Tracing two generations in twentieth century Indian women's education through analysis of literary sources: selected writings by Padmini Sengupta

ABSTRACT

This article uses literary sources written by Padmini Sengupta, 1906–1988 (daughter of Kamala Satthinadhan, 1880–1950, educator, writer, and editor of the Indian Ladies’ Magazine) to map two generations of women in India from reformist backgrounds and their education and writing. Padmini's biography of her mother, The Portrait of an Indian Woman, 1956, is analyzed at length. Here, Sengupta offers at once a memoir of her own growing years and a biographical portrait of her mother Kamala Satthianadhan. Supplementing this analysis is an examination of how women's education is represented in Sengupta's novel Red Hibiscus, 1962. Padmini wrote many works of a non-fictional and biographical nature. In analyzing her writing, we also understand better how Indian women writers representing their own educational trajectories in the print and public sphere shortly after Indian independence lay the groundwork for the later development of women's history and Women's Studies in India.     

Melancholia in Vita Sackville-West’s Hogarth Press Novels

Author Vita Sackville-West (1892–1962) has been understood as an author who celebrates in both prose and verse the institution of the English country estate, in part because of her personal attachment to her family’s Kentish house, Knole. The four popular novels that Vita Sackville-West published with the Hogarth Press during the early 1930s—The Edwardians (1930), All Passion Spent (1931), Family History (1932), and The Dark Island (1934)—are no exception, save for their particular focus on the agnatic inheritance of both aristocratic title and estate along with the female subject’s exclusion from that system. While the first pair of novels entertain the possibility of mediated success in obtaining the loved object, either the estate itself or an effective substitute, the latter works become melancholically resigned to the restrictions that effectively disinherit the aristocratic eldest daughter. This escalating melancholia, often Freudian in its narrative presentation, directs the novels’ successive focus less toward the act of mourning the loss of the country house, of some version of Knole either real or imagined, and more to the vexing inability to both acknowledge the disinheritance and mourn the loss. In fact, the melancholic dynamic threatens to erase each of Sackville-West’s protagonists, and as her novels detail the advancing impact of this disinheritance, the female characters face literal extinction. Thus, the celebratory stance so often attributed to Sackville-West is, in these works, a far more critical and essentially abject perspective that demands compensation.     

Authenticity of self‐expression: Reinterpretation of female independence through the writings of simone de beauvoir

Based on the autobiographical writings of Simone de Beauvoir, this paper reinterprets the concepts of “dependency” and “independence” with respect to women's experiences. De Beauvoir, considered a strong and independent woman, continuously struggled for emotional independence, a struggle which she conceived as being against the need that drove her “impetuously toward another person”. However, a careful examination of de Beauvoir's inner voice as it is reflected in the subtext of her autobiographical writings, suggests that her true struggle revolves around a desire for authentic expression of her feelings and needs — rather than for separation from others.

As an adolescent de Beauvoir was caught between the expectations of her parents and her own needs, remaining the “dutiful daughter” at the expense of being false to her own self. This pattern of dependency reappears in her adult life, when she seems to be incapable of validating her feelings of jealousy and anger in her relationship with Sartre. Her means of coping with this problem is by giving it a literary expression, hence, she seems to gain a sense of freedom and independence by giving her repressed feelings an authentic outlet.

The re‐reading of de Beauvoir's autobiography in a new light of feminist criticism reveals a concept of dependency different from the need to rely on, receive help from, and be influenced by another. When one examines the meanings of dependency and independence through the female language of connectedness and women's values of care and involvement, the essential meaning of dependency shifts from the lack of self‐reliance to suppression of self‐expression, and from struggles for separation to struggles for one's personal truth and for authenticity in one's relations with others.     

Emmeline pankhurst: a biographical interpretation [1]

This article examines a dominant narrative about, Emmeline Pankhurst, leader of the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian Britain. It is claimed that this narrative is to be found in the influential book, The Suffragette Movement (1931), written by one of Emmeline's daughters, Sylvia. In this book, Sylvia portrays her mother as a traitor to the socialist cause, a leader who deliberately encouraged wealthy Conservative women to join the WSPU and who failed to mobilise the working classes, a misguided autocrat who supported a single-issue campaign, a weak woman easily swayed by her eldest daughter, Christabel, and a failed mother who neglected her less favoured children, Harry, Adela and Sylvia.     

