“That's the Modern Girl”: Missionary Women and Modernity in Kolkata, c. 1907 - c. 1940

Abstract

In 1923, three young single western women—Margaret Read, Iris Wingate, and Eleanor Rivett—made an adventurous summer trip riding and trekking from Kalimpong in West Bengal, right up to Sikkim. Read and Wingate, both wearing riding breeches and with hair bobbed, were somewhat more adventurous, continuing their trip to Tibet. This was a holiday from their work in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta), the great cosmopolitan city of the British Raj in India. Surely these independent and mobile women were reminiscent of “the Modern Girl” that has been “singled out as a marker of ‘modernity’”. However, these women were not in the sites where “the Modern Girl” has hitherto been located, for they were working in the Christian missionary movement in India. Eleanor Rivett, an Australian and the oldest in the trio, was principal of United Missionary Girls High School (UMGHS) while Iris Wingate and Margaret Read, both British, were working with the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) in Kolkata.