Brahmins, a group which had for several generations been involved in administration and higher learning and were to figure prominently in the 19th-century social reform movements. Roy’s early classical education had included Sanskrit, Arabic and Persian, and by 1800, he was fluent and well-read in English. He was exposed not only to the dissident Calcutta British radicals, Unitarians and advocates of free-trade, but also to liberal political thinkers of Europe—Locke, Bentham, Montesquieu and Adam Smith among others. This was a period when the question of women’s emancipation was eagerly discussed in Europe, especially by the radicals and Unitarians in Britain; while the British radicals were directly influenced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment in France (Voltaire, Montesquieu and Rousseau) and by the events of the French Revolution, the Unitarians (liberal Christians who believed in the single personality of God the Father as opposed to the Trinity) advocated reason and tolerance in the religious sphere and civil liberty in politics, and were at the forefront of reformist and democratic movements. Associated with radicals and Unitarians was Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), the best-known feminist of the time who had made an impact with her famous book Vindication of the Rights of Women (1791) (Mies and Jayawardena 1983: 13). It is interesting that Mukherjee who describes Roy as ‘one of the male feminist thinkers of the 19th century’ remarks that Roy’s arguments on women’s status ‘were like those of Mary Wollstonecraft’, and one can only speculate that, living at that period, he had been exposed to her writings. It is known, however, that on his visit to London, Roy met the radical Unitarian, Harriet Martineau (Mukherjee 1982: 161–5).
1319
1320Roy championed women’s rights on four issues: sati, polygamy, women’s education and women’s property rights. In 1818 and 1820, he published pamphlets against sati (which were translated into English). Criticizing the oppression of women, he wrote:
1321
1322At marriage the wife is recognised as half of her husband, but in after-conduct they are treated worse than inferior animals. For the woman is employed to do the work of a slave in the house … to clean the place … to scour the dishes, wash the floor, to cook night and day, to prepare and serve food for her husband, father, mother-in-law, brothers-in-law and friends and connections. (Nag and Burman 1977: 156)
1323
1324
1325
1326Roy’s mobilization of Hindu thought against the system of sati created the necessary public opinion to enable the government, which was also under pressure from missionaries on this issue, to make the practice a criminal offence in 1829. Although ancient Hindu law had made provision for widows to remarry in certain circumstances, by the medieval period of Indian history the higher castes had prohibited remarriage. The issue came up between the 1830s and 1850s, and agitation for a reform of the law was taken up in many parts of India. The Young Bengal Movement, founded in the 1830s, for example, was a proponent of social reform and women’s emancipation; its journal, The Bengal Spectator, came out in 1842 in strong support of widow remarriage (Haldar 1972: 45). Rammohan Roy was particularly horrified by the various types of violence used against women, which he vividly described in 1820:
1327
1328Amongst the lower classes, and those even of the better class … the wife, on the slightest fault, or even on bare suspicion of her misconduct, is chastised as a thief. Respect to virtue and their reputation generally makes them forgive even this treatment. If unable to bear such cruel usage, a wife leaves her husband’s house to live separately from him, then the influence of the husband with the magisterial authority is generally sufficient to place her again in his hands; when, in revenge for her quitting him, he seizes every pretext to torment her in various ways, and sometimes even puts her privately to death. These are facts occurring every day, and not to be denied. What I lament is, that, seeing the women thus dependent and exposed to every misery, you feel for them no compassion, that might exempt them from being tied down and burnt to death. (Nag and Burman 1977: 157)
1329
1330
1331
1332There was a lively debate on the religious texts. Rammohan Roy and the liberals challenged the interpretation of Vedic texts on the question of sati: they were also eager to counteract the missionary view that Indians were barbarous and uncivilized, and referred to ‘cruel murder, under the cloak of religion’ which had led to Indians being regarded with ‘contempt and pity … by all civilised nations on the surface of the globe’ (Nag and Burman 1977: 163).
1333
1334The reform of Hinduism became a vital issue if the Indians were to counter the attacks and criticisms of the British, and ultimately if they were to resist British domination. In 1828, Roy and other enlightened Bengalis formed the Brahmo Samaj, which drew inspiration from many religions and aimed at changing the debased form of Hinduism that prevailed. The ‘Brahmos’, as they were called, challenged all forms of obscurantism and ritual, as well as female oppression associated with orthodox beliefs, and many of the later activists who took up issues of women’s emancipation were from this group of Brahmo Samaj reformers.
1335
1336Roy and the Brahmo Samaj had been given valuable financial support by Dwarkanath Tagore, a rich landowner of Bengal. His son Debendranath Tagore (1817–1905) succeeded Roy as head of the movement and carried on Roy’s campaigns to purify Hinduism. He founded Shantiniketan as a religious retreat in 1886; it was his son Rabindranath Tagore who transformed it into a university in 1901.
1337
1338
1339
1340
1341
1342Growth of the Reform Movement
1343
1344
1345The reformist campaign increased in fervour during the 1850s. The most active campaigners on widow remarriage during this period were Iswar Chandra Vidyasagar (1820–91), a Bengali who, in 1856, published a pamphlet ‘Marriage of Hindu Widows’ and presented a petition to the government on the issue; Debendranath Tagore, an activist of the Brahmo Samaj, who formed an organization to campaign for widow remarriage and against other evils affecting women, and Dayananda Saraswati (1824–83), a North Indian social reformer who founded the Arya Samaj, another movement for the purification and revival of Hinduism. With support from the press and British officials, the agitation led to the Act of 1856 which legally permitted the remarriage of widows. Social custom was difficult to change by legislation, however, and it was only the very daring who defied tradition.
1346
1347As in many Asian countries at this time, the reformers’ ideal was the monogamous, nuclear family. Polygamy in India was practised by both Muslims and Hindus of ‘high’ caste and class, the Muslims being allowed four wives; the Kulin Brahmins, for example, were permitted an indefinite number of wives. The issue of polygamy was first raised by Hindu reformers who campaigned for its abolition and by Bengali playwrights and writers who satirized the practice; in the 1850s, many petitions against polygamy were presented to the government, one being from the Maharaja of Burdwan in 1855. The campaign was continued, especially by Vidyasagar who, in the 1870s, wrote tracts exposing the evils of polygamy. Government policy at that time, however, was against too much interference in traditional practices affecting family life.
1348
1349The issue of child marriage was also taken up by social reformers of the 19th century. Unlike sati, polygamy and the ban on widow remarriage, which affected the upper segments of society, child marriage was widespread among Hindus (but not practised by tribal groups). The practice was considered a religious and social obligation by ‘higher’ castes, and a means by which to protect their daughters from men with economic power by the ‘lower’ castes. It was also an economic saving, since male children commanded lower dowries (Mazumdar 1976: 52). The reformers best known for their agitation on this issue were Keshab Chandra Sen (1838–84), Vidyasagar and Gopal Hari Deshmukh. As a religious reformer and leader of the Brahmo Samaj, K.C. Sen argued that the practice of child marriage was a corruption of the scriptures and wrote, ‘the custom of premature marriage, as it prevails in this country, is injurious to the moral, social and physical interests of the people and is one of the main obstacles in the way of their advancement’ (Basu 1978: 46–7). Vidyasagar pointed out in 1850 that child marriage was linked to the problem of Indian widows because many of the child brides were widowed at an early age. Dayananda Saraswati urged that girls should be educated and only allowed to marry at 16 or 18, arguing that because of child marriage, the Hindus were the ‘children of children’ (Heimsath 1964: 120).
1350
1351In 1872, some success was achieved with the Marriage Act which set higher age limits for marriage, 14 for girls and 18 for men. Further agitation and publications by reformers like Behramji Malbari, who had used the press (including his own Indian Spectator) for the campaign against child marriage, led to the Age of Consent Bill of 1891, which raised the legal age of consent for sexual intercourse from 10 to 12 for girls. Even this was achieved only after bitter controversy since it was opposed by political radicals like B.G. Tilak as being an unwarranted interference by the British in local customs.
1352
1353Another area of agitation for the social reformers was that of property rights for Hindu women. Existing unwritten practice was particularly harsh on the Hindu widow who had no claim on her husband’s property except the right of maintenance, as a result of which she was at the mercy of her husband’s relatives. In 1874, the Right to Property Act gave a widow a life interest in her husband’s share of the property and a share equal to that of a son; however, the Act did not give a widow the right to own or dispose of this property, and daughters continued to be excluded from rights of inheritance.
1354
1355Omvedt has pointed out that the subordination of women is ‘crucial to the general hierarchical organisation of caste society’ and the anti-Brahmin movement in India was consequently also linked to the women’s struggle. One of the first to make the connection between caste oppression and women’s oppression was the most radical social reformer of the 19th century, Jotirao Phule (1827–90), a Maharashtrian of ‘low’ caste who led the anti-Brahmin struggle, also opposing polygamy and child marriage and advocating women’s education and widow remarriage. In the 1850s, Phule had set up a school for girls in Pune and two schools for ‘untouchables’, and in 1863 he started a Home for the Prevention of Infanticide, to care for the unwanted children of widows. He founded the Satyashodhak (Search for Truth) Samaj in 1873, an anti-Brahmin movement aimed at saving the ‘lower castes from the hypocritical Brahmins and their opportunistic scriptures’; this movement heralded the struggles of non-Brahmins of later years. Phule’s forceful writings in Marati had an impact, especially works like Gulamgiri (‘Slavery’), published in 1872. In opposing sati, Phule speculated about whether any husband would become a sata by being immolated on the funeral pyre of his wife (Heimsath 1964: 102, 248). Omvedt has written on Phule’s concern for women’s rights:
1356
1357Phule was capable of becoming emotionally involved over the issue—one of his polemical articles involved a scathing attack on one of his own colleagues for sexist behaviour and showed an awareness of the issue of language-embedded sexism that has only become more general today. In his final book, Sarvajanik Satyadharma, an effort to create a secular ethics, he strives throughout to use non-sexist phraseology; instead of the Marathi equivalent of a phrase such as ‘all men are equal’ he used instead and very consistently, the term sarve ekander stri-purush, ‘each and every woman and man’. (Omvedt 1975: 46)
1358
1359
1360
1361The Marati and Gujarati reformers of the 19th century were in the forefront of several controversies over women’s rights, and important public debates on caste and women’s oppression raged in western India. An influential Gujarati reformer was Darsondas Mulji (1832–71), who had a newspaper, Satya Prakash, which led an attack on the immorality of maharajas and Hindu priests and supported widow remarriage, women’s education and foreign travel. His denunciation of the maharajas led to a libel case against him in 1861 which he won. Another of the early Maharashtrian reformers was Gopal Hari Deshmukh (1823–92), known as ‘Lokahitwadi’, who in the 1840s had begun to attack Brahmin traditional practices, including the caste system, child marriage and the treatment of widows. Deshmukh urged the use of English texts or translations to foster scientific thought and advocated the rejection of Brahmin learning. Writing in Marati he said: ‘I think that the misery of women is so great that when I remember it my hair stands on end. These Brahmins instead of killing their daughters, put them into greater misery …’ (Heimsath 1964: 102). The woman question remained an important issue in the non-Brahmin movement of later years. In 1920, for instance, the non-Brahmins of Pune, together with Brahmin liberals, held a meeting at which free compulsory female education was demanded. The nationalist leader Tilak was violently opposed and driven away from the meeting when he argued that there were funds only for male education (Omvedt 1975: 46).
1362
1363Another element in the continuing expansion of education for women was in the creative fields. Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941) had transformed Shantiniketan (founded by his father) into an institute for the regeneration and revival of Indian culture and art, while being open to influences from all other cultures. Shantiniketan was open to women and Rabindranath placed great emphasis on the conditions necessary for the release of creative potential in women. This was evident, not only in his educational work, but also in his well-known poems and short stories. He came out strongly against traditional customs and practices, while adopting a modern attitude to the role and status of women in society; the women in his creative writings are ‘drawn more vividly and with a firmer hand than the male characters’ (Naravane 1980: 94). An example is his story ‘Devi’, later made into a film by Satyajit Ray, where a woman is driven to insanity by a tradition-ridden father-in-law who believes, on the basis of a dream, that she is the reincarnation of a goddess. However, while attacking such practices, Tagore was, at the same time, a believer in the unique contribution of woman, through her special qualities, to the harmonious continuance of human society. His vision in this respect was essentially traditional and sentimental:
1364
1365If the human world becomes excessively male in its mentality, then before long it will be reduced to utter inanity. For life finds its truth and beauty, not in any exaggeration of sameness, but in harmony … It is their instinct to perform their services in such a manner that these, through beauty, might be raised from the domain of bondage to the realm of grace. (Naravane 1980: 94)
1366
1367
1368
1369In these attitudes, Tagore was at one with most male reformers of the time.
1370
1371In South India too the non-Brahmin movement had originated against Brahmin hegemony ‘questioning the right of the Brahmins to dominate top-class jobs and to perpetuate the myth of a superior culture’ (Lakshmi 1984: 9). The ‘self-respect movement’ in the 1920s against the Brahmins, led by E. V. Ramaswami Naicker, known popularly as Periyar (the Great), attacked the caste system and all forms of religious ritual and idol worship. Equal rights for women were advocated and marriages based on ‘self-respect’ were popularized: this meant that there should be equal consent between the man and the woman, and that there should be no priests present to officiate at a marriage (Ram 1979).
1372
1373There were several male writers and poets in South India who were forceful proponents of women’s emancipation. One was the leading Tamil poet Subramaniya Bharathi (1882–1921), who belonged to that stream of radical thought in Asia and the Middle East which advocated modernity and reform, while asserting a cultural identity against imperialism. He was active in many areas of political and social reform, and was influenced by foreign radical and revolutionary movements, welcoming the Russian Revolution in 1917. He championed Indian independence while denouncing caste oppression, the ill-treatment of immigrant Tamil workers in Fiji, the inequitable distribution of wealth in India and the subordination of women.
1374
1375Bharathi was especially insistent on female education and the rights of women, and criticized Tamil conservative society for keeping women in subjection. He often used the image of ‘Mother India’, and linked the subjection of India with the subjection of women, describing the awakening of all oppressed groups that was taking place. He was impressed by the agitation for women’s voting rights in Europe and in a journal he edited called India, he wrote a note in 1906 on the struggle for women’s suffrage in Britain. He also edited a monthly journal for women, Chakravarthini (‘Empress’). It is also interesting to note the influence of early Chinese feminism on Bharathi, who translated two articles on the famous woman martyr entitled ‘The Story of a Chinese Woman called Jiu Jin’ and ‘A Speech by Jiu Jin’. Bharathi’s poems in Tamil also frequently dealt with issues facing women, one being significantly entitled ‘Pudumai Pen’ (‘New Woman’), the popular slogan of the period. Themes of marriage, free love and chastity also occur in his poems.
1376
1377While many Indian nationalists like Gandhi chose to idealize Sita, ‘the monogamous, chaste, self-sacrificing spouse of Rama’, as the model for Indian womanhood, Bharathi in contrast wrote poems on Draupadi, ‘the strong-willed, passionate, revengeful, polyandrous wife of the five Pandavas of the Mahabharata’ (Mies 1975: 57). He translated his own poem ‘Kummi of Women’s Freedom’ based on the ‘kummi’, a woman’s dance in South India, from which a few verses are given below:
1378
1379Dance the Kummi, beat the measure;
1380
1381Let this land of the Tamils ring with our dance.
1382
1383For now we are rid of all evil shades;
1384
1385We’ve seen the Good.
1386
1387Gone are they who said to woman: ‘Thou shalt not open the Book of Knowledge’.
1388
1389And the strange ones who boasted, saying:
1390
1391‘We will immure these women in our homes’—
1392
1393Today they hang down their heads.
1394
1395And they talk of wedded faith;
1396
1397Good; let it be binding on both.
1398
1399But the custom that forced us to wed, we’ve cast it down and trampled it under foot;
1400
1401Dance the Kummi, beat the measure;
1402
1403To rule the realms and make the laws
1404
1405We have arisen;
1406
1407Nor shall it be said that woman lags behind man in the knowledge that he attaineth.
1408
1409Dance the Kummi, beat the measure;
1410
1411
1412
1413Another South Indian who similarly wrote on women’s oppression was the well-known poet Kumaran Asan (1873–1924). His controversial poem Chintavishtayya Sita (‘The Brooding Sita’), written in 1919, is an interpretation of the legend of Rama and Sita, where Sita instead of submitting obediently to tests of fire to prove her chastity, strongly protests ‘Does the King think that I should once more go into his presence and prove myself a devi? Do you think I am a mere doll … my mind and soul revolt at the thought’.
1414
1415There were other novelists of Kerala who in the 19th century spoke out on women’s issues, including Chandu Menon (1847–99), who advocated women’s education, stressing the importance of English education. His famous Malayalam novel Indulekha (1889) concerns, in the author’s words, a story of a woman who although left ‘helpless by the untimely death, first of her father and then of her uncle’ was able to marry a man of her choice because of ‘the firmness and strength of mind she had acquired through education’. Menon also adds, addressing Indian women:
1416
1417If you wish to really enlighten your minds, you must learn English, whereby alone you can learn many things which you ought to know in these days and by such knowledge alone can you grasp the truth that you are of the same creation as man, that you are as free agents as men, that women are not the slaves of men. (Menon 1965: 369)
1418
1419
1420
1421
1422
1423Female Education
1424
1425
1426Since the reform of ‘social evils’ was linked to the issue of preserving and strengthening basic family structures and creating good wives and mothers, the question that frequently arose was that of female education, a policy supported by both progressive and orthodox reformers. There had been many educated women in the upper classes, including famous women writers and poets, but no general education was available to women. This became an issue on which there was broader agreement than on such issues as widow remarriage, which had touched religious sensibilities. Many liberal reformers campaigned in favour of female education. Vidyasagar was at the forefront of the movement and established 40 girls’ schools in Bengal between 1855 and 1858 (Asthana 1974: 27). Conservatives also joined the campaign for female education. Ramakrishna Paramhamsa, the Hindu philosopher who popularized the concept of a ‘Supreme Mother’ and her worship in the form of the goddess Kali, said: ‘I worshipped all women as representatives of the divine mother. I realised the Mother of the Universe in every woman’s form’ (Everett 1979: 55). Ramakrishna’s renowned disciple Vivekananda, however, a radical on many issues, believed that a woman should not be educated in the modern sciences but should be trained to achieve fulfilment within the family.
