Women's education in colonial Tamil Nadu, 1900-1930: the coalescence of patriarchy and colonialism.

Abstract

This paper presents a theoretical framework for approaches to women's education and employs this framework in a discussion of the effects of patriarchy and colonialism on the educational process in Western Europe and North America as adapted in India. According to Sylvia Walby, patriarchy is the system of social structures and practices in which men dominate, oppress, and exploit women, while colonialism depends on a relationship in which the colonized group is assumed to be intellectually, morally, and physically inferior to the colonizer. It is on the perspectives of these two systems that educational policy in Britain was based then imported to India, subsequently finding expression in various official and unofficial pronouncements. Most important, over the course of time educated Indian men in their official capacity endorsed and adapted these same pronouncements while concretizing policies relating to women's education. After the framework, an overview of schooling in Madras Presidency in the 1920s is presented. The impetus for the development of formal education for women had more to do with the notion of imparting a far greater impulse to the educational and moral tone of the people in general, and to men in particular, than with the espousal of equality of educational opportunities for women. Many issues, each of which needs to be explored further to get a picture of the complexity of the subject, compounded the problem of the expansion of women's education.