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Road To Freedom

Women : Crossing the Threshold

In the 1890's when two friends Kashibai Kanitkar and Anandibai Joshi stepped out of their homes wearing shoes and carrying umbrellas they were pelted with stones. Within a decade Kashibai Kanitkar started writing novels in Marathi and Anandibai qualified as a doctor in America.
In the early part of the 19th century whether a female child would be allowed to live at all depended on the region and the community in which she was born. Female infanticide was rampant in the country, particularly in the North in the 18th century and in the early part of the 19th century.
If a girl was allowed to live and grow up she was married and packed off to her husband's house even before she outgrew her childhood. A girl of those days did not know of an intermediary stage between childhood
and motherhood. When an eleven-year-old girl named Phulmani fell a victim to her adult husband's passion there was a public outcry. 1500 women signed a petition to Queen Victoria appealing to her to raise the age of consent and finally the Bill of Age of Consent was passed in 1891, prohibiting cohabitation with a wife under the age of 12.
Child widows, if they were not forced to become satis as in Bengal, Rajasthan and some other parts of the country were made to live a life of degradation. While Raja Ram Mohan Roy successfully campaigned for abolition of Sati, his contemporary Ishwarchandra Vidyasagar launched a movement for widow re-marriage. It gladdened his heart when his own son married a widow in 1856. Behramji Malbari, a Parsee, worked relentlessly to promote the concept of widow remarriage in western India.
Dewan Bahadur Raghunath Rao in Madras and Virasalingam in Rajahmundry were two other stalwarts of the widow re-marriage movement.

The first schools for girls had been started at the beginning of the 19th century by Christian missionaries. By the middle of the century, progressive-minded Indians in all parts of the country but especially in Bengal, began to advocate education for women.
In Maharashtra, Jyotirao Phule founded the first school for women in Pune. Predictably there was opposition to the move to open up education for girls. When Ananta Shastri of Maharashtra began to teach Sanskrit to his wife Laxmibai, the villagers boycotted the couple. The couple had to build a house in the forest where their daughter Ramabai was born in 1858.
Pandita Ramabai grew up to become a champion of women's education. She attended the 1889 Congress in Mumbai, along with 9 other ladies.
The women delegates were not allowed to speak or vote on resolutions at this session. However, in the 1890 session, a woman delegate was allowed to speak and she is reported to have thanked the President for granting her the privilege.
It took another 40 years for women in Bengal to shed the purdah. A group of Brahmo women took the lead by walking through the streets of Calcutta with their faces uncovered and singing loudly.
One of the first women activists was Sarala Debi Ghoshal, a niece of poet Rabindranath Tagore. After graduation, at the age of 23, Sarala Debi left home in 1894 and took up a job as Asst. Superintendent at a girl's school in distant Mysore. She chose to leave her home because she 'wanted to flee the cage or prison of home, and establish her right to an independent livelihood like men.' On her return to Calcutta she became the editor of Bharati, a monthly journal. In 1904, Sarala Debi trained a group to sing Bande Mataram at the Congress session held in Calcutta. It was Sarala Debi who initiated the move to use the words Bande Mataram as a national call, thus preparing the ground for women to participate in the struggle for freedom.

Road To Freedom

Women : Crossing the Threshold

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