Moving from the Margin and Dissolving Boundaries: Indian and British Women

Abstract

The pitfalls and tensions of historicizing one's scholarship and personal life were made dramatically apparent to me a few years ago when my department interviewed a candidate for a position in U.S. women's history whose research examined the ideology of second-wave feminism about sexuality. Listening to an intellectually complex presentation of the central themes and arguments of her forthcoming book which focused on the 1970s and 1980s had me, a self-identified second-wave feminist, saying that while some of her conclusions were valid, others certainly did not reflect what my friends and I were thinking or doing in Cincinnati. The relativity of historical reconstructions and individual memory (as well as the fallibility of human memory) reinforces that the following narrative is only one small tile in a complex mosaic that seeks to portray the evolu-tion of women's and gender history in the context of South Asia. These scattered reflections are meant to stimulate research that will produce multiple narratives—narratives that more precisely and fully document the entangled and diverse nature of the energetic intellectual initiative begun during the 1970s to add women and stir into the mixture of South Asian historiography. When we started to develop a women's studies program at the University of Cincinnati in 1974, Elizabeth Sato and I, with no formal education in women's history, volunteered to develop a course on the history of women in Asia. Finding little published research on Asian women, we assigned many primary sources, including memoirs of Western women in Asia who chronicled their self-proclaimed success to "uplift" Asian women. I was intrigued by the fact that, at the first United Nations International Women's Year Conference in Mexico City in 1975, many women activists from Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East expressed a deep distrust of and even outright hostility toward Western feminism. Their main criticism was the irrelevance of many Western feminist goals and ideologies for women living in non-Western countries, many of which had experienced European and American formal or informal colonial rule for centuries or at least decades. Moreover, the emergent field of women's history concentrated on elite white women in the United States and tended to homogenize women from beyond the United States [End Page 179] and Europe as some kind of exotic other. For example, at the Third Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in 1976, there was only one panel on "non-Western" women, which lumped together papers on women in Africa, India, and Latin America.