Suttee Sainthood through Selflessness

2011 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 281-299 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susmita Roye
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Indian Woman ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Political Interpretation

The immolation of Hindu widows has generated much horror while remaining tenaciously mixed with clandestine admiration. Reported in many eyewitness accounts and literary works, the topic has given rise to highly contested sociocultural, legal and ideological debates, strongly linked to women’s rights. But the root question has not gone away: is suttee/sati just painful female victimisation or can it also reflect powerful female agency and the power of devotion? This article examines two literary works, Maud Diver’s Lilamani, in which an Englishwoman unreservedly idolises a suttee, and Krupabai Satthianadhan’s Kamala, where an Indian woman expresses deep pride in sutteehood. Engaging in a search for deeper meanings, this article asks what makes these two women writers revere a suttee so totally. Can one really be a suttee-saint through selflessness, or are there some deeper meanings yet to be uncovered? A wider political interpretation is suggested to re/present the root meaning of suttee.

Mothering India

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susmita Roye
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Social Reform ◽  
Women's Fiction ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
British India ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Time Period ◽  
Indian Writing In English ◽  
Gender Based

Mothering India concentrates on early Indian women’s fiction, not only evaluating their contribution to the rise of Indian Writing in English (IWE), but also exploring how they reassessed and challenged stereotypes about Indian womanhood, thereby partaking in the larger debate about social reform legislations relating to women’s rights in British India. Early women’s writings are of immense archival significance by virtue of the time period they were conceived in. In wielding their pens, these trend-setting women writers (such as Krupa Satthianadhan, Shevantibai Nikambe, Cornelia Sorabji, Nalini Turkhud, among others) stepped into the literary landscape as ‘speaking subjects,’ refusing to remain confined into the passivity of ‘spoken-of objects.’ In focusing on the literary contribution of pioneering Indian women writers, this book also endeavours to explore their contribution to the formation of the image of their nation and womanhood. Some of the complex questions this book tackles are: Particularly when India was forming a vague idea of her nationhood and was getting increasingly portrayed in terms of femaleness (via the figure of an enchained ‘Mother India’), what role did women and their literary endeavours play in shaping both their nation and their femininity/feminism? How and how far did these pioneering authors use fiction as a tool of protest against and as resistance to the Raj and/or native patriarchy, and also to express their gender-based solidarity? How do they view and review the stereotypes about their fellow women, and thereby ‘mother’ India by redefining her image? Without studying women’s perspective in the movement for women’s rights (as expressed in their literature) and their role in ‘mothering India’, our knowledge and understanding of those issues are far from holistic. A detailed study of these largely understudied, sadly forgotten and/or deliberately overlooked ‘mothers’ of IWE is long overdue and this book aims to redress that critical oversight.

“Founded upon the Rock Which Is Christ”

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maeve Brigid Callan
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Female Agency ◽  
Women's Voices ◽  
Wide Range

While little can be said with certainty about Irish Christianity’s first few centuries, Patrick’s concern and respect for women provide powerful testimony about gender relations and female agency in the fifth century. He acknowledged male ecclesiastical hierarchy outside of Ireland, but in country his primary partners in the faith were female. His seventh-century and subsequent biographers proclaim his dominance over virtually everything and everyone in Ireland, but they allow us to hear echoes of women’s voices and spheres of activity. Patrician texts, which serve primarily male interests, attest to the wide range of possibilities for women in the Irish church and proclaim women’s rights over both their property and themselves, as they also show how those rights were negotiated within the early Irish church.

Tunisia

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douja Mamelouk
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Women's Rights ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
The Novel ◽  
French Protectorate ◽  
Independence Era

This chapter focuses on the development of the novel genre in Tunisia. In 1881, Tunisia was transferred from Ottoman rule to French Protectorate, with important implications for the country linguistically and culturally. The difficulties of publishing and the development of nationalism under colonial rule influenced linguistic choices as well as the themes of the novels produced. In the post-independence era, nationalism, secularism, women’s rights, and patriotism became the themes of Tunisian literature in both Arabic and French. Censorship continued to be an issue for writers. This chapter examines the beginnings of the Arabic novel in Tunisia and considers works by Arabophone women writers. Finally, it looks at a number of Francophone novels, as well as novels published after the 2011 revolution.

John Stuart Mill Translated by Siegmund Freud

1999 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 195-205 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Molnar
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
John Stuart Mill ◽  
Women’S Rights

Freud's translation of J.S. Mill involved an encounter with the traditions of British empirical philosophy and associationist psychology, both of which go back to Locke and Hume. The translation of Mill's essay on Plato also brought Freud into contact with the philosophical controversy between the advocates of intuition and faith and the advocates of perception and reason. A comparison of source and translated texts demonstrates Freud's faithfulness to his author. A few significant deviations may be connected with Freud's ambiguous attitude to women's rights, as advocated in the essay The Enfranchisement of Women. Stylistically Freud had nothing to learn from Mill. His model in English was Macaulay, whom he was also reading at this period.

The Transnational Women's Rights Movement and the World Economy

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-173 ◽  
Author(s):  
Heidi E. Rademacher
Keyword(s):  
Women's Rights ◽  
Small Body ◽  
World System ◽  
World Society ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Social Movement Organizations ◽  
Global Movement ◽  
Negative Effect ◽  
Society Perspective ◽  
The Impact

Promoting the ratification of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) was a key objective of the transnational women's movement of the 1980s and 1990s. Yet, few studies examine what factors contribute to ratification. The small body of literature on this topic comes from a world-society perspective, which suggests that CEDAW represented a global shift toward women's rights and that ratification increased as international NGOs proliferated. However, this framing fails to consider whether diffusion varies in a stratified world-system. I combine world-society and world-systems approaches, adding to the literature by examining the impact of women's and human rights transnational social movement organizations on CEDAW ratification at varied world-system positions. The findings illustrate the complex strengths and limitations of a global movement, with such organizations having a negative effect on ratification among core nations, a positive effect in the semiperiphery, and no effect among periphery nations. This suggests that the impact of mobilization was neither a universal application of global scripts nor simply representative of the broad domination of core nations, but a complex and diverse result of civil society actors embedded in a politically stratified world.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document