1427
1428In the 19th century, as in other countries, Indian reformers thought that social evils could best be eliminated through education; however, the concept of education was limited to producing good home-makers and perpetuating orthodox ideology. ‘Education would not turn the women away from their familial roles, but improve their efficiency as wives and mothers and strengthen the hold of traditional values on society, since women are better carriers of these values’ (Mazumdar 1976: 49–50; emphasis added). In addition, Christian missionaries were keen to use education for proselytizing and for ensuring that, if the women became Christians, there would be no lapses back to the old beliefs by male converts. Girls’ schools were started by missionaries and British residents in the leading cities, especially in Bengal where the British had made their first inroads in the mid-19th century. In 1820, the first girls’ school was founded by David Hare in Calcutta; Professor Patterson founded a girls’ school in Bombay in 1848, and in 1851 J.E.D. Bethune started the Bethune Girls’ School in Calcutta, which later became the first women’s college. Many Indian reform groups like the Arya Samaj and Brahmo Samaj ran educational institutions for women, and Indian women such as Pandita Ramabai and Ramabai Ranade were involved in projects for female education. The visit to India of Mary Carpenter, a well-known British social reformer, who made a report on women’s education in India, resulted in the establishment of a teachers’ training college in 1870 (Asthana 1974: 135). By 1882, there were 2,700 educational institutions for girls with 127,000 pupils; the majority were primary schools, but there were also 82 secondary schools, 15 teachers’ training institutes and one college.
1429
1430By the 1870s, women had begun not only to write literary works in English, but also to translate works from other European languages, a notable example being Toru Dutt (1856–77), born to a wealthy, literary family of Bengali Christians. She travelled with her parents to Europe in 1869, attending school in France where she not only learnt French but also developed an abiding interest in French culture. In 1870, they went to England, where the poems of the family were published that year by Longmans, Green & Co., under the title The Dutt Family Album. In 1871, the Dutts went to Cambridge where Toru and her sister ‘sedulously attended the Higher Lectures for Women, with great zeal and application’ and also took French lessons (Das 1921: 39). Returning to Bengal in 1873, she continued to write and translate. She published her first book of verse translations from French poetry at the age of 20 (the year before her death in 1876) under the title A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields; this has been described as ‘an amazing feat of precocious literary craftsmanship’ (Das 1921: vii).
1431
1432In the 1880s, Indian women also started to graduate from universities, the first being two students of the Bethune school, who completed their studies at Calcutta University in 1883. By 1901, there were 256 women in colleges, the figure rising to 905 in 1921. In 1916, the Indian Women’s University was started in Bombay by D.K. Karve, who had read about the Japanese Women’s University (Heimsath 1964: 241). In the same year the Benares Hindu University was founded with an affiliated women’s college.
1433
1434Although some women thus benefited from access to schools and universities, even in the most educationally advanced states of India the vast majority of girls did not attend school (Asthana 1974: 135–7). Moreover, education for women was mainly confined to the larger cities and towns and served the needs of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. The policies of promoting women’s education and the type of education provided were not intended to promote women’s emancipation or independence, but to reinforce patriarchy and the class system. ‘The class bias of the reform movement was most pronounced in the field of education. The plea that education would only improve women’s efficiency as wives and mothers left its indelible mark on the educational policy’ (Mazumdar 1976: 53).
1435
1436However, education enabled some women to break into avenues of employment that had previously been denied to them. In 1902, 242 women were attending medical schools and many had been trained as teachers, nurses and midwives. Cornelia Sorabjee, a Parsee, was the first Indian woman to graduate in law at Oxford in 1882, although it was not until 1923 that women were allowed to practise law. Another category of pioneers were the Indian women who challenged convention by studying medicine, either in India (where Madras and Bombay Medical Colleges had admitted women in 1875 and 1883 respectively) or by going abroad to medical colleges in the West, where women were accepted. Among the early women doctors were Anandibai Joshi who graduated in 1886 from the Women’s Medical College in Philadelphia and worked as a physician in the women’s ward of the Kohlapur hospital; Kadambini Ganguli (b. 1862) who had been educated in Britain and was the first woman graduate of Calcutta University and Bengal’s first woman doctor; Annie Jagannadhan who studied in the newly founded Edinburgh School of Medicine for Women in 1888 and in 1892 became a house surgeon in a Bombay hospital; and Rukmabai who obtained a medical degree from London University in 1895 and later worked in the Women’s Hospital in Rajkot. These women had to battle against the full weight of conservatism. To give one example:
1437
1438Rukmabai rebelled against Indian traditionalism, in order to study medicine. She left her husband who filed a suit against her. She was bitterly criticised and even sentenced to six months imprisonment if she did not agree to live with him. A compromise was finally reached whereby she had to pay a large sum of money to her husband. It was, however, decreed in accordance with Hindu Law, that Rukmabai could never marry again. (Asthana 1975: 54–5)
1439
1440
1441
1442
1443
1444Agitation by Women
1445
1446
1447Pandita Ramabai
1448
1449Although the leading social reformers in the 19th century were males whose objectives were to cleanse and reinforce family life, the women themselves started to overstep the home and family limits envisaged for them by the reformers:
1450
1451For the early pioneers of social and religious reform, women were at first objects of their emancipatory efforts, but in the course of the 19th and 20th centuries they became more and more subjects in the political and social sphere. (Mies 1980: 117)
1452
1453
1454
1455There were several women activists and pioneers in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the majority of them linked by birth or marriage to families in which the men had participated in religious or political reform movements. Many examples of protest by women have been lost to history, however. Omvedt has written: ‘Phule had referred to a Marathi book written by a non-Brahmin woman, Tarabai Shinde, “The Comparisons of Men and Women” but both this 19th century woman and her writings have disappeared from available records’ (Omvedt 1975: 46).
1456
1457One of the most notable pioneers among the women we do know of was Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), a reputable Sanskrit scholar, whose courageous and independent activities on behalf of women’s causes made her the foremost female agitator of her time. Her life was unusual for a woman of that period. Her father, a Sanskrit scholar of Maharashtrian origin, believed that women had as much right to knowledge as men. He is said to have been ‘cast out by society for teaching Sanskrit to his wife Lakshmibai against the established social convention’. Although orthodox on other issues, he took an ‘uncompromising attitude towards the education and the marriageable age of girls (Madhavananda and Majumdar 1953: 403). Because of such views, the family was hounded from place to place and lived the life of nomadic scholars, wandering all over India. As a child, Ramabai not only acquired mobility and experience, but learnt Sanskrit and theology from her parents. The family went through many misfortunes and it was said of Ramabai that ‘the persistent social persecution that ultimately led to the death of her parents and sister … reinforced by the famine of 1874, steeled her heart against the Hindu religion and society, neither of which she could ever forgive’ (Madhavananda and Majumdar 1953: 404).
1458
1459In 1878, Ramabai went to Calcutta together with her surviving brother. Her critique of Hinduism made her known in Bengali reformist circles and, because of her knowledge of Sanskrit, she was given the title of ‘Pandita’; she also went on a tour of Bengal and Assam, lecturing on social injustice. For a woman to be well-versed in theology, in a society where religion is all-pervasive, has always been an advantage when challenging social evils that are disguised as religious orthodoxy; and Ramabai used her knowledge in the cause of women. She had two unique advantages that are usually denied to women who are physically and intellectually confined, namely an understanding of social reality gained through her nomadic travels and a command of Hindu ideology gained through her knowledge of the scriptures.
1460
1461Using the argument that women had held high positions in ancient India, Ramabai made an all-out attack against the orthodox priests. Having been widowed (in 1882) with a new-born daughter, she had to fend for herself and to face criticism for not conforming to the traditional deportment of a widow. She began a life of travel and agitation, starting a series of Mahila Samaj (women’s organizations) in Bombay state, and campaigning for women’s education and medical training. She wrote a book, Sthri Dharma Neeti (‘Women’s Religious Law’), which advocated women’s emancipation and attacked traditional practices harmful to women. By this time she had also learnt English, having come into contact with Christian missionaries in Pune. In 1883, she travelled to Britain, where she met Dorothea Beale, a pioneer woman educationalist and principal of Cheltenham Ladies College, where Ramabai spent some time studying and teaching. She went on the USA and Canada in 1886, where she studied and lectured, returning to India in 1889 via Japan. Her book on the status of women, The High Caste Hindu Woman, was well received in America and led to the formation of the Ramabai Association, one of whose objectives was to collect funds for women’s activities in India. She later converted to Christianity and began a series of projects involving girls’ schools, orphanages and widows’ homes. Pandita Ramabai was also politically active, being one of the few delegates to the Indian National Congress sessions in 1889. Her life and work not only inspired many other women, but also influenced many male reformers such as M.G. Ranade and D.K. Karve (Asthana 1974: 41–8).
1462
1463The other area of activity that permitted women to leave the confines of the home was social work. As in Victorian Britain, some women of the bourgeoisie and wives of male social reformers were active in social work among the poor and destitute. To give one example among many, Ramabai Ranade (wife of M.G. Ranade) held free classes for women in sewing and first-aid, visited hospitals and prisons and distributed food during crises such as the 1913 famine (Asthana 1974: 50–1). The proliferation in the 19th century of social reform activities among various groups resulted in the formation, under M.G. Ranade’s guidance, of the Indian National Social Conference in 1887. The aims of this organization were to ‘strengthen the hands of the local associations and to furnish information to each association … as to what is being done by others … and to stimulate active interest by mutual sympathy and co-operation’. Up to 1917 the Conference met separately but concurrently with the political organization, the Indian National Congress, but after that date, its activities were merged into the general political agitation of the Congress (Desai 1957: 123–34).
1464
1465Muslim Women and Social Reform
1466
1467While the early agitation for social reform came from Hindu males and was concerned with the status and role of Hindu women, the Muslims also began action on social reform in the late 19th century. Many of the issues that agitated the Hindus did not apply to Muslim women since Muslim law allowed for widow remarriage, divorce and a share of parental property. However, concern was expressed by Muslim male social reformers on issues such as polygamy, purdah and female education.
1468
1469The most prominent Muslim reformer was Syed Ahmad Khan (d. 1898), who pioneered Muslim higher education and, in 1875, founded a Muslim university college at Aligarh. Khan wrote in his journal Tahzibul-Akhlaq on all aspects of social reform. Believing that the decline of the Muslims was due to their reluctance to adopt Western-style education, Khan advocated modern education for both men and women. He also opposed polygamy, taking the view that since a man could not treat all his wives equally (as enjoined in the Koran), polygamy was not permissible under Islam. On this question Syed Ahmad Khan went against the strong current of orthodox opinion, declaring that, ‘Polygamy must be absolutely and definitely restricted … monogamy should be the rule.’ He also challenged the orthodox views that Islam advocated purdah (seclusion) for women or that it discouraged women’s education (Bhatty 1976: 101, 107). Other Muslim male reformers included Badruddin Tyabji (1844–1909), a Bombay businessman who campaigned against the purdah system; Syed Imam who financed a Muslim girls’ school in Patna, believing that the country’s progress was linked to women’s education; and Hydari, a well-known writer, who expressed the prevailing views on the need for educating girls: ‘while the education of a boy helps him only, the education of a girl lifts the whole family to a higher state of mental and moral life’ (Desai 1957: 112).
1470
1471Some attempts to promote education were made by Muslim women: Amina Tyabji, wife of Badruddin Tyabji, started a Muslim girls’ school in 1895 and Begum Abdullah managed a similar school in Aligarh that was founded by her husband, Sheik Abdullah in 1906; this school later became a woman’s college affiliated to the Aligarh Muslim University. Other Muslim women pioneers included members of the Tyabji family: Begum Nawab Misra, who founded an orphanage, and Shareefa Hamid Ali, who began a nursing centre. In several urban centres, Muslim women of well-known families began local women’s associations, and in 1916, the Begum of Bhopal formed the All-India Muslim Women’s Conference. Such activities were not wholly approved by the traditionalists, however, who showed their opposition to Muslim girls’ schools and were angered by the resolution passed by the Muslim Women’s Conference in 1917 that polygamy be abolished (Everett 1979: 63).
1472
1473As the political struggle began, however, Muslim women began to take part in the agitation. The Khilafat movement among Muslims in India (protesting against the dismemberment of the Turkish Empire) brought the female relatives of the leaders of the movement on to the public platform. Mohamed Ali’s mother, Bi Amman, as well as his wife and Hasrat Mohani’s wife, for example, addressed women’s meetings during this campaign; when the brothers Mohamed and Shaykat Ali were imprisoned, Bi Amman appeared in public at the joint Muslim League and Congress Sessions of 1917. In later years, many Muslim women joined the satyagraha and non-cooperation movements. Thus while participation in political activities was more easily tolerated, Muslim opinion was not prepared for changes in laws regulating women’s social position.
1474
1475
1476
1477
1478
1479Women and Nationalist Agitation
1480
1481
1482It was in the political struggles against imperialism that Indian women (both Hindu and Muslim) began actively to participate in life outside the home; and in doing so, they had the support of many nationalist political leaders. The expansion of women’s education and their admission to universities had produced a number of English-educated, middle-class women by the late 19th century, and they made their presence felt in political activities. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, allowed women to become members and ten women participants from Bombay and Bengal attended the sessions in Bombay in 1889.
1483
1484Bengal had been exposed to British influence from the 18th century and was in the vanguard of both Westernization and political and reform movements linked to national revival and nationalism. The women of the Bengali bourgeoisie were also among the earliest pioneers of reform and political agitation, one of the best known being the writer Swarnakumari Devi (1885–1932), Rabindranath Tagore’s sister, who together with her husband edited Bharati, a Bengali journal. In 1882, she started the Ladies Theosophical Society for women of all religions, during a period when Indian intellectuals had shown some interest in the theosophical movement founded by Colonel Olcott and Helena Blavatsky. In 1886, Swarnakumari also began a women’s association (Sakhi Samiti) which was concerned with promoting local handicrafts made by women, and in 1889 she was one of the first women to attend the sessions of the Indian National Congress. She was also a well-known novelist; her novels reflected the thinking of Bengali reformers, both men and women, who had been educated in English but had retained traditional values. In An Unfinished Song, the heroine is Westernized and marries a doctor who has studied in England and is supportive of women’s rights, but she adheres to certain orthodox values and to ‘the traditional ideal of female religious devotion’ (Everett 1979: 54).
1485
1486Women continued to participate in Congress politics in the 1890s, including activists like Pandita Ramabai and women professionals such as Dr Kadambini Ganguli. In the early 20th century, women became more involved in politics with the increase in nationalist activities. Mass struggles for self-rule, including the boycott of British goods, took place during this period. There was also increased militancy, bomb throwing and assassinations, especially in Punjab and Bengal; violence occurred after the partition of Bengal in 1905, and events such as the deportation of the ‘extremist’ leader B.G. Tilak in 1908 led to strikes by Bombay workers. Women joined the agitation, organized swadeshi meetings, boycotted foreign goods, and donated money and jewellery to the nationalist movement. As part of the campaign, a pamphlet A Vow for Bengali Women was circulated, explaining the swadeshi movement to village women, calling upon them to participate in certain rituals which had political significance and to boycott foreign goods. Protest meetings were held throughout Bengal, some of them exclusively for women. The most active women’s leader of this period was Swarnakumari’s daughter, Sarala Devi, who started physical exercise clubs and a swadeshi store for products made by women.
1487
1488Many foreign theosophists also participated in the nationalist and women’s movements, the foremost being Annie Besant (1847–1933), feminist and former Fabian socialist who, in the 1880s, had created a stir in Britain with her campaign for birth control and her leadership of the match girls’ strike. Besant came to India in 1893 and was active in the theosophical movement and in education and not only formed the Home Rule League in India but also became the first woman president of the Indian National Congress in 1917. Other theosophists who were concerned about Indian women’s status included Margaret Cousins, an Irish feminist, who arrived in India in 1915 and participated in many of the social and political reform movements of the time, being one of the founders of the All-India Women’s Conference in 1927, and Dorothy Jinarajadasa (the wife of a Sri Lankan theosophist) who, together with Besant and Cousins, formed the Women’s Indian Association in 1917. Also active in the early 20th century nationalist upsurge was a militant Irish woman, Margaret Noble (1867–1911), who arrived in India in 1895, and under the influence of Swami Vivekananda, took on the name of Sister Nivedita and worked in Bengal. She is said to have had links with Irish revolutionaries, and her work in education, cultural activities and agitation for swaraj was characterized by revolutionary zeal.
1489
1490
1491
1492
1493
1494Gandhi and Women’s Rights*
1495
1496
1497The Congress leaders saw the advantages of mobilizing women and always exhorted them to join the nationalist struggle as equals. We shall examine in some detail the ideas of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru as they pertain to the role and status of women; the similarities and differences of their ideas reflect the many currents of thought that were then prevalent on the issue of women’s emancipation.
1498
1499Gandhi’s basic ideas on women’s rights were equality in some spheres and opportunities for self-development and self-realization. He believed that ‘woman is the companion of man, gifted with equal mental capacities’, and realized that her contemporary subordinate position was the result of domination by man. He said ‘woman has been suppressed under custom and law for which man was responsible and in the shaping of which she had no hand.’ He argued that the rules of social conduct must be developed only on the basis of co-operation and consultation, and should not be imposed by one sex on the other. In this connection, Gandhi said, ‘men have not realised this truth in its fullness in their behaviour towards women. They have considered themselves to be lords and masters of women instead of considering them as their friends and co-workers.’ Gandhi was equally aware that the position and role of women differed from class to class and that, for example, ‘in the villages generally they hold their own with their men folk and in some respects even rule them.’ But he was convinced that ‘the legal and customary status of women is bad enough throughout and demands radical alteration.’
1500
1501However, Gandhi’s view of women’s equality was located within a religious sense of the word and within the patriarchal system, projecting a concept of women’s role as being complementary to that of men and embodying virtues of sacrifice and suffering. In 1921 he stated: ‘To me the female sex is not the weaker sex; it is the nobler of the two: for it is even today the embodiment of sacrifice, silent suffering, humility, faith and knowledge’ (Everett 1979: 76).
1502
1503Gandhi believed that every man and woman had a duty to perform in the interest of self-realization and social well-being. While arguing that ‘she should labour under no legal disability not suffered by men’ and denouncing ‘the sheer force of vicious circumstances’ by means of which ‘even the most ignorant and worthless men have been enjoying a superiority over women which they do not deserve and ought not to have’, he still thought that there was a particular sphere appropriate for women. This is most clearly illustrated in his ideas on female education. He was all in favour of educating women, but the emphasis must be different for men and for women. He said:
1504
1505In framing any scheme of women’s education this cardinal truth must be kept in mind. Man is supreme in the outward activities of a married pair and, therefore, it is the fitness of things that he should have a greater knowledge thereof. On the other hand, home life is entirely the sphere of women and, therefore, in domestic affairs, in the upbringing and education of children, women ought to have more knowledge.
1506
1507
1508
1509
1510*The quotations from Gandhi, unless otherwise stated, are from India of My Dreams by M.K. Gandhi. Details in bibliography.
1511
1512In this line of thought, he believed that courses of instruction for men and women should be based on ‘a discriminating application of these basic principles’ if ‘the fullest life of man and woman is to be developed’.
