Print Culture and the Modern World

(i) Women became important as readers as well as writers. Penny magazines were especially meant for women, as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and housekeeping. When hovels began to be written in the nineteenth century, women were seen as important readers. Some of the best-known novelists were women : Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot. Their writings became important in defining a new type of woman: A person with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think.
(ii) Social reformers and novels created a great interest in women's lives and emotions, there was also an interest in what women would have to say about their own lives. From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women-about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labour and treated unjustly by the very people they served. In the 1880s, in present-day Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passionate anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows. A woman in a Tamil novel expressed what reading meant to women who were so greatly novel confined by social regulations : ‘For various reasons, my world is small … More than half my life's happiness has come from books.
(iii) While Urdu, Tamil, Bengali and Marathi print culture had developed early, Hindi printing began seriously only from the 1870s. Soon, a large segment of it was devoted to the education of women. In the early twentieth century, journals, written for and sometimes edited by women, became extremely popular. They discussed issues like women's education, widowhood, widow remarriage and the national movement. Some of them offered household and fashion lessons to women and brought entertainment through short stories and serialised novels.