Successful female aging for beginners: Carolyn Heilbrun/Amanda Cross and perspectives of gendered aging in The Players Come Again

Although Carolyn Gold Heilbrun (1926–2003) is best known for her best-selling mystery novels, published under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross, she also authored remarkable pieces of non-fiction which evidence an intense reflection upon female aging as well as her long-standing commitment to feminism. Works such as Reinventing Womanhood (1979), The Representation of Women in Fiction (1983), Writing a Woman's Life (1988), and The Last Gift of Time: Life Beyond Sixty (1997) explore the ways in which women in general and the author in particular experience the changes that maturity involves as an enriching process rather than as a path into decay and loss. This paper contends that these might perhaps shed a new light into her fiction as Amanda Cross, which includes The Players Come Again (1990). Taking her essays in feminism and literary criticism as a basis, my aim was to reveal the extent to which Heilbrun's commercial mystery novels represented a springboard to the theories she put forward in her essays, which vindicated the difficulties as well as the joys involved in a gendered experience of aging.     

Tracing the voice: Pandita Ramabai's life through her landmark texts

‘The silence of a thousand years is broken’ exulted Rachel Bodley's introduction to Pandita Ramabai's feminist manifesto The High‐caste Hindu Woman, which was published in 1887 and sold 9,000 copies internationally within a year.1 Rachel L. Bodley, ‘Introduction’ in Pandita Ramabai, The High‐caste Hindu Woman (Maharahstra State Board of Literature and Culture) Bombay, 1887, reprinted 1977, pp. i–xix (reference p. i). The 1888 reprint of the book in the United States mentions that it is the ‘tenth thousand’. View all notes Its author was instantly made into an icon in Western countries from the United States to Australia, to linger on in their collective memories, even as she was relegated to ‘silence’ in the social histories and discourses of India. This conundrum, pivotal to an understanding of her life and, I submit, rooted in her feminism, is still to be addressed. The numerous and informative biographies of Ramabai (23 April 1858–5 April 1922) have been located within two distinct paradigms: one projects her life, sometimes almost hagiographically, as a triumphant expression of the Christian impulse;2 Ramabai's Christian biographies in English include S.M. Adhav, Pandita Ramabai (The Christian Literature Society) Madras, 1979; Bodley, ‘Introduction’; Rajas K. Dongre and Josephine F. Patterson, Pandita Ramabai: a Life of Faith and Prayer (The Christian Literature Society) Madras, 1963; Nicol McNicol, Pandita Ramabai (Association Press) Calcutta, 1926; and Padmini Sengupta, Pandita Ramabai Saraswati: Her Life and Work (Asia Publishing House) Bombay, 1970. Her best‐known Marathi Christian biography is Devadatta Tilak, Maharashtrachi Tejaswini Pandita Ramabai (Nagarik Prakashan) Nashik, 1960. View all notes and the other valorises her advocacy of women's education while sidestepping the issue of religion.3 Ramabai's Hindu (or non‐Christian) biographies include Tarabai Sathe, Aparajita Rama (D.P. Nagarkar) Pune, 1975, and K.S. Thackeray, Pandita Ramabai (V.R. Baum) Mumbai, 1905 (both in Marathi); and A.B. Shah, ‘Introduction’ in A.B. Shah (ed.), The Letters and Correspondence of Pandita Ramabai (Maharashtra State Board of Literature and Culture) Bombay, 1977, pp. xi–xxxvi (in English). View all notes Both elide her feminism. Recent feminist scholarship on Ramabai has impressively interwoven multiple disciplinary and ideological strands, but tended to focus either on her passage to Christianity,4 Susan Glover, ‘Of Water and of the Holy Spirit’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 1995; Gauri Viswanathan, ‘Silencing Heresy’ in Outside the Fold: Conversion, Modernity and Belief (Oxford University Press) Delhi, 1998, pp. 118–52. View all notes or her reverse gaze at the West during international travels.5 Antoinette Burton, ‘Restless Desire’ in A. Burton, At the Heart of the Empire: Indians and the Colonial Encounter in Late‐Victorian Britain (University of California Press) Berkeley, 1998, pp. 72–109; Inderpal Grewal, ‘Pandita Ramabai and Parvati Athavale’ in I. Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Duke University Press) Durham, NC and London, 1996, pp. 179–229. Kumari Jayawardena, ‘Going for the Jugular of Hindu Patriarchy’ in Vicki L. Ruiz and Ellen Carol DuBois (eds), Unequal Sisters, 3rd edition (Routledge) New York and London, offers a variation on Ramabai's interaction with American women, in terms of American aid to her educational project in India and its inherent tensions. View all notes The parameters of her life and of her feminism have rarely been clearly outlined.6 I have tried to do this in Meera Kosambi, ‘Introduction’ in M. Kosambi (ed.), Pandita Ramabai through Her Own Words: Selected Works (Oxford University Press) Delhi, 2000, pp. 1–32; and Meera Kosambi, ‘Returning the American Gaze: Situating Pandita Ramabai’s American Encounter' in M. Kosambi (ed.), Pandita Ramabai's American Encounter: ‘The Peoples of the United States’, 1889, M. Kosambi (trans.) (Indiana University Press) Bloomington, 2003, pp. 1–46. View all notes In this article I propose to analyse her feminism by tracing her multiple ideological trajectories mainly through a discussion of some of her landmark writings, and then indicate the problematic of her representation of the highly troped ‘oppressed Indian woman’.     