1513
1514Within this context, Gandhi in 1929 deplored the existing social evils which affected women, being, as he himself said, ‘uncompromising in the matter of women’s rights’. He was against the ban on widow remarriage, calling it ‘this poison of enforced widowhood’, though once again he based his arguments on religious and moral grounds. He argued (in 1926) that
1515
1516Voluntary widowhood consciously adopted by a woman who has felt the affection of a partner adds grace and dignity to life, sanctifies the home and uplifts religion itself. Widowhood imposed by religion or custom is an unbearable yoke and defiles the home by secret vice and degrades religion.
1517
1518
1519
1520He had similar ideas on female morality and divorce, and in 1926 spoke against double standards for men and women: ‘And why is there all this morbid anxiety about female purity? We hear nothing of women’s anxiety about men’s chastity. Why should men arrogate to themselves the right to regulate female purity?’ To Gandhi, self-restraint in sexual matters was a great virtue, but it had to come from within the individual. Marriage was a sacrament; the dowry system should be abolished because it debased marriage, reducing it to an arrangement for money. Divorce was preferable to the continuance of a marriage which had ceased to be a vehicle for self-realization.
1521
1522Gandhi’s ideal woman was the mythical Sita, the self-sacrificing, monogamous wife of the Ramayana, who guarded her chastity and remained loyal to Rama in spite of many provocations. Sita was ‘promoted’ as the model for Indian women. ‘Gandhi was perhaps hardly conscious of the fact that his ideal of womanhood, which he considered to be a revival of the Hindu ideal, contained in fact many traits of the puritan-Victorian ideal of woman, as it was preached by the English bourgeoisie.’ Moreover, this image of woman had a ‘strategic function in the political movement’ (Mies 1980: 27).
1523
1524Even though Gandhi appreciated the role of Indian peasant women, he still had no notion of economic equality for women. As Mies remarks:
1525
1526In Gandhi’s idealised image of women her economic activity, especially the aspect of her economic independence, is not emphasised. As the most important activity he recommends to the women spinning and weaving, both of which he considers as religious acts and conforming to the ‘nature’ of woman. On the economic independence of women he speaks evasively. The image of the modern independent career woman does not fit into Gandhi’s conception of the ideal woman. (Mies 1980: 126)
1527
1528
1529
1530Gandhi, however, was very conscious of the power that women could have in a struggle based on the concept of non-cooperation. He stressed the importance of their participation in political and social matters and exhorted them to join the nationalist struggle. ‘In order to play her full and destined role in world affairs, in the solution of conflicts by non-violent means, women must extend their hearts and interests beyond the narrow confines of their homes and family and embrace the whole of humanity’ (Mazumdar 1976: 56, 59).
1531
1532Gandhi placed particular stress on the issue of non-violent struggle, claiming that women had great ability to endure suffering and could therefore play a key part in the movement. He claimed that the principle of ‘non-violence’ (ahimsa) and political non-violent resistance was suited to women as they were by nature non-violent. ‘I do believe,’ he wrote in 1938, ‘that woman is more fitted than man to make ahimsa. For the courage of self-sacrifice woman is any way superior to man’ (Mies 1980: 125). It was suggested that, being used to forms of passive resistance in their daily lives, they could the more effectively participate in socially organized passive resistance and non-cooperation.
1533
1534Moreover, Indian women themselves were soon to take up the Gandhian ideology and to advocate satyagraha as a form of struggle particularly suitable for women. A women’s journal, Stri Dharma, stated in 1930: ‘Because the qualities which this new form of warfare is displaying are feminine rather than masculine, we may look on this life and death struggle of India to be free as the women’s war’ (Everett 1979: 76).
1535
1536
1537
1538
1539
1540Nehru and Women’s Rights
1541
1542
1543Jawaharlal Nehru’s views on the status of women were more in keeping with those of the enlightened reformers of the time. Having sympathized, while in Britain, with the cause of the suffragists and having been exposed to the liberal and socialist debates on the ‘woman question’, he took what was at that time a ‘progressive’ stand on women’s issues. He particularly emphasized the necessity for women to work outside the home, to be economically independent, and not to regard marriage as a profession. ‘Freedom depends on economic conditions even more than political, and if a woman is not economically free and self-earning, she will have to depend on her husband or someone else and dependants are never free’ (Luthra 1976: 5). He realized that this economic bondage was ‘the root cause of the troubles of the Indian women’, and clearly perceived that superficial reforms would not serve the cause of their emancipation. ‘The joint family system of the Hindus, a relic of a feudal age utterly out of keeping with modern conditions, must go and so also many other customs and traditions. But the ultimate solution lies only in complete refashioning of our society’ (The Bombay Chronicle, 25 April 1929).
1544
1545In the same context, Nehru was rather suspicious of constant evocations of the past:
1546
1547I must confess to you that I am intensely dissatisfied with the lot of the Indian woman today. We hear a good deal about Sita and Savitri. They are revered names in India and rightly so, but I have a feeling that these echoes from the past are raised chiefly to hide our present deficiencies and to prevent us from attacking the root cause of women’s degradation in India today. (Speech at Allahabad, 31 March 1928)
1548
1549
1550
1551Nehru’s more progressive attitude is also revealed in his ideas about female education. He did not agree that there was a fixed sphere for women and that education for women should therefore have a different emphasis. He took part in the foundation-laying ceremony for a women’s college at Allahabad, but discovered that its prospectus laid down that woman’s place was in the home, that her duty was to be a devoted wife, bringing up her children skilfully, and dutifully obedient to her elders. He was quite outspoken in his criticism of these ideals.
1552
1553May I say that I do not agree with this idea of women’s life or education? What does it signify? It means that woman has one profession and one only, that is the profession of marriage and it is our chief business to train her for this profession. Even in this profession her lot is to be of secondary importance. She is always to be the devoted help-mate, the follower and the obedient slave of her husband and others. I wonder if any of you here have read Ibsen’s ‘Doll’s House’, if so, you will perhaps appreciate the word ‘doll’ when I use it in this connection. The future of India cannot consist of dolls and playthings and if you make half the population of a country the mere plaything of the other half, an encumbrance on others, how will you ever make progress? Therefore, I say that you must face the problem boldly and attack the roots of evil. (Speech at Allahabad, 31 March 1928)
1554
1555
1556
1557Nehru also urged women to participate in the nationalist struggle. In 1931 he stated, ‘In a national war, there is no question of either sex or community. Whoever is born in this country ought to be a soldier’ (Luthra 1976: 3). Nehru spoke with great enthusiasm about the women who took part in the nationalist movement, of the thousands who braved police charges and prisons. However, he was quite conscious that women had to engage in a double struggle, against imperialism and against oppression by men and that these struggles were intimately linked. He wrote:
1558
1559They were mostly middle-class women, accustomed to a sheltered life, and suffering chiefly from the many repressions and customs produced by a society dominated to his own advantage by man. The call of freedom had always a double meaning for them, and the enthusiasm and energy with which they threw themselves into the struggle had no doubt their springs in the vague and hardly conscious, but nevertheless intense, desire to rid themselves of domestic slavery also. (Nehru 1962)
1560
1561
1562
1563
1564
1565Women in Political Action
1566
1567
1568Despite the many pronouncements of good intent by the male leaders, however, most of them still saw a woman’s role basically as that of a housewife within a conservative family structure. Women activists became subsumed in the political struggle; women were lauded for being good satyagrahis (non-violent activists), but the real issues that concerned them as women were regarded by the men as of secondary importance. The agitation of the early social reformers about the social evils that affected women in the family were supplanted by nationalist issues, resulting in the neglect of women’s unequal social and economic position. What is more, the few women’s issues that were taken up were those that interested the middle-class women’s organizations, such as the suffrage questions. In 1917, for example, Sarojini Naidu, Margaret Cousins and a deputation of women met the Viceroy and put forward demands for female franchise, and in 1919, Sarojini Naidu was part of a deputation of the Home Rule League who went to Britain to lobby for reforms and franchise rights. In 1918, the Indian National Congress supported the granting of the vote to women. The constitutional reforms of 1919 allowed provincial legislatures to decide on the issue; in 1921, Madras province, where the anti-Brahmin Justice Party had a majority, was the first to allow women to vote; other provinces followed, and in 1926, women were also given the right to enter the legislature, Dr S. Muthulakshmi Reddi becoming the first woman legislative councillor in Madras that year. Her struggle, however, to introduce social legislation such as the Devdasi Bill, banning temple prostitution of young girls, met with opposition and was unsuccessful (Lakshmi 1984: 22–3).
1569
1570In the mass movements of the 1920s and 1930s, women’s participation was much in evidence in certain acts such as the khadi campaigns (to wear homespun cloth), in the picketing of shops selling foreign goods, and in the Salt March of 1930 (when Gandhi urged the people to break the government’s monopoly of salt manufacture by marching to the sea and making salt themselves), as well as in the general political demonstrations and mass agitation which resulted in the call by Congress for civil disobedience. Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, a militant Congress activist, was among the first to break the salt law and recalled that:
1571
1572Thousands of women strode down to the sea like proud warriors … they bore pitchers of clay, brass and copper … How had they broken their age-old shell of social seclusion and burst into this fierce light of open warfare? What had stirred them into militant rebels? (Basu 1976: 24)
1573
1574
1575
1576Women all over India joined the struggle for independence and many thousands were jailed. Of the 80,000 arrested during the salt satyagraha, 17,000 were women. In 1931, the Congress delegates at the sessions held in Karachi congratulated the women ‘who rose in their thousands and assisted the nation in the struggle for freedom’ (Basu 1976: 29–30). Two women associated with this period of struggle were Sarojini Naidu and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya.
1577
1578Sarojini Naidu
1579
1580Sarojini Naidu (1879–1949) was the daughter of Aghorenath Chattopadhyaya, a Bengali, who had studied chemistry at Calcutta University and had obtained a D.Sc. degree from Edinburgh in 1877. He was in the Brahmo Samaj movement for social reform as well as in Congress activities, and was the principal of a college in Hyderabad. Sarojini was educated in Madras and later studied in Cambridge, returning to India in 1898. She married a South Indian, Dr G. Naidu, that year, thereby breaking barriers of both province and caste. By 1904, Sarojini had made a mark as a poet and an orator and was influenced by G.K. Gokhale—the moderate nationalist leader. In 1914, she met Gandhi in England and in subsequent years was his devoted follower, also becoming one of the chief speakers of the Indian National Congress. In 1920, Sarojini joined Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement and campaigned all over India on this issue. During the nationalist upsurge of the early 1930s, she worked with Gandhi and was with him on the Salt March of 1930, at the Round Table Conference in London in 1931, and during subsequent Congress agitation, being jailed in 1942 during the ‘Quit India’ movement.
1581
1582Sarojini Naidu, during these years of political activity, also campaigned for women’s rights (including franchise, education and divorce). In 1917, she was involved in the campaign for women’s rights, lecturing on women’s emancipation and petitioning the Secretary of State on women’s franchise rights; but her views were conservative as she had a traditional view of the ideal woman. Moreover, ‘Her emphasis was on harmony and comradely cooperation between man and woman in the common struggle for freedom and progress, not on confrontation’ (Naravane 1980: 95). In 1926, she became the first woman president of the Congress, an event that received much publicity outside India. In her presidential address she evoked an idealized vision of the past, ‘In electing me chief among you, through a period fraught with grave issues … you have reverted to an old tradition, and restored Indian women to the classic epoch of our country’s history’ (Naravane 1980: 96). In the 1930s, she was active in the All-India Women’s Conference, and represented the moderate current of reformers who, while campaigning against discrimination against women, were more preoccupied with the nationalist political struggle, bypassing the issue of women’s subordination within the family.
1583
1584Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya
1585
1586More radical than Sarojini Naidu was her sister-in-law, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, whose life reflected the many strands of activity in the women’s movement of that time. She was born in South India in 1903, the daughter of a government official in a wealthy orthodox family; her husband died soon after their marriage and Kamaladevi, instead of adopting the secluded life of a Tamil widow, shocked conservative society by going to Madras to study and by marrying the Bengali playwright, Harindranath Chattopadhyaya. Through her marriage she became linked to a distinguished family; Chattopadhyaya’s sister was Sarojini Naidu; and his brother Virendranath, who had grouped the Communist Indian political exiles in Berlin, was the common-law husband of Agnes Smedley (1892–1950) (the American feminist and Communist, later to achieve fame in China), whom Kamaladevi had met in the 1920s.
1587
1588In 1926, Kamaladevi was the first woman in India to run for the Legislative Council, but she was defeated by 200 votes. Apart from her activities in the Indian national movement, which resulted in her being jailed for participating in the Salt March and satyagraha, Kamaladevi was also involved in the women’s movement. She had been influenced by Margaret Cousins in Madras during her student years and had met feminists in Europe in the early 1920s. She joined the Congress Socialist Party in the 1930s and presided at the Meerut sessions of the party; in her presidential address she made the point that ‘rather than running away from the Congress, calling it bourgeois’, socialists should ‘capture the Congress movement and prevent the leadership from converting it into a bourgeois party, thus stealing from us the Congress heritage’ (Cobb 1975: 71).
1589
1590Divorced in 1933, Kamaladevi travelled widely in Europe, China and Japan to propagate the cause of Indian independence. On returning to India in 1942 she was jailed, but used the occasion to write extensively. In 1946–47 she was on Nehru’s Congress Working Committee, and in subsequent years concentrated her activities on developing a national theatre and reviving the handicrafts industry (Cobb 1975).
1591
1592By this time, women had become active not only in nationalist and political bodies but also in organizations whose membership and direction were solely in their hands. One of the earliest of such organizations was the All-India Conference for Educational Reform, formed in Pune in 1927. This body laid emphasis on activities connected with the reform of education and of marriage law; it adopted resolutions demanding compulsory primary education, increased facilities for women in the education system, the abolition of child marriage and the fixing of the legal minimum age of marriage at 14 for females. The organization was composed of women from many strata of society—from feudal families and the middle classes, as well as women professionals and political activists. Its office-bearers reflected this diversity: the vice-presidents were the Rani of Sangli, Lady J.C. Bose and Sarojini Naidu; the chairperson was Margaret Cousins, and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya was its secretary. The president, however, was the Maharani of Baroda who had co-authored a book (published by Longmans in London in 1911) entitled The Position of Women in Indian Life, the views propounded in it being such as to provoke an attack by the socialist feminist, Rebecca West, who said ‘she takes a step backwards; she actually recommends women to take up “genteel callings” ’ (Marcus 1982: 12).
1593
1594At the 1928 sessions of the conference in Delhi, Muslim women’s participation was much in evidence; the name was changed to All-India Women’s Conference (AIWC) and a Muslim president was appointed, the Begum mother of Bhopal, Maimoona Sultana. In 1929, the AIWC conference in Patna elected the Rani of Mandi as president and adopted a resolution that the scope of its activities should be widened to include ‘the consideration of all social evils which hinder the progress of education’. Another change was seen at the 1930 conference when Sarojini Naidu was elected president and Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya the secretary. These sessions passed resolutions on equal inheritance rights for women and also stressed the need to enquire into the conditions of life and work of working-class women and children, but no political resolutions were passed (Chakravartty 1980: 196–8).
1595
1596As the nationalist movement developed in the 1930s, differences of opinion arose within the AIWC concerning its involvement in political issues. Some wished it to remain aloof from politics, but women of the Congress and Communist movements spearheaded the efforts to politicize the AIWC. The resulting dichotomy within the leadership of the association was described by a Communist militant as follows:
1597
1598One section … wanted to keep the organisation segregated from politics of any kind whether of a national nature or otherwise, while there were others, who saw that women’s emancipation, social or economic, could not be achieved without national independence nor without struggling for social justice. Communist women activists tried their level best to work within the AIWC and turn it into a living mass organization in which broad sections of women of all classes could struggle for their rights and welfare. (Chakravartty 1980: 199)
1599
1600
1601
1602Another left-wing Congress woman who was active during these years was Aruna Asaf Ali (née Ganguli), a Bengali Hindu teacher who had made an unconventional marriage to a Muslim lawyer. She joined Gandhi’s Salt March agitation in the 1930s and was active in the Congress Socialist Party. During the 1942 ‘Quit India’ movement she went underground and was involved in violent activity against the British throughout India. In 1945, she clashed with Gandhi over the issue of violence, and in 1952 joined the Communist Party of India.
1603
1604
1605
1606
1607
1608Women and Revolutionary Nationalism
1609
1610
1611Although the Indian National Congress, which had adopted a policy of non-violence under the leadership of Gandhi, was the dominant nationalist organization, there were some Indian nationalist groups which followed a more militant policy of revolutionary and violent action. These groups were active within India (especially in Bengal, Punjab and Maharashtra) as well as abroad, where they were able to canvass and organize support. Several foreign women were linked with these revolutionaries and Communists, among them Evelyn Roy (wife of M.N. Roy) and Agnes Smedley, who worked with Indian revolutionaries in exile in New York and Berlin.
1612
1613
1614
1615
1616
1617Bhikaiji Cama
1618
1619
1620The best-known Indian woman in revolutionary circles in Europe was Bhikaiji Cama (1861–1936), who came from a wealthy Bombay family of Parsee social reformers. In 1885, she married Rustomji Cama, a lawyer, who was pro-British. She left her husband at the age of 27 and became active in nationalist politics, attending the Congress sessions in Bombay. She went to Britain in 1901 for medical treatment; there she came under the influence of Indian revolutionary nationalist Krishnavarma. Her militant speeches attracted attention and she left for Paris to avoid being arrested, remaining there in exile (Nanavutty 1977: 78–9). In 1907, when the Indian nationalist Lala Lajpat Rai was arrested, she spoke at a protest meeting in Paris, and called for a boycott of the British:
1621
1622What is the good of talking about the glorious past of India … if you are living in slavery today? … what is it that makes you live in subjection? Come out and establish liberty and equality under Swaraj … Let us combine. If we all speak bravely like Lajpat Rai how many forts and prisons must they build before they can deport or confine us all? … Friends! show self-respect and stop the whole despotic administration by refusing to work for it in any capacity. (Srivastava 1983: 55–6)
1623
1624
1625
1626In 1907, Cama was part of the British delegation to the International Socialist Congress at Stuttgart, where she spoke against British imperialism and unfurled the Indian national flag. She made an impassioned speech on this occasion:
1627
1628The continuance of British rule is positively disastrous and extremely injurious to the best interests of Indians. Lovers of freedom all over the world ought to cooperate in freeing from slavery one-fifth of the human race … I call upon you … to rise and salute the flag of Indian independence. (Srivastava 1983: 69)
1629
1630
1631
1632In Paris, Cama became the focus of Indian revolutionary activity in Europe. She was also closely associated with the more radical and revolutionary Indians specially Krishnavarma and Vir Savarkar, both of whom the British regarded as anarchists and terrorists. When Savarkar swam ashore in Marseilles from the British ship in which he was being deported to India and was returned by the French police to the British authorities, Bhikaiji Cama organized the protests in France and mobilized the French left against this breach in international law. Cama was also responsible for two revolutionary papers (Vandemataram and Talwar) which were published in Geneva and smuggled into India. The British intelligence service was alert to Cama’s influence, reporting in 1913 that she was ‘one of the recognised leaders of the revolutionary movement in Paris’, with contacts with revolutionary groups in exile from other countries (Kulke 1978: 210). It is hardly surprising, therefore, that having failed to get Cama extradited from France because of her contacts with Indian and foreign ‘terrorists’, the British confiscated her property in India; the French, however, interned her during World War I (Kulke 1978: 210–11). During these years several young Parsee women who were reported to have been under her influence were kept under police surveillance, one of her associates being Perin Captain (1888–1958), the granddaughter of the moderate nationalist, Dadabhai Naoroji. She had come to Paris in 1905 to study at the Sorbonne and in 1910, along with Cama, attended the first Egyptian National Congress held in Brussels (Nanavutty 1976: 89). In later years she was active in the Indian National Congress.
