Print Culture and the Modern World

(i) Writings about lives and feelings of Women: Lives and feelings of women began to be written in particularly vivid and intense ways. Women's reading, therefore, increased enormously in middle-class homes.
(ii) Women and liberal families: Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their womenfolk at home, and sent them to schools when women's schools were set up in the cities and towns after the mid-nineteenth century. Many journals began carrying writings by women, and explained why women should be educated. They also carried a syllabus and attached suitable reading matter which could be used for home-based schooling.
(iii) Women and Conservatives: Conservative Hindus believed that a literate girl would be widowed and Muslims feared that educated women would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances.

Reaction:
(i) Sometimes, rebel women defied such prohibition. In East Bengal, in the early nineteenth century, Rashsundari Debi, a young married girl in a very orthodox household, learnt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen. Later, she yrote her autobiography Amar Jiban which was published in 1876. It was the first full- length autobiography published in the Bengali language.
(ii) 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.
(iii) A woman in a Tamil novel expressed what reading meant to women who were so greatly confined by social regulations: ‘For various reasons, my world is small. More than half my life's happiness has come from books.
(iv) In 1926, Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, a noted educationist and literary figure, strongly condemned men • for withholding education from women in the name of religion.