Writing suffragette history: the contending autobiographical narratives of the pankhursts

On 10 October 1903 Emmeline Pankhurst founded the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU), an organisation that was to become the most notorious of the groupings campaigning for the parliamentary vote for women in Edwardian England. Their militant campaign was led by Emmeline and her eldest daughter, Christabel, the WSPU's Chief Organiser, the two younger Pankhurst daughters, Sylvia and Adela, also becaming active in the movement. While all four women wrote accounts of the campaign, the focus here is on the published autobiographical narratives of the three elder Pankhurst women – Emmeline's My Own Story (1914), Sylvia's The Suffragette Movement (1931) and Christabel's Unshackled (1959). In particular, the ways in which these women presented themselves and each other, and how they related the story of their private family relationships as mother, daughters and siblings, is explored     

Hearts and Minds: War Neurosis and the Politics of Madness in Anna Kavan's I Am Lazarus

Abstract

Anna Kavan's fictional portrayals of psychiatric breakdown and its treatment provide a unique perspective on the patient's experience of early to mid twentieth-century psychiatry. This article looks in detail at Kavan's time working with soldiers suffering from effort syndrome during the Second World War, observing how the solider-psychiatric patient becomes a figurehead for her radical politics in her Horizon article ‘The Case of Bill Williams’ (1944), and a prominent protagonist in her stories. Through close reading of her correspondence, her journalism and her wartime stories collected in I Am Lazarus (1945), it examines how the intersection of psychological trauma and physiological symptoms characteristic of effort syndrome surfaces in Kavan's writing of this period and in her own psychic responses to the war. It observes the importance of figurative language to her portrayal of war trauma and psychological breakdown, as her characters embody metaphor in their psychosomatic symptoms, and explores a twisted reconception of mind–body dualism prevalent throughout her writing of this period. It goes on to examine how the peculiar interaction of the physical and the psychological extends to the relationship between Kavan's characters and their external environment in her Blitz stories. Against the backdrop of the war-torn city, mind and body engage in ongoing conflict, affect and emotion bleed into her physical landscapes, and everyday objects become animated and hostile towards her protagonists.     

“I've always suffered from sirens'’: The cinema vamp and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood

The most important source for Robin Vote, the heroine of Djuna Barnes’ modernist novel, Nightwood (1936), is the vamp, whose heyday in the middle teens was also the period of Barnes’ highest productivity as a newspaper journalist. The vamp, as full‐grown femme fatale and “wild child,” appeared first in her early feature articles, later in short plays, stories, and poems. These and her stylish pen and ink sketches of vamps established her reputation as a “specialist.” She was one of the first to note that “vamping” was a habit of mind as well as a mode of fashion. Barnes’ interest in both manifestations of the vamp craze powered her conception of Robin Vote, a vamp malgré lui.     