1633
1634In India, too, women were involved in militant and violent activity during the various periods of agitation. For example, Saraladevi Chaudhurani, who worked with the Suhrid Samiti, supported the male revolutionaries, and another woman, Har Devi, collected funds for the revolutionaries in Lahore. In the late 1920s there was another phase of violent action in India in which women participated. In Delhi, Roopati Jain, aged 17, was in charge of a factory which produced chemicals for bombs. The Punjab revolutionary Bhagat Singh had several women collaborators including Sushila Devi, who had been jailed several times, and Durga Devi who had joined the freedom movement at 16 and had shot a policeman in Bombay. In Calcutta in 1928 a group of women students (Chhatri Sangha) recruited and trained women revolutionaries, organized study circles and gave lessons in cycling, driving and armed fighting. Some of them lived in a hostel where bombs were hidden and delivered to revolutionaries. The members of this group included Kalpana Dutt, who often put on male attire and was arrested and deported for life for her role in the Chittagong Armoury raid of 1930; and Preeti Waddedar who died in action after leading a raid on a Railway Officers’ Club in 1932. The group also included two young girls, Santi and Suniti, who in 1931 shot the District Magistrate of Comilla and were sentenced to life imprisonment; there was also Bina Das who fired on the British governor of Bengal at a college convocation in 1932 and was imprisoned; and Kamala Das Gupta who acted as a courier, carrying bombs in Calcutta. Many members of the Chhatri Sangha were inspired by the Indian Congress leader, Subhas Chandra Bose, who was one of the principal Congress socialist leaders of the 1930s and who, in Germany and later in south-east Asia, formed an Indian National Army to fight the British. Bose made a special appeal to women to join the struggle and formed a women’s militia called the Rani of Jhansi Women’s Regiment; this was led by Lakshmi (Swaminadhan) Saghal, who was given the title of captain.
1635
1636Some of these women who were categorized as ‘terrorists’ were to join the Indian Communist Party (formed in 1921): one such was the heroine of the Chittagong Armoury raid, Kalpana Dutt, who later married P.C. Joshi, Communist Party General Secretary from 1935 to 1948. According to the Communist Party, ‘these terrorist martyrs had turned from normal nationalist politics to terrorism only because of their frustrations in the Congress non-cooperation movements; their conversion to Communism … represented a still higher stage of political “maturity” ’ (Overstreet and Windmiller 1959: 235). P.C. Joshi, commenting on his wife’s reminiscences of the Chittagong raid, wrote, ‘To read her own story is to understand a living phase of our national movement, how in the thirties the vast majority of the terrorist detainees and prisoners became Communists’, adding that terrorism was the infant and Communism was ‘the mature stage of their revolutionary lives’ (Overstreet and Windmiller 1959: 235).
1637
1638
1639
1640
1641
1642Women in the Communist Movement
1643
1644
1645Many other women were active in the Indian Communist Party in the 1920s and 1930s. One of them, Ushatai Dange, had been a child widow and had defied orthodox opinion against widow remarriage by marrying S.A. Dange, the Communist leader. She trained as a nurse from 1925 to 1927 in Bombay and participated in protest actions by nurses. In 1928 and 1929, when there was a wave of militant strikes in India, Ushatai Dange was involved in several textile-mill strikes, helping to organize the women workers. The strike at the British Textile Mills in particular, which lasted for eight months in 1929, was organized and led primarily by women; during this strike the employer was surrounded and detained by the women (Chakravartty 1980: 178–9), a tactic which was to become popular in later times as the gherao.
1646
1647Another woman Communist militant active in the BTM strike was Parvatibai Bhore: she was of humble social origins and had earned her living as a tailor. In later years Bhore became a forceful public speaker and organizer of the textile workers (Chakravartty 1980: 180). Minakshi Sane was another Communist organizer who worked in Sholapur in Maharashtra among the textile and bidi (cheroot) workers. She was active during the economic depression of the early 1930s when several spontaneous strikes took place. Writing about the bidi workers’ successful strike in 1936, Chakravartty says: ‘The sight of women workers going on strike was a rarity in those days. This made such a sensation … that the famous Marathi novelist … N.S. Phadke came to see the striking women … [and] wrote a one-act play entitled Aagwali (the Firebrand).’ Minakshi Sane used the experience of the strike to organize women slum dwellers in Bhajan Mandals where bhajans (songs) were sung in between discussions about the week’s events in India and elsewhere. Her group became popular and was invited to hold similar events in other slums (Chakravartty 1980: 182–3).
1648
1649During the late 1930s and World War II (1939–45) Communist women were active in the nationalist struggle and in relief work during the Bengal famine, sometimes jointly with the All-India Women’s Conference. Particularly active were the women of Bengal, a province that had been in the forefront of the nationalist agitation. In 1938, there was a strong movement in Bengal for the release of political prisoners who had been arrested by the British for ‘terrorist’ activities and imprisoned in the Andaman Islands. Women of various political groups in Bengal came together in this agitation: ‘the first attempt at building a united women’s organisation, in which political women were at the forefront’ (Chakravartty 1980: 8).
1650
1651At this time the All-India Student Federation set up a Girl Students Committee to mobilize militant young women in all parts of the country in a separate organization, support being the most enthusiastic in Bengal, Bombay and the Punjab. In 1940 the girl students held a conference in Lucknow which was presided over by Renu Chakravartty (born 1917), an active Communist who had recently returned after graduating in Cambridge (where she had been secretary of the Indian Students’ Federation). As she recalls the Lucknow meeting:
1652
1653I told them of the menace of fascism which was but the extreme face of imperialism. I told them of the heroic battles being fought in Spain against Franco fascism … of that wonderful and courageous fighter and leader La Pasionaria—a glory to entire womanhood … but most important, the unparalleled united front being built from Europe to China to stem the tide of fascism. (Chakravartty 1980: 10)
1654
1655
1656
1657The girl students’ movement grew rapidly: its membership rose to 50,000 in 1941 and it became the source of inspiration for many young women. During this period of intense political activity many women left their homes in spite of parental objections to carry on their political activities, many running the risk of arrest by the British authorities. In 1940, the Girl Student Association leader, Kamala Das Gupta, was arrested; she was succeeded by Kalyani Mukherjee, who continued to be involved in political agitation and later married the Communist activist, Mohan Kumaramangalam (Chakravartty 1980: 13).
1658
1659In 1942, some of the active women of the left, Kamala Chatterjee, Manikuntala Sen, Renu Chakaravartty and Ela Reid, formed the Mahila Atmaraksha Samiti (Women’s Self-Defence League—MARS) which grew rapidly throughout Bengal. The Japanese bombings of Bengal helped to highlight the need for self-defence, both of the country and of its women. MARS put forward slogans for the defence of freedom, for the release from prison of Gandhi and other national leaders, and engaged in relief work during the famine: ‘Humanitarian work and political work became one and indivisible. They taught women that the terrible sufferings of the people in famine or in war could never be solved unless they had a popular government’ (Chakravartty 1980: 21–4).
1660
1661The tragic events of the Bengal famine of 1942–44 brought women of all classes into relief work and political agitation. For example in 1943, the Calcutta MARS organized a hunger march of 5,000 Hindu and Muslim women to the Assembly to demand food and to protest about price rises.
1662
1663The demonstrators in their tattered rags and with babies in arms, famished and emaciated, marched before the eyes of Calcutta’s public, telling them what words failed to do, of their pitiful plight. The march was unique, a model of orderly organisation. Neither police, nor Communist-baiters, could do anything. The impact of this demonstration was tremendous. It was one of the first militant actions of women which stirred the city of Calcutta. The demonstrators demanded “Open more shops, arrange proper supplies and bring down the price of rice.” When they refused to move the Chief Minister distributed 100 bags of rice immediately to the women. (Chakravartty 1980: 29–30)
1664
1665
1666
1667In May 1943, MARS held a provincial conference of women from the 21 districts of Bengal at which the secretary announced that they now had 22,000 members. When the second conference was held in 1944, membership had risen to 43,000. In that year the accent was on the rehabilitation of women who had been reduced to destitution and prostitution during the famine. Many homes for destitutes, and child-care and relief centres were begun; as Ela Reid reported in calling for expansion of the activities of the MARS, ‘Women … suffered the most due to famine’ (Chakravartty 1980: 67).
1668
1669
1670
1671
1672
1673Conclusion
1674
1675
1676This study of the participation of women in the political struggles of India in the 19th century and first four decades of the 20th century, and in movements for the improvement of the status of women, provides much material for the historical understanding of some of the problems typically faced by women’s movements in the Third World. The most revealing aspect has been the essential conservatism of what on the surface seemed like radical change. While highlighting and legally abolishing the worst excesses (like sati), emphasizing female education, and mobilizing women for satyagraha, the movement gave the illusion of change while women were kept within the structural confines of family and society. Revolutionary alternatives or radical social changes affecting women’s lives did not become an essential part of the demands of the nationalist movement at any stage of the long struggle for independence, and a revolutionary feminist consciousness did not arise within the movement for national liberation. Women in the nationalist struggle did not use the occasion to raise issues that affected them as women. Rather than liberating themselves from traditional constraints and bondage, as Vina Mazumdar states, ‘the woman’s roles within the family as wives, daughters and mothers were re-emphasised or extended to be in tune with the requirements of the family in a changing society’ (Mazumdar 1976: 63). Thus, while Indian women were to participate in all stages of the movement for national independence, they did so in a way that was acceptable to, and was dictated by, the male leaders and which conformed to the prevalent ideology on the position of women. As Mies has pointed out:
1677
1678To draw women into the political struggle is a tactical necessity of any anti-colonial or national liberation struggle. But it depends on the strategic goals of such a movement whether the patriarchal family is protected as the basic social unit or not. The fact that the women themselves accepted their limited tactical function within the independence movement made them excellent instruments in the struggle. But they did not work out a strategy for their own liberation struggle for their own interests. By subordinating these goals to the national cause they conformed to the traditional pativrata or sati ideal of the self-sacrificing woman. (Mies 1980: 121)
1679
1680
1681
1682Nevertheless, the examples of women’s militant participation in political struggles as well as their involvement in strikes and working-class protests and peasant rebellion (including the Telengana peasant struggles in the early 1950s) all show that Indian women have played a prominent part in anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist and democratic movements of protest over a long period. In contrast to the traditional ideal of womanhood, which even today is propagated in various ways, Indian women have another tradition of militancy and courageous activity in movements for social and political change.
1683
1684
1685
1686
1687
16887.Emancipation and Subordination of Women in Sri Lanka
1689
1690
1691
1692We went in the spirit of crusaders and answered the questions in an inspired manner. Lord Donoughmore asked if we wanted Indian Tamil women labourers on the estates to have the vote. I replied ‘Certainly, they are women too. We want all women to have the vote’.
1693
1694Agnes de Silva, leader of the women’s deputation to the Commission on Constitutional Reform, 1927 (Russell 1981: 58)
1695
1696
1697
1698Sri Lanka attracted a great deal of attention in 1960 when Sirimavo Bandaranaike became the world’s first woman prime minister; this was widely interpreted, both in Sri Lanka and outside, as an indicator of the role and position of women in Sri Lankan society—a position of equality and independence. To emphasize this interpretation, it was pointed out that women in ancient society had enjoyed a position of importance, that women in Sri Lanka have not had to suffer from many of the social evils that affected women in neighbouring countries, such as sati, purdah, child marriage and the ban on widow remarriage, and that women in modern Sri Lanka enjoyed a better quality of life than in other countries of Asia—a literacy rate among women of 83%, a maternal mortality rate of 1.2 per 1,000 live births, and a life expectancy of 67 years at today’s levels, which has been achieved in spite of a relatively low Gross National Product. However, a closer look at the position of women in Sri Lankan society, both ancient and modern, reveals that, in spite of conditions that appear favourable to them, women have existed and continue to exist in a situation of subordination.
1699
1700The ancient history of Sri Lanka does show a number of examples of women who made their own contribution to the religious and political events of their times. Legend has it that 2,500 years ago, Sri Lanka was ruled by a ‘demon’ queen, Kuveni; in later periods of history, women ruled in their own right and there were queens like Anula Devi, Soma Devi, Lilavati and Sugala who led the armies of her kingdom into battle. However, such women were very often the mothers, wives or daughters of kings and other important personages; such exceptional women did not reflect the prevalent position of women in ancient Sri Lankan society.
1701
1702The geographical location of Sri Lanka as an island at the tip of the Indian peninsula has influenced the country’s demography, society and culture. The population is composed of two major ethnic groups—the Sinhalese and the Tamils—the result of successive waves of migration from all parts of India, mixing in various degrees among themselves and with the aboriginal inhabitants; during later periods Arab and Muslim traders as well as Europeans also established themselves in the island. The Sinhalese, who form the major ethnic group had, by the 5th century AD, developed an extensive irrigation system which enabled the cultivation of paddy over vast tracts of fields and the growth of a prosperous agrarian community. The surplus generated was appropriated by the monarchs, the bureaucracy and the Buddhist temples, and was sufficient to form the basis for an advanced civilization. The Sri Lankan state was, from about the 4th century BC onwards, a part of a regional polity comprising several monarchies in South India, with which it sometimes forged alliances and sometimes went to war. Close links have thus always existed between India and Sri Lanka and their social systems and ideology relating to women have been somewhat similar. As we pointed out in the chapter on India, women’s primary role in the home, as mother, wife or daughter, was in subordination to the male members of the family. However, the one specific feature of Sri Lankan ideology has been the continuing presence of Buddhism, which has played a crucial role in forming Sri Lankan culture. Although the Buddha was born in India, the religion almost disappeared from the country of its birth, while continuing to flourish in Sri Lanka and in other countries of Asia. Buddhism was introduced into Sri Lanka in the 3rd century BC and quickly became the dominant religion. It was accepted by the kings, high officials and the people, and became the state religion, serving as the legitimizing ideology of the ruling system. In view of the central role of Buddhism in Sri Lanka (and some other parts of Asia), it may be appropriate at this point to discuss some aspects of its attitude to women.
1703
1704
1705
1706
1707
1708Buddhism and Women
1709
1710
1711Buddhism came into being in the Gangetic plain in India at a time when settled agriculture had replaced the earlier pastoral economy, when trade in agricultural surpluses had become an important part of the economy and had brought into being an urban mercantile class, and when tribal social structures were giving way to absolute monarchies (Kosambi 1965: 144ff). The Brahmanic tradition associated with the earlier pastoral economy was no longer consonant with this rapidly evolving society, and Buddhism was the most important of a number of religions that emerged at this time. Buddhism, in this context, opposed many of the teachings and ritual practices of the Brahmins; the role of women in society was one of the areas on which the reforms of Buddhism had some immediate impact. The Brahmanic social system, as we have indicated in the case study of India, was caste-based and strongly patriarchal. It denied to women any role other than the domestic. Buddhism opened up the social sphere for women, most importantly by admitting women into the ranks of its clergy, whereas in Brahmin practice the rituals had been a monopoly of men.
1712
1713Many women from all strata of society, from royal families, from the households of rich urban merchants and from the common people, became Buddhist nuns. To the extent that women now had a culturally approved alternative style of life, the control of males over their social life and sexuality was diminished. The reasons that impelled women to enter the Buddhist order were many; some of them have been movingly enunciated in poems by the nuns themselves around 80 BC. Sumangalamata, the wife of a rush-weaver who became a nun, says:
1714
1715O woman well set free! How free am I!
1716
1717How thoroughly free from kitchen drudgery
1718
1719Me stained and squalid among my cooking-pots
1720
1721My brutal husband ranked as even less
1722
1723Than the sunshades he sits and weaves.
1724
1725(Rhys Davids 1909: 25)
1726
1727
1728
1729Another nun, Mutta, speaks on the same theme:
1730
1731O free, indeed! O gloriously free
1732
1733Am I in freedom from three crooked things:—
1734
1735From quern, from mortar, from my crookback’d lord!
1736
1737Ay, but I’m free from rebirth and death,
1738
1739And all that dragged me back is hurled away.
1740
1741(Rhys Davids 1909: 15)
1742
1743
1744
1745Relief from the degrading domestic sphere was thus one of the reasons for entering the monastic order. Another was probably the desire to combat the existing belief in woman’s inherent incapacity in the spiritual field. The nun Soma is derided by Mara, the Lord of Death:
1746
1747That vantage-ground the sages may attain is hard
1748
1749To reach. With her two-finger consciousness
1750
1751That no woman is competent to gain!
1752
1753(Rhys Davids 1909: 45)
1754
1755
1756
1757Here, Mara the ‘evil one’ makes a sneering reference to the accepted notion of female intelligence and consciousness. A woman boils rice from her young days but despite all this experience, never knows the precise moment when the rice is cooked; she must take some rice out and press it between her two fingers. Soma, the nun, challenges this view, stating:
1758
1759How should the woman’s nature hinder us?
1760
1761When hearts are firmly set, who ever moves
1762
1763With growing knowledge onward in the path? …
1764
1765Am I a woman in these matters, or
1766
1767Am I a man, or what am I then?
1768
1769(Rhys Davids 1909: 45–6)
1770
1771
1772
1773The other main reason for entering the order seems to have been the desire to move out of the reach of a male-dominated sexuality, as is evident in the verses attributed to Ambapali and Vimala, who had earlier been courtesans. The tribulations of the lay life and the obligations of marriage are described by Isidasi, the daughter of a rich merchant:
1774
1775My salutation morn and eve I brought
1776
1777To both the parents of my husband, low
1778
1779Bowing my head and kneeling at their feet,
1780
1781According to the training given to me.
1782
1783My husband’s sisters and his brothers too,
1784
1785And all his kin, scarce were they entered when
1786
1787I rose in timid zeal and gave them place.
1788
1789And as to food, or boiled or dried, and drink,
1790
1791That which was to be stored I set aside,
1792
1793And served it out and gave to whom ’twas due.
1794
1795Rising betimes, I went about the house
1796
1797Then with my hands and feet well-cleansed I went
1798
1799To bring respectful greeting to my lord.
1800
1801And taking comb and mirror, unguents, soap
1802
1803I dressed and groomed him as a handmaid might.
