Women and print

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Women's reading rose enormously in middle-class homes. Print made books cheap and easy to get, so reading moved inside the home.
Two routes opened for girls:
Liberal husbands and fathers taught their womenfolk at home.
New schools for girls were set up after the mid-nineteenth century.
Journals did double duty. They printed writing by women, and they also printed syllabi (course lists) for home-based schooling — so a girl kept at home could still follow a course.

Hindu fear: a girl who learnt to read would become a widow. Literacy was treated as bad luck for the husband.
Muslim fear: an educated woman would be corrupted by reading Urdu romances (love stories).
Women broke the rule anyway:
A north-Indian Muslim girl secretly learnt to read and write Urdu against her family's wish.
In East Bengal, Rashsundari Debi learnt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen, where no one watched her.

She wrote Amar Jiban (1876) — the first full-length autobiography in the Bengali language. An autobiography is the story of your own life written by yourself.
Her name is catalogued in international library records as Rasasundari Dasi, 1809–1900 — she lived to about 91 [2].
She wrote the book at about age 60, and it is counted as the first known autobiography by an Indian woman [2].
Point to remember: she was not a reformer or a public speaker. She was a housewife. Print turned a private, kitchen-learnt skill into a public book.

Kailashbashini Debi — from the 1860s. She wrote that women were:
shut up inside the house,
kept ignorant on purpose,
made to do hard work,
and treated unjustly by the very families they served.
1880s, present-day Maharashtra — Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai. Both wrote with passionate anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows. Widows were the sharpest case: shaved head, plain food, no remarriage.
These were not gentle appeals. They were attacks in print, and print carried them beyond the town where they were written.

Hindi printing began seriously only from the 1870s — later than Bengali.
Soon a large part of Hindi print was given to women's education.
Early-twentieth-century journals were written for women, and sometimes edited by women. Their contents mixed:
big public questions — education, widowhood, widow remarriage, the national movement;
practical home matters — lessons on housekeeping;
serialised fiction (a novel printed a few pages at a time, one instalment per issue, so readers came back).
So the same magazine that taught a woman to run a kitchen also told her about the freedom struggle.

Print was not always on the side of reform. It was also used to fix women in place.
Ram Chaddha's Istri Dharm Vichar sold fast. It taught women how to be obedient wives.
The Khalsa Tract Society printed cheap booklets with a similar message. Many were written as dialogues (two people talking) on the qualities of a "good woman".
Exam point: the same technology — cheap print — served both the reformer and the conservative.

In 1926, she condemned men for keeping women out of education in the name of religion. Her argument: Islam itself grants women an equal right to education, so the men were using religion as an excuse.
She lived 1880–1932 and is treated as a pioneer of women's liberation in pre-Partition Bengal [3].
She got no formal schooling; she was taught at home, mainly by her elder brother [3].
In 1911 she founded the Sakhawat Memorial Girls' School in present-day Kolkata, aimed mainly at Muslim girls [3].
Her 1905 book Sultana's Dream imagines Ladyland — a country run by women, where men are shut in the "mardana" (the reverse of the zenana, the women's quarter) and the working day is only two hours [3][4].
UNESCO inscribed Sultana's Dream on its Memory of the World regional register in May 2024 [4].

Amar Jiban (1876) by Rashsundari Debi — first full-length autobiography in Bengali; she learnt to read in her kitchen.
Rashsundari Debi's dates in Library of Congress records: 1809–1900; wrote her life story at about age 60 [2].
Kailashbashini Debi — wrote from the 1860s on women confined at home and kept ignorant.
Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai — 1880s, present-day Maharashtra, wrote on the plight of upper-caste Hindu widows.
Hindi printing began seriously only from the 1870s; much of it went to women's education.
Istri Dharm Vichar — author Ram Chaddha, Punjab; taught wifely obedience.
Khalsa Tract Society — cheap booklets, often dialogues on the "good woman".
Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein, 1926 — attacked men for denying women education in religion's name.
Begum Rokeya: 1880–1932; founded Sakhawat Memorial Girls' School, 1911, Kolkata; wrote Sultana's Dream, 1905 [3].
Sultana's Dream entered UNESCO's Memory of the World regional register in May 2024 [4].

Print was a two-way weapon in the women's question. The same cheap press produced Tarabai Shinde's anger and the Khalsa Tract Society's obedience manuals. Technology did not decide the politics; the people who owned the press did.
Print turned private suffering into public argument. A woman's complaint inside a household reached no one. Once printed — Rashsundari Debi's kitchen literacy, Kailashbashini Debi on confinement — it became evidence that reformers, and later the national movement, could cite.
Literacy was feared because it broke control over information. Both Hindu and Muslim conservative fears (widowhood, Urdu romances) are really fears of a woman reading something her family did not choose for her. Print removed the family's gatekeeping over what a woman knew.
Women's journals fused domestic and national themes. Housekeeping lessons and serialised fiction sat next to widow remarriage and the national movement — this is how a mass female readership was pulled into nationalist politics without leaving the home.
Reform inside religious language, not against it. Begum Rokeya argued from Islam's own tenet of equal right to education [1], and built an actual school in 1911 [3] — showing reform worked best when it used the community's own vocabulary plus institutions, not print alone.