Punarvivaham vs. Pativratyam: Pulugurta Lakshmi Narasamamba and the Widow Remarriage Question in Colonial Andhra

The question of widow remarriage, which occupied an important place in the social reform movement, was hotly debated in colonial Andhra. Women joined the debate in the early twentieth century. There was a conservative section of women, which bitterly opposed the widow remarriage movement and attacked the social reformers, both women and men. Pulugruta Lakshmi Narasamamba led this group of women. Lakshmi Narasamamba treated widow remarriage (punarvivaham) with contempt and termed it as an affront to the fidelity (pativratyam) of Hindu women. According to her, widow remarriage was equal to ‘prostitution’, and the widows who married again could not be granted the status of kulanganas (respectable or chaste women). Lakshmi Narasamamba’s stand on the question of widow remarriage led to the emergence of a fiery and protracted controversy among women which eventually led to the division of the most famous women’s organization, the Shri Vidyarthini Samajamu. She opposed not only widow remarriage but also post-puberty marriage and campaigned in favour of child marriage. This article describes the whole debate on the widow remarriage question that took place among women. It is based on the primary sources, especially the woefully neglected women’s journals in the Telugu language.

Figurations of the Feminine in the Early French Women's Press, 1758-1848

This book examines the origins of the early French women’s press and traces the evolving representations of womanhood that appear over the first ninety years of women’s journals in France. It argues that this critically neglected medium offers a key source of information on French women’s personal and political aspirations by giving us a privileged insight into their everyday lives. The early women’s press represented an important means of allowing women to access and contribute to the key cultural, intellectual and political debates which dominated French society at the time and which directly influenced their position within it. This book highlights the political, feminist potential of this medium written by women for women. Through textual analyses of different ‘generic’ subsections, whether the literary journal, the fashion journal, the domestic press or more explicitly politicised outputs, this book challenges the critical commonplaces that have been applied to the women’s press, both in France and elsewhere. As the first comprehensive study in English of these origins, this book demonstrates the political richness of this medium and the key perspectives it gives us on female self-expression and on the everyday lives of women from across the class spectrum during this key historical period.

Gender Identities in Women's and Feminist Periodicals in Serbia

Slobodanka Peković, Časopisi po meri dostojanstvenog ženskinja: Ženski časopisi na početku 20. veka (Journals suited for respectable women: Women’s journals from the early twentieth century), Novi Sad-Beograd: Matica srpska, Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2015, 378 pp., RSD 550 (paperback), ISBN 978-86-7946-154-4.Stanislava Barać, Feministička kontrajavnost: Žanr ženskog portreta u srpskoj periodici 1920–1941 (The feminist counterpublic: A genre of woman’s portrait in the Serbian periodical press from 1920 to 1941), Beograd: Institut za književnost i umetnost, 2015, 436 pp., RSD 1100 (paperback), ISBN 978-86-7095-224-9.