1804
1805I boiled the rice; I washed the pots and pans
1806
1807And, as a mother on her only child,
1808
1809So did I minister to my good man.
1810
1811(Rhys Davids 1909: 158)
1812
1813
1814
1815Isidasi complains, however, that in spite of all her efforts, she was rejected by her husband.
1816
1817For me, who with toil infinite thus worked
1818
1819And rendered service with a humble mind,
1820
1821Rose early, ever diligent and good,
1822
1823For me he nothing felt save sore dislike.
1824
1825(Rhys Davids 1909: 159)
1826
1827
1828
1829Although admission to the order opened up more space for women, it was still a controlled space. The nuns had considerable autonomy in their internal organization and were specifically prohibited from rendering to monks any service of a personal nature such as washing their robes. Yet nuns as a whole were subordinate to male monks: all nuns, however senior in the order, should bow before any monk, however junior; in doctrinal and disciplinary matters they must obtain guidance from monks; monks could speak in a gathering of nuns, but no nun could speak in a gathering of monks. But even under such conditions, it was still a very considerable enlargement in the role of women.
1830
1831In Sri Lanka, the introduction of Buddhism was quickly followed by the establishment of an order of nuns. We are told that women of all strata in society became nuns. While the more daring sought relief from orthodoxy in this manner, the old order reasserted itself quickly as far as the generality of women were concerned. The benign influence of Buddhism was also instrumental in reducing not only the rigours of the caste system, but also some of the glaring injustices practised against women such as sati and the ban on widow remarriage. However, in spite of the absence of such practices in Sri Lanka and the opening of some parts of the non-domestic spheres to women, the social structures were still patriarchal and gave women a subordinate role, typical of traditional societies.
1832
1833The role and its reproduction are well illustrated in the following extract from the Kavyasekeraya, a Sinhalese narrative poem of the 15th century, still popular as a school text. The stanzas contain the advice given by a father to his daughter on marriage:
1834
1835Do not leave your house without your husband’s permission;
1836
1837when you go out, do not walk fast and see that you are properly clad.
1838
1839Be like a servant to your husband, his parents and his kinsmen.
1840
1841Do not admit to your companionship the fickle courtesan,
1842
1843the thief, the servant, the actress, the dancer,
1844
1845the flower-seller or the washerwoman.
1846
1847Sweep your house and garden regularly and see that
1848
1849it is always clean. Make sure that you light the
1850
1851lamps to the gods both at dawn and dusk.
1852
1853When your husband returns home from a journey,
1854
1855receive him joyously and wash his feet;
1856
1857do not delegate this task to servants.
1858
1859Do not spend your time standing at your door,
1860
1861strolling about in gardens and parks and do not
1862
1863be lazy at your household duties.
1864
1865Protect the gods in your house. Do not give
1866
1867anything away even to your own children,
1868
1869without your husband’s consent.
1870
1871If your husband’s attention seems directed elsewhere,
1872
1873do not speak to him about it, let your tears be
1874
1875the only indication of your sorrow.
1876
1877Seek out your husband’s desire in food and see that
1878
1879he is constantly satisfied, feed him and ensure his
1880
1881well-being like a mother.
1882
1883When you go to your husband let it be like a goddess,
1884
1885beautiful, clad in colourful silks, ornaments and sweet-smelling perfumes.
1886
1887Be the last to go to bed and the first to rise.
1888
1889When your husband wakes, see that you are by his side.
1890
1891Even if your husband appears angry and cold,
1892
1893do not speak roughly to him; be kind and forgiving
1894
1895Never think to look elsewhere for your comfort.
1896
1897
1898
1899Such attitudes were common to both major ethnic groups inhabiting the island, the Sinhalese and the Tamils, and despite many changes which will be referred to later, they have persisted in Sri Lankan society to this day. The concept of female beauty prevalent in Sri Lanka is also reminiscent of Indian tradition. The much-quoted 15th-century Sinhala verses from Salalihini Sandesaya (influenced by Sanskrit poetry) describes the ideal beautiful woman who has blue-black hair reaching to the ground, eyes like lotuses, and teeth like pearls:
1900
1901A face like the full-moon,
1902
1903A waist that can be clasped with both hands,
1904
1905Hips as wide as a chariot wheel,
1906
1907Breasts like swans, golden-skinned,
1908
1909She is a celestial maiden but for the fluttering
1910
1911of her eyelids.
1912
1913(Voice of Women 1980: 12)
1914
1915The persistence of the attitudes illustrated in the Kavyasekeraya is attested to in later literature. In a popular play of the 1920s, Ehelepola Natya, a female character says, ‘you know, my lord, that it is not the custom of Sinhala ladies of high birth to inquire from their husbands on their return home, where they have been or why they have been delayed’, and then sings:
1916
1917I am the servant of my Lord …
1918
1919I am his servant.
1920
1921For my past sins
1922
1923I am limited to the home
1924
1925Matters outside the home
1926
1927Are not my concern.
1928
1929I am the servant of my Lord.
1930
1931(Voice of Women 1980: 13)
1932
1933The reference to past time arises from a concept common in Buddhism in Sri Lanka: the notion that being born a woman is a consequence of sins in previous lifetimes. Traditionally, a common aspiration among women was to be a man in a future birth, for only a man could become a Buddha.
1934
1935Accepted ideology in traditional Sri Lanka thus required women to subordinate themselves at all times to the male, but there were some differences with the situation in adjoining countries. Although caste was an important factor in the hierarchical society, it was not as rigid as in India with its Brahmanic orthodoxy. Not only could women enter the Buddhist order of nuns, but men and women also participated together in religious rites. Among the peasantry, women worked alongside their men, although certain tasks in the cultivation cycle were forbidden to them. It was this traditional order which was affected and changed by the advent of imperialism.
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941Changes Under Imperialism
1942
1943
1944Foreign rule came to the coastal regions of Sri Lanka in 1505 through the Portuguese, who held some of the maritime areas for 150 years; the Dutch succeeded them, ruling these areas from 1656 to 1796, while British rule over the entire country dated from 1815 to 1948. Resistance to imperialism during Portuguese and Dutch occupation was continuous, from small-scale revolts to major uprisings that were able to hold the foreigners at bay for considerable periods. In the 19th century, after the fall of the Kingdom of Kandy in 1815, opposition to foreign rule took many forms. Apart from the ‘great rebellion’ of 1818, which lasted one and a half years and almost succeeded in ousting the British, the Kandyan provinces were in a state of continuous ferment, culminating in the rebellion of 1848, some of whose leaders drew their inspiration from the revolutionary movements then taking place in Europe.
1945
1946The advent of imperialism brought basic changes to the political and social structures of the country. The Portuguese and Dutch occupiers suppressed the traditional religions and imposed new social, political and educational institutions on the people. One area of social practice which the foreign rulers tried to change forcibly was that of marriage. The marriage laws prevalent among the Sinhalese in the pre-colonial period were a reflection of the existing agrarian society. Women could be married in diga or binna. A diga marriage meant that the woman went to the husband’s home and became a part of his family; she was given a dowry and had no further claims of inheritance. The binna marriage was uxorilocal with the husband taking up residence in the wife’s home; in this form of marriage, the woman was entitled to an equal share of the inheritance when her father died, and her husband was subject to expulsion at will. Caste and other considerations entered into the marriage contract, which could be dissolved by mutual consent. In the Kandyan regions, polyandry, mainly fraternal polyandry (one woman marrying several brothers), was also practised, but was not very widespread.
1947
1948The Dutch introduced the patriarchal Roman-Dutch legal system into the maritime areas under their control and enforced new marriage and inheritance laws. When the British captured Kandy, they attempted to change the marriage laws, basing themselves largely on a Victorian moral repugnance to polyandry; marriages should be monogamous and registration was necessary if the children were to be deemed legitimate and to share legally in the inheritance. Attempts to implement this law raised problems since the majority of the people in the Kandyan areas simply ignored the registration requirement. The government was thus forced to make some realistic compromise. Although inheritance problems remained intractable, the new laws ‘liberalised the grounds on which marriage could be dissolved by inluding mutual consent and enabled the district and provincial administrators to grant divorce after inquiry, thus doing away with hearings in law courts’ (Tambiah 1978: 277). Kandyans still enjoy this more liberal form of marriage contract.
1949
1950The plantation form of economic organization (first coffee and later tea, rubber and coconut) was rapidly developed during the British occupation. It was the expansion of plantation capitalism that led to the rise of a Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and working class by the latter decades of the 19th century. From around 1900 onwards, the local bourgeoisie began to make demands for democratic rights, for equal opportunity and for political reforms. In the 19th century, they expressed their demands through religious and cultural movements, and in the early years of the 20th century, through political agitation for constitutional reforms. The working class too, from 1890 onwards, began to agitate for economic improvements and for the right to unionize, resorting to strikes on numerous occasions. These religious, nationalist and working-class movements were led by men from the Sri Lankan bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, but there were always a few women who supported and joined them. In this respect, the situation in Sri Lanka was very similar to that of movements in other countries.
1951
1952In order to assess the various forms of struggle in which women in Sri Lanka were involved in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it is necessary to distinguish between two classes: first, the working women in the plantation, urban and rural sectors who joined in the working-class struggles for economic and political rights; and second, the middle-class women, some of whom campaigned for equal status with middle-class men and others who demanded radical changes to the existing society. The ground was set for these advances by the growth of educational opportunities for girls, which even in the 18th century had advanced far enough to produce a school of women poets.
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958The Women Poets of the 18th Century
1959
1960
1961Education in pre-colonial Sri Lanka was largely a function of the Buddhist monks and was carried out in temples and monastic educational institutions known as pirivenas. In this context, it was open mainly to men. There are recorded instances of women who were said to be well-versed in Sanskrit and Sinhala literature, but the very structure and form of education make it likely that such women from the upper strata were a rare exception; the generality of women were unlettered and uneducated.
1962
1963The system of parish schools established by the Dutch in the regions under their control was also really a part of their ecclesiastical activities, education being regarded as ‘a subtle vehicle of proselytism and a more efficacious weapon, perhaps, than the method of direct compulsion’ (de Silva 1952: 241). These schools were also a means of educating the minor local cadres required by the Dutch administration. The most innovative fact about the schools, however, was that most of them were co-educational, thus providing women of a certain class with the opportunity of a lay education. Most of the women who were afforded this opportunity were the children of minor local functionaries and of teachers in the schools. To this situation we owe a remarkable instance of literary activity among Asian women in the late 18th century.
1964
1965Sinhala literary activity had suffered, as all other forms of cultural expression, in the long period of foreign domination, but in the latter half of the 18th century, there was a revival of Sinhala literature in southern Sri Lanka, which was less in the classical tradition and more at the folk level. Prominent in this revival were a number of Buddhist monks and local-level officials, but it is of particular interest that women poets also took a leading part.
1966
1967The best-known woman poet of the ‘Matara school’, as it was called, was Gajaman Nona. Born in 1758, the daugher of a minor Sinhala official and the granddaughter of a teacher at a parish school in Colombo where she is said to have been educated. She was subsequently married to an official working in the Matara district of southern Sri Lanka. Her real name was Dona Cornelia Perumal, the name itself being evocative of Western influence. She completed her Sinhala education under Buddhist monks and acquired fame as a poet. Her work combined the folk idiom of the era with traditional Sinhala poetic forms and was a true reflection of the changing times. Her poems dealt either with the harsh reality of contemporary society, poised as it was between an indigenous cultural revival and the growing impact of Western modernizing attitudes; or with erotic love, continuing one of the genres of ancient Indian and Sinhala poetry. Among her most famous compositions are a series of risqué love poems exchanged with Elapata Dissava, an official in charge of a district. Her own ambivalence is shown by the fact that she delighted in dressing herself in the fashion of a Dutch gentlewoman.
1968
1969Other women poets of this period included Gajaman Nona’s younger sister, Dona Arnolia Perumal; her daugher, Dona Katerina; Attaragama Kumarihamy, the daughter of a dissava (chief), and Dissanayake Lamatani. It is significant that all these poets came from families of local officials who worked for the Dutch administration. Runa Hamine and Ranchagoda Lamaya were two other women poets of the period, some of whose compositions survive. Little is known of their antecedents, but it is clear from a reading of their verses that they came from a lower social class. Runa Hamine was later commissioned by a Wesleyan missionary to put the Bible into popular Sinhala verse. Having done a large part of the work, she complained of the meagre reward and lack of recognition. She was astute enough to realize that both arose from the fact that she was a woman; in a complaint in verse, she wrote, ‘If this work had been done by a man, he undoubtedly would have received both money and fame, but since it was done by a woman, she received no such reward’ (Denham 1912: 425).
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975Female Education in the 19th Century*
1976
1977
1978Compared to other countries of Asia the women of Sri Lanka thus had a head start in the field of education. The British, who displaced the Dutch in Sri Lanka in 1796, inherited their system of education which included co-educational parish schools, although the single Dutch institution of secondary education, the Colombo Seminary, was for boys only. In the early British period, dominated by military and economic priorities, the colonial administration took little interest in the question of education. But Governor North founded the first English boys’ school in Colombo in 1799, to train interpreters to meet the administration’s needs; North also revived some of the old Dutch schools, and Lady Brownrigg, the wife of his successor, founded a girls’ school in the early years of the 19th century.
1979
1980The main educational activity of the period, however, was carried out by Christian missionaries who started their work in the second decade of the 19th century—Baptists, Methodists and missionaries from the American Mission and the Church Missionary Society. They opened schools using the local languages for the poor, and using English for the privileged. Since converts were lapsing back into their traditional religions after their marriage, English ‘sister’ schools were started to produce Christian wives for the converts. The first of these was Uduvil Girls’ College, Jaffna, founded in 1824 by the American Mission, as a ‘counterpart’ to the Batticotta Seminary (later Jaffna College). According to Tennent, the pupils at first ‘were of low caste and poor’ but the school later attracted ‘daughters of parents of property and influence in the district’. By 1841, the British Church Missionary Society started a girls’ boarding school in Nallur (Jaffna), and found no necessity to canvass for pupils; there was a ‘multitude of candidates’ who applied to join the school (Emerson Tennent, quoted in Sivathamby 1979: 55).
1981
1982After the 1833 Colebrooke-Cameron Report on constitutional and administrative reforms, the colonial government established a few English schools: the Colombo Academy (later renamed Royal College) in 1835, and three central schools (for boys) in 1841. In response to a demand from parents, five girls’ ‘superior schools’ were started in the 1840s—two in Colombo and the others in Kandy, Galle and Jaffna. These schools were staffed by British women from the Society for Promoting Female Education. The curriculum included English, British history, arithmetic, geography, ornamental needlework, drawing, music and Western cookery. The stress was on the acquisition of ‘accomplishments’, and C.A. Lorenz (a Sri Lankan liberal of the period) remarked of these schools that there was ‘too much time and attention being bestowed on the ornamental rather than the useful’. By 1868, 87% of the girls at these élitist schools were Europeans and Burghers (mixed descendants of Europeans), the others being from rich Sinhala and Tamil families. The Central School Commission which had started the schools also opened some bilingual girls’ schools in which half the girls were from Burgher families. By 1868, there were twelve Sinhalese or Tamil girls’ schools known as vernacular schools. The Morgan Report (1869), which made recommendations on educational policy, proposed that girls’ schools be opened wherever possible.
1983
1984
1985*This section on female education is based mainly on material kindly provided by Professor Swarna Jayaweera.
1986
1987In the second half of the 19th century, the influence of the girls’ high school movement in Britain was felt in Sri Lanka, but this was a period when the government withdrew from direct management of English education, preferring to leave it to the missionaries with state assistance wherever needed. The existing girls’ ‘superior schools’ were closed down, and a petition in 1895, which called for the opening of a government girls’ school parallel to the prestigious boys’ school, Royal College, was refused. However, interest in female education led to more action by competing missionary societies, which seized the opportunity of subsidies offered by the government under the grant-in-aid system. Several English post-elementary, fee-levying girls’ schools were opened for girls of bourgeois and petty-bourgeois families, and were often ‘paired-off with the existing boys’ schools; for example the (Catholic) Good Shepherd Convent, Colombo (1869) with St Benedict’s College, the (Methodist) Girls’ High School, Colombo (1866) with Wesley College, and the (Anglican) Girls’ High School, Kandy (1879) with Kingswood College. In other words, the policy of seeking to provide suitable wives of the correct denonimation for the products of the boys’ schools was continued.
1988
1989The children of the poor went to the vernacular schools (boys, girls or mixed). Education in these schools was free, but included only reading, writing, arithmetic and drawing. There were also Anglo-vernacular girls’ boarding schools (seven in 1883), run by the missionaries for lower middle-class families. These offered a residential education for girls and were mostly agents of conversion and acculturation, one example being the Baptist Girls’ School in Colombo.
1990
1991There were also at this period a few private schools, one being Queen’s College, Kandy, a ‘ladies’ school of the highest class, affording on terms suited to the times, all the educational advantages of the High Schools of England’. In many cases, however, daughters of rich Sri Lankan merchants and conservative landowning families did not go to school, but had governesses (sometimes foreign) to teach them English, arithmetic, needlework, music and drawing in their own homes. It may be noted in passing, that these women had adopted Victorian fashions by the 1850s, that in the 1860s, brides of this class wore imported gowns from London, and that up to the 1920s, when the Indian sari was introduced into Sri Lanka, the rich westernized Sinhalese women wore European dress.
1992
1993The introduction of the Cambridge examinations was an important step in the development of secondary education in Sri Lanka; these examinations became the goal of both boys’ and girls’ schools, and the prestige of scholarships to English universities at a time when there was no university in Sri Lanka, awarded on the basis of the examination results, made them very popular. In 1881, for the first time, one girl sat for the Senior Cambridge and five for the Junior Cambridge examination. By 1900, the figures had risen to 15 and 77 respectively and in that same year, ten girls’ schools sent candidates for the Senior Cambridge and 22 for the Junior Cambridge.
1994
1995The curriculum was broadly the same in girls’ and boys’ schools and was borrowed almost wholesale from Britain. The subjects were English, British history, arithmetic, geography and two of the following: mathematics, Latin, mechanics, animal physiology, drawing, botany, physics, chemistry, sanitation, agriculture, book-keeping, shorthand, English literature, domestic economy (for girls), Pali, Sanskrit, French and German. It was a typical colonial education in which Sinhala and Tamil, the national languages, were not taught. The principals and many teachers of the prestigious girls’ schools were British and the textbooks came from Britain. For example, botany lessons were about English plants and flowers; domestic science instruction was from Kelly’s Advanced Textbook of Domestic Economy, and the cookery taught was Western. The only difference between the education of boys and girls was that certain ‘accomplishments’ such as domestic science and needlework were provided for the girls, and that whereas Greek and Latin were taught in élitist boys’ schools, the leading girls’ schools taught Latin only. Since knowledge of music enhanced a girls’ dowry value, the music examinations of the Trinity College of Music, London, became very popular among the English-educated middle class.