Dreams by Day and Night: Kant,Freud and Ella Freeman Sharpe

Abstract: The poet and novelist Mathilde Blind (1841–96) is known to have been influenced by evolutionary theory, particularly in her epic poem The Ascent of Man (1889). However, critics have not yet noted the extent to which her depictions of the courtship plot in her less overtly evolutionary writings are indebted to Darwin's representations of animal mating rituals. Although Darwin's commentary on patterns of relationships in the animal world often reinforced stereotypes of masculine aggression and feminine coyness, feminist writers, including Blind, shifted the focus onto creatures, such as birds and spiders, whose mating behaviour disrupts these stereotypes. This article examines four pieces in which Blind re-imagines the courtship plot by applying imagery of other species to human relationships: her poems ‘The Song of the Willi’ (1871), The Heather on Fire (1886) and ‘The Teamster’ (1889), and her novel Tarantella (1885). By rewriting the courtship plot in this way, Blind contests the idea that middle-class gender relations are sanctioned by the natural world and highlights the variety of possible gender roles found in other species.     

Eating Attitudes and Weight-Loss Attempts in Female Adolescents and Their Mothers

This study examined the relationship between mothers' eating attitudes and weight-loss attempts and their adolescent daughters' body dissatisfaction and weight-loss attempts. Two modes of transmission of mother's values to the daughter (modeling and encouragement) and two forms of weight-loss behavior (moderate and extreme) were examined. Female 10th and llth graders and their mothers completed eating attitudes and behaviors questionnaires. Daughter's moderate weight-loss attempts (e.g., dietary restraint and exercising) and its associated body dissatisfaction were significantly associated with mother's encouraging her daughter to lose weight. In contrast, daughter's more extreme weight-loss behaviors (e.g., fasting, crash dieting, and skipping meals) were predicted by mother's reports of her own body dissatisfaction and mother's use of extreme weight-loss behaviors herself. These effects were not simply an artefact of daughter's body weight. Implications for theory and prevention were noted.     

Book review

Women in post‐Soviet society

Anna Rotkirch, Elina Haavio‐Mannila, eds. Women's Voices in Russia Today (Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing Co., 1996), pp. xii + 266. ISBN 1–85521–679–5, £39.50.

Hilary Pilkington, ed. Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (London: Routledge, 1996), xii + 306 pp. ISBN 0–415–13544–3, £14.99.     

The Day I Will Never Forget: an interview with Kim Longinotto

The documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto talks to Catherine Fowler about her latest film The Day I Will Never Forget (2003) about female genital mutilation (FGM) in Africa. Longinotto’s films have consistently interrogated our understanding of womens’ place in the world, and her latest film is no exception. She discusses how she found her subjects: Fardohsa, a midwife who has been campaigning against FGM, a group of girls who have (successfully) taken their parents to court in order to prevent FGM being practised, and Fouzia, a girl of nine who reads a poem that she wrote the day after she was circumcised, asking her mother to explain why she put her daughter through such a painful experience. Longinotto also discusses the ethical issues raised by her filming of a circumcision of two sisters, and the wider issues that her film engages: the powerless position of women in African societies, the confusion of religion and culture in discussions of FGM, and the impact of saying ‘no’ to this practice.     

Looking for Lela Simone: Singin’ in the Rain and microhistories of women’s sound work behind the scenes and below-the-line in Classical Hollywood Cinema

ABSTRACT

Despite her contribution to some of classical Hollywood’s most renowned musicals, the largely unknown Lela Simone exemplifies one of Hollywood’s ‘anonymous movie workers’ (Leo Rosten) working in the shadows of film history. As music co-ordinator for MGM’s Arthur Freed Unit (1944–1957), Simone’s exacting technical supervision of sound and music recording and post-production ensured films such as The Pirate (1948), On the Town (1949), An American in Paris (1951), Singin’ in the Rain (1952) and Gigi (1958) achieved perfect synchronisation and polished production values. Drawing on archival sources this article engages with the methodological and conceptual challenges of making visible the labour of women, like Simone, working below-the-line in technical roles. Taking Simone’s work on sound and music in the iconic ‘Singin’ in the Rain’ number as a case study, the article illustrates how a micro-historical focus can bring a previously invisible realm of women’s labour, and agency, into view.     

