1750-1900 Document 4 South Asia

Womens Declining Economic Status in Colonial India

Source: Stearns, Peter N. Gender in World History. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000.) pp. 7879.
For women, by far the most important result of British intervention in India concerned the loss of
work opportunities thanks to policies and industrial competition that disadvantaged Indian production,
from the mid-eighteenth century well into the twentieth.
British businessmen and policymakers quickly realized that Indian manufacturing must be
discouraged if the colony was to turn a profit for the imperialists. In the eighteenth century, British laws
sought to limit imports of Indian manufactured goods, particularly cotton cloth, so that British industry
could gain ground. Reducing Indian production was a first step in the rapid expansion, and then
mechanization, of cotton output in Britain. What the British sought from India, instead of its traditional
manufacturing strength, involved expanded agricultural production, particularly of items such as teas and
spices, plus a direct market for British industry. By the early 1800s, tens of thousands of Indian
manufacturing workers, disproportionately women, were being thrown out of work, their manual methods
no rival for the steam-driven British factories. The result was growing impoverishment for many Indian
families and a severe reduction in the economic range available to women. Increasingly, domestic
service, begging and, above all, agriculture provided the main recourses for women. Hardships affected
men as well, but on the whole they were much more successful in developing alternatives. By the early
twentieth century, for example, in Bengal- one of Indias main industrial regions- up to 90% of all the
jobs in modernized industries (textiles, mining, metallurgy) were held by men. Womens relative status,
and often their bargaining power within families, was declining.
British officials found it hard to acknowledge these developments. They were out for profit, and
were hardly likely to reverse the imperialist economic advantage out of humanitarian concern for women.
But nineteenth-century British values were hostile to womens employment in any event. While there
were many women workers in British industry, middle-class opinion became even more unfavorable,
worrying about the results of work on sexual morality and family life. Regulation of womens work was
introduced by the 1850s, and in fact the percentage of women actively employed began to go down. The
process of reducing womens work opportunities and worsening their economic position relative to men
continued, through a mixture of explicit and implicit imperialist policies. In Bengal again, whereas
women had constituted about 25% of the labor force in manufacturing and sales in the 1880s, it was down
to 14% in 1931. Traditional opportunities (outside of agriculture) were shrinking, while jobs in the
growth sectors were almost impossible to come by. Though many men proved highly mobile in search of
new jobs, women were often confined to traditional village settings, where work activities became more
and more marginal.
In this context, opportunities for male superiority over women clearly increased. Moreover,
many Indian men, themselves buffeted by economic change, often resentful of imperialist measure that
reduced them to subservient status in government or the military, might look to traditional advantages
over women as compensation for the tensions they were experiencing.

Gender Roles, Nationalism and Colonial India

Source: Stearns, Peter N. Gender in World History. (London and New York: Routledge, 2000.) pp. 8586.
The rise of movements for greater national autonomy, and ultimately independence, reflected
many of the ambiguities of Indias interaction with the West by the late nineteenth century. Early
nationalist movements were run by men. They were strongly influenced by Western political ideals-the
idea of a nation and national loyalty was itself been male-dominated, looking to political and military
change but largely assuming a status quo where women were concerned. Indian nationalism also stressed
the validity of many aspects of Indian tradition, including Hinduism, which was a further potential
limitation on connections with changes in male-female roles and relationships. But nationalists did see
that some alterations in Hinduism were needed to create a modern nation, respectable in the eyes of
outside observers and capable of forging new levels of unity.
Many nationalist reform movements continued to think of women not as individuals, but as wives
and mothers. They urged improvements in womens health and even education, but in order to improve
their family service. Many stressed the need for better schools, attacking the colonial regime for failing to
provide funding and rigorous standards for womens education but they pushed for largely religious
(Hindu) schooling. Some argued for a bit of domestic training as a supplement. The idea was that
education would help women related to educated husbands and improve their talents as mothers-not that
education would promote women as individuals or prepare them for new kinds of work. This was a
tension that existed in Western debates over womens education as well, but the Indian discussion veered
toward a more traditionalist viewpoint:
"The character of girls' education should be different from that of boys in many essential respects. The
education we give our girls should not unsex them."
"With all the sorrow and pain that an educated Hindu feels for the present position of Indian womanhood,
he would not have his daughters and sisters go out into the world in search of employment as the girls in
Europe do, nor to speak of other excesses to which they are all liable by virtue of their conditions of life."
Yet even this halting approach had results. Upper-caste Indians, both male and female, gradually
became more accustomed to the idea of education of some type for women. Individual women, operating
within the orbit of the nationalist reform movements, were able to establish schools, and some of them
were quite successful, training increasing numbers of teachers among other things. A variety of womens
organizations and clubs also spun off from the reform movements. The male leaders, too, while
maintaining a fairly traditional view of women and their roles, did press for other changes, including
limitations on child marriage and better rights for widows-seen as vital to create a healthier family
atmosphere for all concerned.
These tentative beginnings blossomed into fuller nationalist embrace of womens educational,
political and legal rights as the twentieth century progressed.