1996
1997However, the value of giving the same examination-orientated education to boys and to girls was the subject of spirited debate. Many colonial bureaucrats and influential women believed that girls needed only limited education, just enough to make them presentable housewives. As Hilda Pieris, the wife of Paul E. Pieris, a distinguished local civil servant of the time, said in 1912,
1998
1999A good deal more might be done by devoting the time which is wasted in obtaining a valueless smattering of Latin, French, theory of music and trigonometry, to … music, drawing, dressmaking and fine needlework, subjects which will not only add to the charm of a girl’s home life, but will also lead to a considerable saving in household expenditure. (Denham 1912: 426)
2000
2001
2002
2003Nevertheless the demand for a ‘Cambridge certificate’ continued to increase among sections of the bourgeoisie; the Principal of the Wesleyan Girls School, in 1912, tried to reconcile these disparate views:
2004
2005Apart from the practical value of those who want to go in for teaching, it improves girls’ position especially to have passed a Cambridge examination, and this helps towards a better marriage settlement. That girls’ education should have any higher or more lasting results than this is not, I think, a matter of general desire throughout Ceylon. (Denham 1912: 427)
2006
2007
2008
2009The educational system was thus supportive of the prevailing class system and its ideology of women as housewives and mothers. But although the main aim of female education was to keep bourgeois women within the home as ‘good’ housewives, it was not long before demands arose from the women themselves to be able to use their education professionally, in the first instance as teachers. A Normal School was opened in 1870 but closed again in 1884: smaller vernacular schools for teachers were subsequently opened and an English Training College for teachers, which opened in 1902, started to admit women in 1908. The missionaries also had grant-in-aid training schools. The Cambridge examinations opened doors to other professions as well. The Ceylon Medical College was inaugurated in 1870; in 1892, the first female student was admitted and by the turn of the century, there were several Sri Lankan women doctors. Among these were Alice de Boer (born 1872), who qualified in Sri Lanka in 1899, and later at Edinburgh and Glasgow, and on her return worked at the Lady Havelock Hospital for Women until 1919; Winifred Nell, sister of Dr Andreas Nell (doctor and eminent antiquarian), also qualified in medicine at Edinburgh and Glasgow in 1900 and worked at the women’s hospital in Colombo and later at the Leper Hospital, while Miss Rudd, also Edinburgh-qualified, became the Registrar of Deaths. These pioneer women doctors were from the Burgher ethnic minority, but they were soon followed by Sinhala and Tamil girls. But there were no girls in either the agricultural or technical schools during this period. Although 15 of the 31 industrial schools in 1900 were girls’ schools, they were in fact schools for orphans and the destitute. There was, however, an Institute of Stenography and Typewriting, started in 1901 by Violet Muthukrishna, who along with her brother and sisters had studied in Madras and had introduced these skills to Sri Lanka. Since the demand for such office skills increased with the expansion of the colonial economy, a number of women followed the course and obtained employment (Wright 1907: 121).
2010
2011It may be noted that the colonial structure also gave rise to the migration to the colonies of many British (and other foreign) women as missionaries, teachers, nurses and doctors, many of them the products of the expansion of higher educational opportunities for Western women in the late 19th century. To give only a few examples, Dr Mary Fysh (M.B. London), born in 1872, was appointed medical officer in charge of the Lady Havelock Hospital for women in Colombo in 1899 (Wright 1907: 131), while the Church Missionary Society, in 1900, began the Ladies College, a high school for girls, whose principal was Ruth Nixon, a graduate in modern literature from the Royal University, Ireland (Wright 1907: 117).
2012
2013Although the majority of the female population at this time received no education at all, fairly quick progress in female education was made in the first decades of the 20th century. The number of girls in school rose from 50,000 in 1901 (27% of the total in school), to 135,000 in 1921 (33%) and 396,000 in 1946 (42%) (Jayaweera 1979: 266). By 1911, literacy rates for women had more than quadrupled from 3% in 1881 to 12% in 1911, while male literacy in the same period less than doubled. It is also interesting to note than in 1911, 21% of the women of the western province of the island were literate, reflecting the increase in education facilities and economic development in that area (Denham 1912: 401–4). Female literacy made dramatic strides in subsequent years, rising from 21% in 1921 to 44% in 1946 and 83% in 1981.
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019Women and the Buddhist Theosophical Movement
2020
2021
2022The political history of Sri Lanka in the latter half of the 19th century and the early 20th century is largely that of the attempt by the emerging bourgeoisie to obtain representative political rights. The population was multi-ethnic and multi-religious (composed of Sinhalese, Tamils, Moors and Burghers who were of the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim or Christian faiths) but during these years, the nationalism that developed became identified with the Sinhala Buddhist majority, with the result that at certain times nationalism and chauvinism became synonymous. The Sinhala Buddhist section of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie, composed of merchants, monks, teachers and others, also launched a campaign against the local and foreign Christian élite who were economically and socially privileged, and against the missionaries who dominated in the field of education.
2023  
2024
2025We see how successful the women of the Western countries are in their lives, and how energetically they work for the cause of suffering humanity. But we seldom or never see a blue-stocking in Ceylon … why should women who have means neglect education? And why should their attention be directed to household duties only? Their sole aim should be to reach the highest ladder of fame, to regenerate their sex and to distinguish themselves … It is … necessary … that a College should be established for the ‘higher educatin’ of the Ceylonese girls … If they receive proper education, women of the East will no doubt become as prominent as those of the Western countries.
2026
2027
2028
2029It was, significantly, several foreign women who were the products of Western universities and were influenced by theosophy, who pioneered Buddhist female education, at a time when the demand for Buddhist girls’ schools had grown with the development of a Sinhalese Buddhist middle class. Many such schools were begun including Maha Maya (Kandy), Sri Sumangala (Panadura), Visakha Vidyalaya (Colombo), Ananda Balika (Colombo) and Sujata Vidyalaya (Matara). The foreign principals of these schools included Hilda Kularatne, Doreen Wickremasinghe, Clara Motwani, and Lu Vinson, all of whom were university graduates. For example, Hilda Kularatne (1895–1956), née Westbook, was the daughter of an official in the British Foreign Office and his wife, Jessie Duncan Westbrook, a theosophist, who wrote on Sufism and translated Persian verses of Sufi mystics, including The Diwan of Inayat Khan, printed by the Women’s Printing Society in London in 1915. After obtaining a modern languages degree in Cambridge, Hilda came to Sri Lanka in 1920, becoming the principal and founder of several Buddhist schools, from the 1920s to the 1940s. She married Patrick Kularatne, the principal of Ananda College, the leading Buddhist boys’ school in the island and spent her life in the cause of Buddhist women’s education. Clara Motwani, née Heath, an American, obtained a BA and MA respectively from the Universities of Louisville, Kentucky, and Iowa, married an Indian theosophist studying at Yale, and arrived in Sri Lanka in 1933, when she was 23; she, too, made her home in Sri Lanka and for over 50 years has been the principal and founder of several schools which provided a modern education for Buddhist girls.*
2030
2031The content and purpose of education in these schools was the subject of much debate, the protagonists seeing in education the means of achieving goals relative to their conception of the role of women in society. A large group of Sinhala Buddhist leaders of the time argued that the education should be so geared as to produce good Buddhist wives, but with the modicum of modern knowledge necessary for the times. Others saw Buddhist women’s education as an essential part of a national and political awakening and a means of emancipating women. Since the girls who attended Buddhist schools were given a more nationalist-biased education, which included stress not only on Sri Lankan and Indian history and culture, but on democratic and anti-colonial movements elsewhere, such students were also receptive to movements for social and political reform. It is not surprising that many of the women of the nationalist and leftist movements of later years had been teachers or students of these schools, and had been inspired by the foreign teachers with their background of anti-colonialism and religious dissent.
2032
2033The foremost proponent of the more traditional view on female education was Anagarika Dharmapala (1864–1933), one of the main figures of the Buddhist revival movement. He was the son of a Sinhala furniture merchant and, in conformity with fashion, had been christened Don David and educated in English. Discarding both his Europeanized name and his job as a government clerk, he joined the theosophists in their work in Sri Lanka and India; he established Maha Bodhi societies in Calcutta and Colombo for the propagation of Buddhism and led semi-political campaigns against missionaries and foreign influences. Dharmapala’s ideology was a mixed one; unlike other Asian reformers, he was against the Westernization and modernization of social life, holding that Europeanization meant barbarism and uncivilized behaviour. Influenced by his travels in Japan, however, and in contrast to the Indian leaders, Dharmapala rejected the spinning wheel and advocated industrialization and the adoption of the latest in scientific and technological knowledge, urging that ‘What India and Ceylon need is more of technological and scientific education than Christian theology and European classics’ (Guruge 1965: 716).
2034
2035
2036*I am grateful to Maya Senanayake and Goolbhai Gunasekera for material on their mothers, Hilda Kularatne and Clara Motwani respectively.
2037
2038Dharmapala’s attitude to the status of women was similarly mixed. He himself had been influenced by several independent foreign women; Helena Blavatsky (who had taken him to Madras in 1884), Annie Besant, the leading light of the Theosophical movement at the turn of the century, and Mary Foster (a rich American Buddhist living in Honolulu) who financed many of Dharmapala’s projects with generous donations. Moreover, Dharmapala had travelled in Europe and the USA and was well aware of the struggles of suffragists and feminists. He wrote:
2039
2040Look at England today, watch … the strenuous efforts made by the women of England to gain their rights politically and on whose behalf some of the greatest men in England are willing to work. Mrs Besant … who is preaching to the people of India gentleness and obedience, yet in England, speaking on behalf of suffragettes says ‘Europe looks on amazed as crowds of well-born, well-bred women go patiently to prison for the sake of their sex. The scandal caused is too great to be prolonged, there is only one way out—granting the vote …’ (Guruge 1965: 513)
2041
2042
2043
2044Dharmapala and others were at this time propagating the myth that the Sinhalese were descendants of Aryans from North India—a chosen people, who were defenders of the chosen faith (Buddhism); not surprisingly, their attitude to women reflected this basic chauvinism. Dharmapala was convinced that the subordination of women was a feature of other religious cultures—especially the Christian and Muslim—whereas Buddhism and the ‘Aryan’ way of life allegedly followed by the Sinhalese, gave freedom to women: ‘Woman in ancient India was free … Indian woman lost her individuality after the Moslem invasion of India. Woman was not considered sacred by the Semitic races. The story of Adam and Eve made woman degraded forever’ (Guruge 1965: 341). ‘The ‘freedom’ of the ideal ‘Aryan’ Buddhist woman portrayed by Dharmapala was almost a reproduction of the stereotype in the verses from Kavyasekeraya:
2045
2046The Aryan husband trains his wife to take care of his parents, and attend on holy men, on his friends and relations. The glory of woman is in her chastity, in the performance of household duties and obedience to her husband. This is the Aryan ideal wife. (Guruge 1965: 345)
2047
2048
2049
2050Dharmapala particularly deplored the effects of missionary activity on Buddhist girls who had adopted not only Western ideologies but also European dress. In the 1890s he warned that ‘girls [are] being educated under western principles by Christian educationalists’ and it was therefore ‘impossible to expect that a race of true Buddhists could be produced in Ceylon’ (Guruge 1965: 798). In his journal, Dharmapala frequently advocated the sari as a suitable garment for Sinhala women, opposed Western dress for girls as immodest, and ridiculed the Victorian hats and crinolines worn by the women of the bourgeoisie. Dharmapala’s views were thus basically anti-foreign, but with a reversion to tradition in social structures, specifically regarding the role of women.
2051
2052There was, however, another perspective on women’s education. Some of the local Buddhist radicals, especially those who had been educated in Britain, were interested in women’s emancipation and in promoting female education as a means of modernizing the traditional society. For example, A.E. Buultjens (1865–1916), a lawyer from South Sri Lanka of the Burgher community, had renounced Christianity as a student in Cambridge in 1887, and converted to Buddhism. He was also influenced by both British socialism and the trade union movement and became a critic of colonialism and missionary activities. In 1899 he wrote ‘It seemed to one that practical Christianity was a mockery, for with the export of missionaries and bibles, there was a far larger export of bottles and bullets, the one to kill the mind, the other the body’ (Buultjens 1899).
2053
2054On returning to Sri Lanka, Buultjens became the principal of the leading Buddhist boys’ school and led a campaign against the government and missionaries on the issue of Buddhist education. He was the first Sri Lankan to write about trade unions and to organize the Colombo workers, becoming the secretary of the country’s first trade union, the Printers Union, and leading their first strike in 1893. Buultjens’s liberal attitudes also extended to the support of female education, an issue much debated in Britain during his student years there. In Sri Lanka, he was active in the Women’s Educational Society and encouraged the establishment of Buddhist schools for girls.
2055
2056The impact of education, both Buddhist and Christian, was felt in the increasing participation of women in areas outside the domestic sphere to which they had traditionally been bound. Although education was designed primarily to fit women for the duties of housewife and mother in accordance with changing social values, education could not but open their eyes to the constraints of that traditional role. An article in the journal Buddhist Companion, published in Colombo in 1914, clearly illustrates this trend. Couched in the form of a dialogue between two women, it criticizes the traditional Buddhist view of women as depicted in old Sinhala writings, and goes on to say: ‘Our Sinhala men are still trying to confine us to the kitchen. They are not interested in teaching us anything beyond that.’ Men and their attitudes are thus seen as ultimately responsible for the subordination of women.
2057
2058
2059
2060
2061
2062The Struggle for Political and Franchise Rights
2063
2064
2065With the expansion of education for women and the emergence of a group of professional middle-class women, especially teachers and doctors, political consciousness among women grew in the first decades of the 20th century, a few joining nationalist organizations. Associated with the earliest radical nationalist organization, the Young Lanka League (formed in 1915), was Nancy Wijekoon, a schoolteacher, who was well known for her stirring nationalist poetry. During the 1915 Buddhist-Muslim riots, she came under suspicion and was kept under surveillance by the police. Reports by the Inspector-General of Police, H. Dowbiggin, mention her ‘seditious’ poetry, which reminded Sri Lankans of their past glory and urged them to rise up against the foreigner (Jayawardena 1972: 172). When the Ceylon National Congress was formed in 1919, several women delegates were present at the first sessions. They were Dr Nalamma Murugesan (who later married the estate trade union leader, Satyawagiswara Aiyar), I. Ganguli, a theosophist teacher from Bengal, and Maheswari Segarajasingham, daughter of the president of the Congress, Ponnambalam Arunachalam.
2066
2067Sri Lanka was one of the first countries of Asia and Africa to achieve women’s suffrage, this right being accorded to all women of over 21 years of age by the Donoughmore Constitutional Reforms of 1931. Middle-class men in Sri Lanka had received the vote in 1912, and from then on the campaign for suffrage rights for women was conducted by women’s groups and male radicals. Beginning in 1923, the trade union leader, A.E. Goonesinha, raised the issue at the annual sessions of the Ceylon National Congress, but without success. Sarojini Naidu of the Indian National Congress, a campaigner for female suffrage who visited Sri Lanka in 1922, inspired the Sri Lankan middle-class women with her eloquent speeches. At the 1925 Congress Sessions, for example, a resolution of the Mallika Kulangana Samitiya (Women’s Society), a women’s organization affiliated to the Congress, that ‘a limited suffrage be immediately extended to the women of this country’ was unsuccessfully proposed by Aseline Thomas and seconded by Agnes de Silva.
2068
2069Several middle-class and professional women, many of them wives of nationalist and labour leaders, formed the Women’s Franchise Union in 1927 and in December of that year they organized a public meeting to demand voting rights for women. The meeting was presided over by Lady Dias Bandaranaike (mother of S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, Sri Lanka’s prime minister from 1956 to 1958) and was supported by many foreign women teachers and theosophists and by local professional women of different ethnic groups. When the Donoughmore Commission on Constitutional reform came to the country in 1928, a delegation from the Women’s Franchise Union gave evidence before it and asked for the right of franchise for all women.
2070
2071Leading the delegation was the secretary of the Women’s Franchise Union Agnes de Silva, née Nell (1885–1961), niece of Winifred Nell, one of the pioneer women doctors, and daughter of Paul Nell, an engineer from Kandy, of the Burgher community. Nell was an ‘extremely broad minded and liberal man, a humanist and rationalist who refused to countenance petty distinctions of social superiority which governed the principles of social life in late Victorian Ceylon’ (Russell 1981: 16). His father, Louis Nell, was colonial Solicitor-General, as well as being a scholar ‘and one of the earliest followers of Darwin in the East’ (Russell 1981: 18). In 1908, Agnes made an unconventional marriage to a Sinhalese lawyer, George E. de Silva, who in later years became a leading liberal, nationalist politician, champion of the depressed classes and castes, and a campaigner for universal suffrage and social reform. Agnes de Silva became the foremost activist for female suffrage in Sri Lanka, and in 1928, when George de Silva went to Britain to campaign for reforms and universal suffrage, Agnes de Silva accompanied him. While in Britain she again raised the issue of female suffrage. The Donoughmore Commission had recommended a limited female franchise to women over 30, but when the reforms were implemented in 1931 all women over 21 were granted the franchise. Agnes de Silva also unsuccessfully contested the first general election under universal suffrage. At this election, Naysum Saravanamuttu, a Tamil doctor (who was elected to a Colombo constituency), and Adeline Molamure, a Sinhala woman from an aristocratic family (who won the Ruanwella seat), became the first women legislators.
2072
2073After adult franchise was won in 1931, middle-class women formed several organizations, including the Lanka Mahila Samiti and the Women’s Political Union, both inspired by Mary Rutnam, née Irvin, a doctor of Canadian origin (married to a Sri Lankan Tamil) who was active in the franchise and other movements. Together with a teacher, Annamah Muttiah, she also started the Tamil Women’s Union in Colombo. Another influential Tamil woman of the 1930s was Maheswari Navaratnam, who had studied at Tagore’s Shantiniketan and had been influenced by the Indian cultural and political movement. She edited Tamil Mahal (‘Tamil Woman’) which advocated the emancipation of women.
2074
2075Although women in Sri Lanka, particularly the Westernized élite, fought and won the franchise much earlier than women in many other countries, their presence in the political structures has been marginal: representation in the national legislatures has never been more than 4% or so, and participation at local government levels has also been insignificant. The few women who have successfully contested and made a name for themselves in the political process have generally entered politics as the result of the death of a father or a husband, inheriting, as it were, the male’s mantle of power, as did Sirimavo Bandaranaike, who entered politics after the assassination of her husband who was prime minister at the time.