‘This accursed child’: the early years of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741-90) actress,philosophe and feminist

The childhood and early youth of Marie Madeleine Jodin (1741- 90) who later achieved some notoriety as an actress, correspondent of Denis Diderot and feminist, throws light on the lives of an artisan family in mideighteenth-century France and on the experience of one delinquent daughter. This study examines Marie Madeleine Jodin's life in relation to different categories of discrimination which she experienced; as a Protestant child, as a libertine daughter and as an actress. Her experience illustrates the workings of systems of authority employed in the eighteenth century to control young women as it impinged on an individual. It is argued that the violent familial and institutional conflicts of Jodin's early life were later reflected in her feminist treatise, Vues législatives pour les femmes (1790), which called for the establishment of a Women's jurisdiction over women. In particular her proposal to eliminate public prostitution and her attacks on the police des moeurs (morals police) have their origin in the bitter experience of her incarceration in a prison for prostitutes in her late teens. The collusion of authority (la police des moeurs) with les filles publiques came to symbolise for her the corruptions of the ancien régime     

Tenderness,Tittle-tattle and Truth in Mother–Daughter Letters: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,Mary Wortley Montagu Stuart,Countess of Bute,and Lady Louisa Stuart

The correspondence of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and her daughter and granddaughter is one of the most extensive collections of English mother–daughter letters for the period. Through it one can see the nature of their political and social activity and their sense and construction of their own social identities and responsibilities. But what is most distinct about the Montagu–Bute–Stuart sequence is their reflection on what mother–daughter letters meant.     

Anna Kavan’s Ice and Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain: Repetition with a Difference

Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.     

Effeminate Edmund Burke and the masculine voice of Mary Wollstonecraft

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the gendered and nationalist rhetorical strategies Mary Wollstonecraft used in her work The Vindication of the Rights of Man which was written as an open letter of response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France . While a number of scholars note Wollstonecraft’s adoption of a masculine voice in her systematic feminizing of Burke, this article also pays attention to the ways in which Wollstonecraft impugns Burke with the taints of being crypto-Catholic, Irish, and quasi-French. We notice how Wollstonecraft’s masculine voice is rational, combative, righteously passionate, middle-class, patriotically English and critically Protestant. We compare the fashioning of Wollstonecraft’s voice with contemporary political caricatures of John Bull and the cartoon depictions of Edmund Burke that appeared as Wollstonecraft was composing her VRM. Wollstonecraft’s VRM gained her considered attention and her critique of Burke’s character, (and what this article claims is her misreading of his aesthetic treatise), have been remarkably influential even to the present day. The characteristics of the distinct voice created in Wollstonecraft’s first Vindication are also evident in her second and more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman. However, the rhetorical commitments entailed in Wollstonecraft’s public voice created challenges for her arguments in the second Vindication that demand careful attention.     

Ghostly givings: Nao Bustamante’s melancholic conjuring of brownness

Centering the relationship between artist Nao Bustamante and the late theorist José Esteban Muñoz, this article explores the ghostly offerings of performative communal melancholia. Elaborating the importance of haunted communion as a site of relation, Bustamante’s performance furthers what we might understand as a Muñozian sense of brown. From her performance of Given Over to Want (1999–2018) to her contribution to the memorial evening Transnocheo for José (2014), Somewhere, My Love, Bustamante conjures a haunted body of work, casting within it an invitation to give oneself over to a mode of queer sociality that offers an otherwise organization of time, corporeality, and relationality and a hermeneutic for the mining of the pathological in furtherance of a theoretical project that offers the relational as a sustaining approach to the hostile present.     

Olive Banks (1923–2006): an appreciation

This Appreciation of Olive Banks (1923–2006) draws upon her memoir published in Women’s History Review, Vol. 8, No. 3, 1999, pp. 401–410, and upon the author’s recollections of and correspondence with her. Born into a solidly working‐class family, Olive Banks overcame the disadvantages of her social class background and gender to become an internationally recognised Professor of Sociology, well known for her contribution to the developing field of the sociology of education and especially for her pioneering work on the history of feminism. Her contribution to women’s history was important at a time when the discipline was developing as an academic field of study in higher education in the 1980s in the USA and Britain.