2076
2077The religious revivalist and nationalist movements also led to a cultural renaissance which had both positive and negative aspects. New forms of literature such as the novel entered the domain of Sinhala and Tamil literature. Some people used these new forms in order to propagate contemporary ideas. In 1914, Mangalanayagam Tambiah wrote a Tamil novel which criticized the system of arranged marriages; S. Sellammal was another Tamil woman writer who, in the early 1920s, wrote several novels on problems affecting women and the necessity for social reform. On the other hand, the novel was also used to revive traditional social values that were felt to be under attack by the new modernizing forces. The most popular Sinhala novelist at the time, Piyadasa Sirisena, extolled the conventional role of women in ancient Indian and Sri Lankan society and their subordinate status in the family; he was against education for women and harshly criticized their attempts to emancipate themselves.
2078
2079The rise in women’s consciousness brought about by education was channelled primarily into struggles for political and franchise rights. Women also concerned themselves with social welfare work but there were few social issues around which agitation could gather strength. Caste was an important aspect of social stratification but it was not rigid. Except for female circumcision practised by the Muslim minority of the country, there were no forms of torture or mutiliation that could be highlighted. Female circumcision was a well-kept secret and never became a public issue; the only question provoking some discussion being that of dowry.
2080
2081As in India, the dowry formed an essential part of the marriage ritual, among both Tamils and Sinhalese. The charge has often been made that while in traditional society the dowry was a means of maintaining the independence and integrity of the wife, it had become so commercialized in modern society that marriage had ceased to exist as a moral contract. In fact, the abolition of the dowry system never became a rallying cry of the women’s movement in Sri Lanka. The first and (up to date) the last attempt to deal with this problem legally was made in October 1938, when Dr A.P. de Zoysa proposed in the legislature that ‘it should be made illegal to give or receive dowries’. De Zoysa called the dowry system a social evil and drew attention to some of its obnoxious effects: ‘there have been cases when young women have committed suicide because their parents were not rich enough to give them dowries … it is our duty to try and remove this evil.’ He also tried to appeal to male pride: ‘For a young man of character and ability to insist that the bride’s parents should give him a dowry is not only immoral but it also shows that there is no character, no manliness.’ The motion was dealt with facetiously by several members of the legislature and was defeated by one vote (Hansard, 27 October 1938).
2082
2083In 1944, professional and other middle-class women formed the All-Ceylon Women’s Conference (ACWC), inspired by the similar organization in India. This association took up many of the legal, economic and political demands of women, and organized several Asian women’s conferences in Colombo. Its president for many years was Ezlynn Deraniyagala (1908–73), née Obeysekera, a member of the Bandaranaike family. She graduated from Oxford and was the first Sri Lankan woman to become a barrister (1933). Apart from her work in the ACWC, she was also on two occasions the president of the International Alliance of Women. The secretary of the ACWC for several years was Eleanor de Zoysa, née Hutton (1896–1981), from Durham. Her family was active in the labour and women’s suffrage movements and she too was a Labour Party organizer in the north of England. She had also been interested in theosophy and Buddhism; in 1929, she married Dr A.P. de Zoysa and came to Sri Lanka in 1934. Other office-bearers of the ACWC were Gladys Loos (principal, Methodist College), Sylvia Fernando (family planning organizer) and Leela Basnayaka (Buddhist activist). The ACWC over the years steered middle-class women away from purely charitable and social service activities and led the demands for the further emancipation of women.
2084
2085
2086
2087
2088
2089Struggles of Working Women
2090
2091
2092While middle-class women were fighting for education, suffrage and equal political rights, the working women of the country were in the struggle for more material gains, for equal wages for men and women, and for more humane conditions of work. Not all the advocates came from the working class, however. As in many other countries, the trade union movement was first dominated by intellectuals and professionals from the middle classes, persons who were disillusioned with the reformist politics of the period and chose to ally themselves with the labour movement.
2093
2094In the 19th century, the most exploited group of workers in Sri Lanka was the large semi-proletariat of women workers on the tea and rubber plantations. In 1881, there were 81,000 women in plantations out of 266,000 workers (30%); by 1911, this figure had risen to 234,000 women workers out of a total of 500,000 (47%) (Denham 1912: 493). Up to the early 1930s, wages on estates were 33 cents per day for men but 25 cents for women (5 cents = one UK penny of the period), although the women did the more important work of plucking the tea leaves. The wage rates for estate women were the lowest in the island, and their illiteracy, general mortality, maternal mortality and infant mortality rates were the highest in the island (in 1911, 98.5% of estate women were illiterate; today the figure is 52%). The general mortality, maternal and infant mortality rates on plantations are today the highest and the literacy and education rates the lowest in the country.
2095
2096In the town, the poorest-paid workers in the 19th century were women employed in unskilled work in factories and other menial occupations. Many women in Colombo were employed in sorting and packing coffee; (there were 20,000 in the 1870s). From the 1880s onwards, women worked in coconut fibre mills as well as in tea packing and graphite sorting: their wage rates averaged around 50 cents per day. In 1908, the rates of pay for women and girls employed by the Public Works Department to break stones for road resurfacing were between 12 and 36 cents a day. There was also a large group of domestic servants (67,000 in 1911), mainly women, who worked as semi-slaves for board and lodging and a pittance of a few rupees a month; again, women servants received less than the men. Another group of women toilers were the peasants who worked as wage labour, sharecroppers or family labour in the countryside and were subjected to various forms of oppression and exploitation.
2097
2098Despite the extreme exploitation on the plantations, trade unions did not appear there until 1931–100 years after the opening of the first coffee plantation in Sri Lanka. This was because the workers were kept as semi-serfs and had no opportunity to organize themselves. One of the early methods by which workers protested against oppressive conditions on plantations was to ‘bolt’ from their places of work. This was one of the numerous offences under the Labour Ordinance of 1865, under which many women were sentenced to terms of imprisonment with hard labour. In 1916, Ponnambalam Arunachalam referred to an advertisement in a newspaper which offered a reward of Rs 50 to any person who arrested half a dozen ‘bolted coolies’ including a woman described as ‘sickly, with a baby in arms and two other children’. In 1915, the Social Service League protested against the imprisonment of women and children for labour offences, referring to two women who were sentenced by the Badulla magistrate on a charge of ‘insolence’. The Attorney General in 1916 objected to exempting women from the provisions of the Labour Ordinance on the grounds that ‘labourers employed on estates are very primitive and a woman may be quite as capable of giving trouble as a man.’ However, the outcry continued until the law was repealed in 1922 (Jayawardena 1972: 209).
2099
2100Early strikes among the urban wage workers were in trades that were purely male occupations: printers, carters, laundry men and railway and harbour workers. But during the general strike of 1923, led by A.E. Goonesinha and the Ceylon Labour Union, and followed by 20,000 workers of Colombo in both the private and public sectors, women factory workers joined in. This was the beginning of the staunch support that A.E. Goonesinha acquired among urban working-class women. The band of militant women dressed in red became an impressive feature of every subsequent strike, procession, demonstration and May Day rally organized by Goonesinha’s Labour Union. Those who opposed him used to denounce them as ‘fishwives’, but these women, some of whom were factory workers and others itinerant hawkers, were militants who courageously came to the fore in all working-class struggles. Goonesinha’s women’s volunteer corps included Emaliya Hamy of Hunupitiya (an active fighter who is remembered for an incident that occurred during the famous tramway strike of 1929, when she garlanded the tram company owner, Cedric Boustead, with a snake), Pavistina Hamy, who worked at Hayleys, and Emmy Nona, a worker at Harrisons and Crossfield, both British firms.
2101
2102The best-known of these working-class militants, however, was Isabella Hamy of Wanathamulla, Colombo, a woman who fought for the rights of the working class at the height of colonial rule, when trade unions were illegal, and exceptional courage was needed to join workers’ agitations. Born in Colombo, Isabella was the youngest child of a family which earned its living by chopping wood. Both her parents died before she was seven years old and she was forced to work in a store, sorting graphite in order to exist. In the early 1920s, Isabella joined a militant labour union. She was a good speaker, had leadership qualities and became one of the keen supporters of labour leader, A.E. Goonesinha. During the 1929 tramcar strike, she organized demonstrations, participated in numerous meetings and processions, and was at the forefront of this famous struggle. Isabella Hamy was also active in politics; during municipal elections and the State Council elections of 1931, she led a house-to-house campaign on behalf of A.E. Goonesinha, who contested and won the Colombo Central seat. As a result of her militancy she came to be known popularly as ‘Captain’.
2103
2104By the early 1930s some middle-class women had become more ideologically and politically conscious and were prepared to join the urban and plantation workers in their struggles. In the plantation sector, the first trade union was formed by K. Natesa Aiyar and Satyawagiswara Aiyar in 1931. Both their wives were also activists: Nalamma Satyawagiswara Aiyar, who was a doctor, devoted her time to work on the plantations, while Kodandarama Natesa Aiyar created a sensation by appearing at public meetings and thrilling the crowds with her songs describing the sufferings of the estate workers. After 1945, many Tamil women from estates became active in the trade union movement, which grew in strength. Among them, Kokilam Subbiah is the best known for the novels she wrote on the degrading position of men and women on the plantations.
2105
2106In the urban sector, many women were active in the labour movement after A.E. Goonesinha formed the Ceylon Labour Party in 1928. Agnes de Silva contested but lost the Galagedera seat as a Labour Party candidate in the 1931 elections. Other women who were on the executive committee of the Labour Party included Dr Satyawagiswara Aiyar, Anne Preston (an English theosophist), Caroline Goonesinha and Ms Richard de Silva (wives of the labour leaders), as well as Eva and Jennie Ferdinando and Madlin Jayawardena, a nurse by profession, who was one of the most active members and was also a member of the Dehiwela-Mt Lavinia Urban Council during World War II.
2107
2108
2109
2110
2111
2112Women in the Left Movement
2113
2114
2115In the early 1930s, a Youth League of radical nationalists and socialists was formed with branches all over Sri Lanka to agitate for national independence. This movement attracted many radical women, especially teachers who had been inspired by the events in India. When the anti-imperialist Suriya Mal Movement was formed in 1933 in opposition to the sale of poppies (for British ex-servicemen on Armistice Day), its best-known members were women: the president was Doreen Wickremasinghe, née Young, an English woman born in Cheshire in 1907 of a family of Labour Party activists. She went to the school (St Christopher’s at Letchworth) founded by Annie Besant and run by theosophists. On graduating from the London School of Economics in 1929, Doreen Young was secretary to Krishna Menon in the India League in London; she came to Sri Lanka in 1930 and became the principal of Sujata Vidyalaya, Matara. She married Dr S.A. Wickremasinghe (who later became the chairman of the Communist Party) and was appointed the principal of Ananda Balika Vidyalaya in Colombo. While at this school she organized the teachers (Lilian Bandaranaike, Eva de Mel, Helen de Alwis, Shirani Gamage and others) in the Suriya Mal campaign. In a pamphlet on the importance of the movement, Eileen Wirasekera and Helen de Alwis wrote:
2116
2117Wear the Suriya flower on November 11th and demonstrate … your self-respect and independence … Register your refusal to encourage participation in Imperialist War. Every Suriya mala is a blow against Imperialism, Fascism and War. Wear the Suriya mala for freedom and peace. (Jayawardena 1974)
2118
2119
2120
2121Many of these women teachers and their students not only made the yellow Suriya flower emblems but also sold them on the streets in the face of opposition from the colonial authorities. The money collected in this way was used to educate a girl from the most depressed caste in the island at a leading Buddhist school in Colombo, in order to show that the caste system could be challenged.
2122
2123During the malaria epidemic which occurred in 1934 at a time of severe economic depression and caused around 100,000 deaths, all Suriya Mal organizers and other politically minded women like Selina Perera (wife of the socialist party leader Dr N.M. Perera) worked in the Kegalla and Ruanwella areas where the epidemic was at its worst. The activists of the Suriya Mal campaign and the malaria epidemic relief campaign had also led a militant strike of textile workers in 1933. In 1935 they formed the island’s first socialist party, the Lanka Sama Samaja Party (LSSP), which had many women militant members including Susan de Silva, Doreen Wickremasinghe and Selina Perera. Contact was maintained continuously with the Indian political movement during the 1930s, and in 1931 and 1937 one of India’s best-known women nationalists, Kamaladevi Chattopadhyaya, visited Sri Lanka. During her 1937 visit, she attracted the attention of the police and government as she made a speaking tour of the country together with the LSSP leaders.
2124
2125In the late 1930s and early 1940s, a few young women graduates of the Colombo University were active in the left-wing movement, among them Vivienne Goonewardena and Sita Wickremasuriya who were prominent members of LSSP and the Communist Party respectively. The LSSP (which by then had become a Trotskyist party) was banned and its leaders arrested in 1940; they subsequently escaped to India with their wives. Women members of the LSSP who were in India during the war included Selina Perera, who became known for her trade union work in Calcutta, and Caroline Gunewardena who married trade union leader S.C. Antonypillai and stayed on in Madras. Other active women who escaped to India were Kusuma Gunewardena (wife of LSSP leader Philip Gunewardena), who was arrested in India and deported to Sri Lanka, and Vivienne Goonewardena (wife of LSSP leader Leslie Goonewardena), who managed to evade arrest.
2126
2127The activities of these and other radical women continued into the late 1940s. The leftist movement in Sri Lanka, as in most other countries, split into several groups, some of which supported the Soviet Union and others that were critical of it. Radical women believed that they had a role to play in unifying the left-wing movement and in January 1948, they formed the EKP (Eksath Kantha Peramuna—United Women’s Front), dedicated to the achievement of socialism and the removal of all discrimination against women. The formation of the EKP was supported by the two main left-wing parties. It became active immediately, holding a public meeting in March 1948 to celebrate International Women’s Day. It was representative of all ethnic groups in the island and included in its ranks women from the working class. The most active leader was Doreen Wickremasinghe; others were Edith Ludowyke (a Hungarian), Vimala Wijewardena, Helen Gunasekera, Parameshwari Kandiah, Vivienne Goonewardena, Noble Rajasingham and Ponsinahamy, a working-class leader. The EKP agitated for the removal of discrimination against the entry of women into the administrative and clerical services of the state, campaigned for the improvement of living conditions in the slums, and protested against the rising cost of living. The existence of the Front, however, was dependent on the active support of the two left-wing parties, and late in 1948, the Communist Party decided that it could no longer cooperate with the LSSP. This decision led to the CP’s withdrawal from the EKP which had to be dissolved. Although it had been active for a year, received a great deal of press publicity, and had made an impact on the women’s question, its dependence on political parties ultimately caused its dissolution. Some members tried to form an independent women’s organization, but their efforts did not meet with success.
2128
2129
2130
2131
2132
2133Conclusion
2134
2135
2136The women’s movement in Sri Lanka, in its origins and development, was essentially a result of the movement for national independence and therefore reflected most of its characteristics. Independence was achieved through a process of peaceful negotiation and gradual advancement. In association with this movement, women were able to win rights to education, suffrage and juridical equality. Thus the case of Sri Lanka demonstrates the possibility of some advancement through a gradualist programme of reform. But this very ability also imposes certain limitations on the movement. It remained limited in involvement to bourgeois and petty bourgeois women; since it existed and worked within the social parameters, it did not question the patriarchal social structures, or the role of the family in the subordination of women. In these respects, it offers a contrast to countries like Japan where women were compelled to question the very basis of family and sexual morality. The other women to organize themselves and evolve their own methods of struggle were the urban working women. They sought to obtain some measure of change in the existing system of power relations, but they too were unable to push their understanding beyond economic relationships.
2137
2138The processes of education for women also contributed to the socializing of women into roles that were only superficially different from those of traditional society. Sri Lanka is thus an interesting example of a society in which women were not subjected to harsh and overt forms of oppression, and therefore did not develop a movement for women’s emancipation that went beyond the existing social parameters. It is precisely this background that has enabled Sri Lanka to produce a woman prime minister, as well as many women in the professions, but without disturbing the general patterns of subordination.
2139
2140
2141
2142
2143
21448.The Movement for Equal Rights for Women in Indonesia
2145
2146
2147
2148I was still going to school when I heard of this courageous Indian woman for the first time. I remember it so well; I was very young, a child of ten or eleven, when, glowing with enthusiasm, I read of her in the paper. I trembled with excitement; not alone for the white woman is it possible to attain an independent position, the brown Indian too can make herself free. For days I thought of her, and I have never been able to forget her. See what one good example can do! It spreads its influence so far.
2149
2150Kartini, writing in 1902 on Pandita Ramabai. (Geertz 1976: 177–8; emphasis added)
2151
2152
2153
2154The political entity that we know of as the Republic of Indonesia is a relatively late creation, which came into being in the aftermath of World War II. The Indonesian archipelago, consisting of a multitude of islands, inhabited by a large number of peoples speaking different languages, was brought into some kind of political unity by the Dutch colonialists; prior to that the islands had existed as independent principalities frequently at war with each other. Some of the islands of Indonesia, notably Sumatra, had figured as important entrepots in the sea-borne trade between India and China from about 2,000 years ago. Relations with the Chinese were primarily economic; but those with India were deeper and resulted in the predominance of Indian religion and culture in the area. By the early 7th century, there were Hindu and Mahayana Buddhist kingdoms in Sumatra and Java. One of the most important was Sri Vijaya, which, at the height of its power in the 10th century, had spread its influence to South India and Sri Lanka. Palembang in Sri Vijaya was well known as a centre of Buddhist learning, attracting scholars from China and India.
2155
2156With the decline of Indian power in the region, much of the trade in this area passed into foreign Muslim hands, and with the control of trade came political power. In the course of the next two centuries, Islam spread all over Sumatra and many of the other islands; in the 16th century, the Muslim kingdom of Atjeh in Sumatra was the principal state in the archipelago, overshadowing the decaying Hindu kingdoms of Java. The economy and social structures of this period were typical of self sufficient agrarian communities; foreign trade in spices and other agricultural products was dominated by the state, and the surpluses generated contributed to the consumption of the princely classes and the erection and maintenance of huge religious monuments like Borobodur.
2157
2158In this society, women had a defined role. Women of the ruling classes enjoyed a certain degree of autonomy and power. Just as in many other countries, women came to the throne when it was a question of preserving power within a dynastic group. Many kingdoms had women rulers including Atjeh, Sulawesi, Bali, Minangkabau and Java. The kingdom of Atjeh, for example, was ruled by women continuously from 1641 to 1699, and during the anti-colonial battles of the 19th century many women of Atjeh participated in the fighting. A princess of Atjeh, Tjut Nja Dien, is said to have fought by the side of her husband and to have continued to fight even after he had fallen in battle; she is still regarded as one of the heroines of Indonesian nationalism. Other kingdoms too had their heroines, including the Minagkabau princesses Bundo Kandung, ‘famous for the wisdom she showed in political affairs’, and Sabai Nang Halus, who collected an army and went to war to avenge her father (Vreede-de Steurs 1960: 45).
2159
2160The women of the peasantry participated fully in agricultural activities as in a typical agrarian economy. The women of Java in the 19th century are described thus:
2161
2162It is the wife who has to take care of the paddy which she has planted, harvested, dried and will husk. It is she who prepares the rice and the spices … buys the household utensils … sells the products of her fields … dyes the cloth which she sells. (Poensen 1887, quoted in Vreede-de Steurs 1960: 42)
2163
2164
2165
2166A missionary describes the women’s activities:
2167
2168Further on is the clacking of a weaving loom worked by a woman … when we enter the house we find the women and the young girls busy making batik. We see them drying husks, preparing medicines and spices … In short we find women occupied with all kinds of home industries. (Kruijt 1908, quoted in Vreede-de Steurs 1960: 43)
2169
2170
2171
2172No doubt these descriptions portray a situation which had existed even earlier. Agricultural occupations in traditional societies always provide a specific place for the labour of women. Some have claimed that the women enjoyed a position of independence and were on terms of equality with the men; Vreede-de Steurs, for example, says that in traditional Indonesian society, a woman’s duties and her rights were in no way inferior to those of the man (Vreede-de Steurs 1960: 42). This, however, ignores the strong patriarchal base of the social structure and the general subordination of women within it.
2173
2174Although Islam came to be the dominant ideology, many Indian cultural patterns persisted in Indonesian society. Earlier Hindu and Buddhist beliefs retained their vitality, even though the trappings of religious ceremonial and kingship had disappeared. It is probably these factors which explain the absence of purdah and other similar practices in Indonesian society.
2175
2176
2177
2178
2179
2180The Advent of Western Imperialism
2181
2182
2183The Portuguese arrived in the region in 1510 and were followed by the Spaniards, the Dutch and the British. They attempted to gain control of the spice trade by establishing their hegemony over the local kingdoms, while fighting each other as well. The Dutch were finally victorious and established their dominion over the islands of Indonesia by the end of the 17th century. Some of the islands were ruled directly by the Dutch; others were controlled through the agency of indigenous princes and rulers.
2184
2185The Dutch objective was to exact maximum profits through the export of spices and other agricultural crops. Since free production for export was not sufficient, the Dutch introduced what was called the ‘culture system’. In order to graft an export economy on to the economy of the existing self-sufficient village structures, they compelled the cultivators to devote a part of their lands to the cultivation of export crops like coffee, sugar, indigo and spices, and to deliver such products to the state in lieu of taxes. Although initially successful in expanding production and creating an exchange economy, this system of exploitation resulted in great discontent, and in 1870 it was replaced by large-scale cultivation with European and Chinese capital. This led to the formation of plantations with the use of compulsory labour and to a considerable expansion of export production. Private enterprise was encouraged and Dutch concerns were allowed to acquire land. Exports of coffee, sugar, tea, tobacco, rubber, tin and oil expanded rapidly; rail, road and shipping facilities were increased and, in the wave of European imperialist competition of the period, the Dutch empire in the ‘Indies’ was expanded and consolidated. Grimal states that the Dutch looked on their empire merely as a territory for mercantile exploitation, their policies being determined only by the need for efficient management. The Dutch had no philosophy of colonization, unlike the French who hoped for the ultimate assimilation of the colony into the metropolitan territory, or the British who hoped to prepare the ‘natives’ for the benefits of self-government (Grimal 1978: 75).
2186
2187Armed resistance to Dutch aggression was widespread from the very beginning, the most notable resistance being the Java war of 1825–30, when Prince Diponegoro unsuccessfully challenged the Dutch in central Java. By the late 19th century, at a period when a sense of national identity and incipient nationalist feelings were developing among Indonesians, Dutch policies also underwent a change; liberal currents of opinion in the Netherlands envisaged a new colonial ‘ethical policy’ to create ‘a multi-racial society, blending characteristics of East and West … self-governing, but in some continuing relationship with the Netherlands’. However, the measures adopted to reduce the harshness of Dutch rule and promote the welfare of the Indonesians, such as irrigation and public health, were meagre and the policy, ‘far from earning the responsive gratitude of a dependent people positively accentuated the growth of Indonesian awareness of alien rule and of hostility towards it’ (Legge 1972: 39–41).
2188
2189The processes of economic change led to a certain degree of social differentiation. In addition to the rich and princely landowners from the previous era, there emerged a multitude of smallholders as well as a number of landless peasants. With the spread of education and the expansion of the bureaucracy, there also came into being a middle class, Western-educated and with a knowledge of the Dutch language. It was to satisfy the aspirations of such groups that the Dutch established a system of representative councils at the levels of the village, town and province: the system was enlarged in 1916 by the establishment of the Volksraad (People’s Council); these bodies were chosen by an electorate limited in terms of income and education, with a heavy bias in favour of the Dutch settlers. ‘The representative bodies had, in the eyes of the Dutch, the advantage of associating the Indonesian elite with the colonial administration and directing the elites’ attention away from nationalist activities.’ However, this aim was not realized; the Volksraad ‘contributed to the development of a national consciousness by the mere fact that it brought together representatives from the various parts of the archipelago who were thus able to become better acquainted with each other and to discuss problems of common interest’ (Grimal 1978: 77–8).
2190
2191One consequence of the ‘ethical policy’ was the expansion of Western educational opportunities for some Indonesians, mainly from the urban middle classes and the landowners, among whose ranks discontent with colonial rule was to arise. In the early phase, education in Dutch produced both secular nationalists and Islamic revivalists. The influence of new currents of thinking in other Muslim countries, advocating a modernized Islam, free of obscurantism, linked to science and progress, and with an improved status for women, was evident in Indonesia; in fact, the principles of modern Islam, propagated from Cairo by Mohamed Abduh and his disciple Raschid Rida in the periodical Al-Monar had, between 1900 and 1930, a greater repercussion in Indonesia than in any other Muslim country (Grimal 1978: 83).
2192
2193
2194
2195
2196
2197Kartini and the Issue of Female Education and Emancipation
2198
2199
2200During the early colonial period, there was little intervention by the Dutch in education, which remained mainly in the hands of the Muslim clergy, with the mosque as the centre of Islamic learning and cultural resistance to the Dutch. By the late 19th century, however, the need for trained local personnel to assist in the administration of the colonial economy led to the first educational reforms. In addition, with the economic deterioration in Java during this period, it was felt that a complete reform of the educational system would result in greater economic development of Indonesia. In 1901, the Queen’s speech enunciated the new colonial ‘ethical policy’ of modernizing the country and spreading technical knowledge among the people. It was in this context that the issue of women’s education arose. At that period, the educational status of women varied with their class position. The women of the peasantry had no schooling, whereas daughters of clerics had some religious-orientated instruction, and some of the daughters of the royal and aristocratic families and civil servants went to elementary schools or were educated at home.
2201
2202One of the first Indonesian women to put forward ideas on women’s emancipation was Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879–1904), whose writings reflected some of the problems faced by upper-class women and their desire for emancipation through education, their revulsion against polygamy, and their ambition to become independent through access to professions and through personal freedom.
2203
2204Kartini was the daughter of the Regent of Jepara in North Java, who was a highly placed bureaucrat. In contrast to other girls from an aristocratic background, Kartini was educated along with her brothers at an elementary school for the children of Dutch planters and administrators, but kept up with her education even after she left school at the age of 12. Her great ambition was to study in the Netherlands, but her father refused her this opportunity. However, she had a window open to the West through J.H. Abendanon, a Dutch liberal (who as colonial Director of Education, tried to promote female education), and Ms Ovink-Soer, a Dutch socialist and feminist (the wife of a colonial official), who taught Kartini and exposed her to radical currents of Dutch thought. Kartini also corresponded with the editor of a socialist women’s magazine, De Hollandsche Lelie, and with a penfriend in Holland, Stella Zeehandelaar, who was also a socialist and feminist.
2205
2206This was a period during which the Dutch feminist movement had made considerable advances. In 1889, a Free Women’s Society had been formed by radical women who demanded equal rights with men: ‘This society consisted of ultra-radical elements, and its members were … by way of ridicule, termed “free women” … These women expressed themselves very strongly on the subjection of … woman and demanded for her the same rights as the man enjoyed’ (Boissevain 1915: 7). This group also launched a Women’s Suffrage Society in 1894. In 1898, the Groningen Women’s League organized a Women’s Labour Exhibition which created an impact by highlighting the exploitation of women in the Netherlands and the colonies. In the same year, another controversy arose over the publication of a sensational feminist novel, Hilda Van Suylenberg by Cecile Van Beek en Donk; it was the story of a single parent who tries ‘to support herself alone in the face of social criticism’; the book also emphasizes the importance of women’s education (Geertz 1976: 14). These developments had an echo in Java, and Kartini wrote to Stella Zeehandelaar that she considered this novel the finest book written on women’s emancipation. ‘I read HVS through in one sitting. I locked myself in our room, and forgot everything; I could not lay it down, it held me so’ (Geertz 1976: 64).
2207
2208Oh, that we … had gone so far, that a book could cause such a violent controversy among us, as Hilda Van Suylenberg has in your country. I shall never rest till HVS appears in my own language to do good as well as harm to our Indian world … It is a matter of indifference whether good or harm, if it but makes an impression, for that it shows that one is no longer sleeping, and Java is in deep slumber. And how will her people ever be awakened, when those who should serve as examples, themselves love sleep so much. The greater number of European women in India care little or nothing for the work of their sisters in the fatherland. (Geertz 1976: 35)
2209
2210
2211
2212Kartini who, while pregnant, visualized continuing teaching after the birth of the child, at the school that she had founded, wrote: ‘We shall have something à la Hilda Van Suylenberg—a mother who with a suckling baby goes out to work’ (Geertz 1976: 241). In 1899, Kartini asked her friend for news of Dutch feminism: ‘Will you not tell me something of the woman of today in the Netherlands? We take deep interest in all that concerns the Women’s Movement’ (Geertz 1976: 35; emphasis added). And in 1900 she referred to a draft translation from English that she had done of an article, ‘The Aim of the Women’s Movement’ (Geertz 1976: 64).
2213
2214Kartini was constrained by the usual retrictions of high Javanese society, which made her all the more enthusiastic in advocating women’s rights and condemning the prevalent practices of polygamy, female seclusion and forced marriage. Her own mother was one of several wives of the Regent and, living in such conditions, Kartini developed strong views on polygamy. ‘The only dream we are permitted to have is to become wife number so much to one man or another … nearly every woman I know here curses this right of the men. But curses do not help, we must act’ (Vreede-de Steurs 1960: 53). In spite of these criticisms, Kartini herself in 1903 married the Regent of Rembang who already had several wives. He was, however, progressive in outlook, encouraging Kartini in setting up a school. Since Kartini’s ideas on the role of women were very advanced for her time, she carried her opposition to the practice of polygamy even to the extent of criticizing Islam and expressing strong views against marriage as sanctified in Islamic practices:
2215
2216The Moslem law allows a man to have four wives at the same time. And although it be a thousand times over no sin according to the Moslem law and doctrine, I shall forever call it a sin … And can you imagine what hell-pain a woman must suffer when her husband comes home with another—a rival—whom she must recognize as his legal wife? He can torture her to death, mistreat her as he will; if he does not choose to give her back her freedom, then she can whistle to the moon for her rights. Everything for the man, and nothing for the woman, is our law and custom. Do you understand now the deep aversion I have for marriage? I would do the humblest work, thankfully and joyfully, if by it I could be independent. (Geertz 1976: 41–2)
2217
2218
2219
2220Kartini’s reflections on how she and her husband would treat a daughter show not only an awareness of women’s oppression, but an unorthodox approach to the role of women: ‘She will never be compelled to do anything abhorrent to her deepest feelings. What she does must be of her own free will. She will have… a father who will never force her in anything. It will make no difference to him if his daughter remains unmarried her whole life long’ (Geertz 1976: 240).
2221
2222Although she had close links with Dutch friends and was influenced by the feminist and socialist literature of the period, Kartini was also critical of European society. ‘We do not expect the European world to make us happier. The time has long gone by when we seriously believed that the European is the only true civilisation, supreme and unsurpassed’, she wrote in 1902, adding rather bitterly, but perceptively:
2223
2224We know why The Echo is glad to publish our articles. It is because we are a novelty and make fine advertisement for that paper. The Dutch ‘Lelie’ placed its columns at my disposal and time and again the directress has asked for letters from me. Why? For the advertisement—letters from a true daughter of the Orient, from a real “Javanese girl”, thoughts from such a half-wild creature written by herself in a European language, how interesting! (Geertz 1976: 203–4)
2225
2226
2227
2228Kartini also developed a critical approach to rural poverty in Java and to colonial rule:
2229
2230Why is it that the Javanese are so poor, they ask. And at the same time they are thinking how they will be able to get more money out of him … grass cutters who earn 10 or 12 cents a day are made to pay trade tax. A sate merchant who butchers two (goats) a day must pay … one hundred and forty-four florins in the course of a year. What is left for his profit? Barely enough to live on. (Geertz 1976: 243)
2231
2232
2233
2234Kartini’s reading was not confined to feminist literature, but included books which opened her horizons to the colonial reality. One example was the novel Max Havelaar, written in 1860 by a Dutch civil servant, Eduard Douwes Dekker, under the pseudonym Multatuli, in which he exposed Dutch economic exploitation of the poor of Indonesia. She often referred to this novel and in 1900 said, ‘But an evil that does exist, is the taking of bribes, that I think as wrong and shameful as the forcible taking of goods belonging to the “little man” as in Max Havelaar.’ Kartini was struck by a line in another Multatuli novel: ‘Father said to her that to know, and to understand, and to desire, was a sin for a girl’ (Geertz 1976: 53, 134).
2235
2236Even more interesting is the way in which examples of other Asian women also influenced Kartini. In 1902, she asked her Dutch pen-friend whether there existed a Dutch translation of the life and writings of the unorthodox Indian woman, scholar and agitator, Pandita Ramabai. While Kartini admired the independent life of Ramabai, and was especially pleased to see that not only white women but also Asians could lead independent lives, she herself was unable to break away totally from family tradition and especially from the tutelage of her father. The denial of an opportunity to study in the Netherlands embittered her even more against orthodox society, yet she remained optimistic. In 1903, the year before her death, she wrote to her Dutch friend: ‘We have not entirely given up the idea of going to Holland’. Even in her personal behaviour she was defiant: ‘I am told that I must modestly (hypocritically) cast down my eyes. I will not do that. I will look men, as well as women, straight in the eye, not cast down my own before them’ (Geertz 1976: 199).
2237
2238Not surprisingly, Kartini was criticized by those in Javanese society who disapproved of her ideas: ‘Oh if you only knew … the slander spread abroad about me! … we were the bearers of new ideas, which were incomprehensible to the great multitude, who scorned us because they could not understand’, she wrote in the year of her death (Geertz 1976: 241). The criticism was to be expected as Kartini not only challenged and threatened the traditional patriarchal norms of male-dominated society but also went against the class traditions of the aristocracy. She spoke clearly and defiantly of her intentions: ‘I have laid out for myself a full life, I have planned to be a pioneer in the struggle for the rights of the freedom of the Javanese woman’ (Geertz 1976: 238).
2239
2240Kartini herself was denied further education because she was female, and this led her to the conviction that education was an essential liberating force for Indonesian women. In 1901 she wrote to Nethe Van Kol, wife of one of the founders of the Dutch Socialist Party: ‘It would be a blessing for Indonesian society if the women received a good education … The only road open to the Javanese girl … is marriage … teach them a trade so that they be no longer a defenceless prey … the only way to escape from such a life is for the girl to learn to be independent’ (Vreede-de Steurs 1960: 53). Kartini thus had in her mind a vision of education for women, not merely as an end in itself, but as the basis for achieving some economic freedom which would in turn lead to their independence. However, she believed that education should serve not only personal escape but also social progress.
2241
2242As in other countries of Asia, male and female reformers regarded female education as a necessary ingredient of progress for individuals and for society; Kartini wrote, ‘We know that there are men who appreciate a thinking educated woman. I heard a man say (he was a highly placed native official) that the companionship of a woman who was educated and enlightened was a great comfort and support to a man’ (Geertz 1976: 67). Kartini had a number of friends who had suffered the same difficulties—being denied the freedom to study, particularly to pursue higher education abroad, and being restricted by their society—and were therefore in revolt. She spoke of such friends with great sympathy:
2243
2244Many times have I talked with women, both with those of the nobles and those of the people, about the idea of an independent, free, self-supporting girl, who would earn her own living; and from each comes the answer, there must be someone who sets the example. We know a regent’s daughter … who is also full of enthusiasm for the idea of freedom. She is crazy to study; she speaks excellent Dutch and has read a great deal … we know another … who is married; she speaks no Dutch, but she has gone further than the others. She has a great admiration for the free independent European woman; she would think it ideal if we could have the same conditions in our native world. (Geertz 1976: 137)
2245
2246
2247
2248Kartini was an activist as well as a theorist. She tried to put her ideas into practice by going against conservative opinion and starting a school for the daughters of Javanese officials. She said: ‘we ought to strike as quickly as possible and place before the public as an accomplished fact a school for native girls’ (Geertz 1976: 220). By 1904, this school had enrolled 120 pupils, but Kartini was unfortunately not able to continue her plan of action as she died in childbirth at the age of 25.
2249
2250In her short life, Kartini had expressed her views so forcefully that the posthumous publication of her letters was a source of inspiration for both the nationalist and the women’s movement in Indonesia. Her letters (Through Darkness into Light) were edited and published in Holland and ran into four Dutch editions before being translated into the Indonesian language in 1923 (Geertz 1976: 24). A Kartini Foundation was set up and schools were established in her memory in Semarang, Jakarta and other towns, the Kartini school in Tegal being run by her sister Kardinah. The Indonesians also honoured Kartini by making her an important national heroine who is commemorated up to the present day. The nationalist Tjipto Mangunkusumo, describing Kartini’s concern with the people, claimed that her ideal was to see the Indonesians ‘rouse themselves from the lethargic sleep in which they have been lost for centuries’. Another nationalist, Sutomo, wrote in 1928, ‘With respect and admiration I quote the name of R. A. Kartini … who opened the way to Indonesian feminism’ (Vreede-de Steurs 1960: 54–9).
2251
2252While in later years Kartini became a cult figure, used by many sections of Indonesian society, there is no doubt that the various facets of her views reflected the many currents of thought engendered by the clash of cultures. As Hildred Geertz has written:
2253
2254Kartini repeatedly swung back and forth between identifying herself with the Dutch liberal humanistic ethic as represented by Abendanon, with the radical socialistic ideas of van Kol and Stella, with the cultivated noblesse oblige of her father as a Javanese aristocrat, and with the mystical spiritualism of her mother. At the same time that she felt attracted to each one, she also felt revulsion at the derogation she received from the Dutch who saw her as ‘only a Javanese’, at the crassness and uncouthness of so many Dutch people she met which jarred against the highly cultivated courtesy of the Javanese, at the wilful ignorance of her tradition-bound oldest brother, who in turn saw her as ‘only a woman’, and at the poverty and illness of the Javanese peasants who depended on prayer and spirit-offerings to improve their conditions of life. (Geertz 1976: 25)