[Reader-list] Ideal Femininity and the Debate on Education in Women's Magazines: posting 3

[sabitha t p]

Women and the Issue of Education in Magazines up to
1920: Part I

I spent the months of May and June in Kerala
collecting my archival material. These included visits
to six archives: The Kerala Sahitya Academy library
and their magazine archives housed in Appan Thampuran
memorial library in Trichur, the Ulloor Smaraka
Granthasala in Trivandrum, the Kerala Studies archives
in the Kerala University library in Trivandrum, the
private collection of Dr. J. Devika housed in Sakhi
Women’s Resource Centre, and the Kerala Centre for
Historical Research archives, also in Trivandrum. From
these six centres I collected photocopies of several
issues of women’s magazines dating from 1892 to 1930.

After going through hundreds of issues of women’s
magazines (and essays relating to women’s issues in
other magazines) up to 1920, I have been trying to
grapple with this vast archival material
methodologically. Finally, I suppose, all of us find
our own methods of working with unwieldy archives. And
so did I. The way I worked after categorising groups
of essays on varying issues – such as education,
sexuality, hygiene, child-rearing and the reproductive
economy – was to take up each of these and further
classify them within each category using deductive
logic, thus establishing certain philosophical and
ideological links between these categories, and
finally to come to a mere two large categories
characteristic of modernity to which these arguments
belong.

I present here the debate on education (which in fact
mobilises a variety of arguments in support of ideal
femininities as well as includes within it issues such
as health, hygiene, motherhood, and sexual desire) as
a case in point. In the case of the debate on
education these categories are the various kinds of
arguments presented in support of or against educating
women. The categories are not mutually exclusive and,
more often than not, they co-exist in one essay. Also
to be noted is the fact that these categories often
apply to essays that support education as well as to
essays that oppose them. I will indicate these
arguments through illustrations from the essays first
and then come to the categories. This mirrors the
sequence in which I worked on these essays.

In the article titled “Women’s Education” by N.R.V.
that appeared in Vidyavinodini (a general magazine) in
Nov-Dec, 1897, we find that the author begins by
supporting women’s education. However the question
here really is what is the ideal kind of education
that he advocates and what notions of ideal femininity
arise from this. He (only men used acronyms for their
names) lists out what education for women entails in
this period: a) oral advice, b) education with the
help of books, and c) stitching, painting and physical
activities or, put another way, a) advice, b)
knowledge of the letters and c) physical education. 
N. R. V. argues that among these, knowledge of the
letters is not of any use to women since it is only
useful to those engaged in administrative activities.
Since women are naturally the weaker sex  - since a
part of their blood goes out every month – one cannot
expect them to undertake physically strenuous
activities such as political administration. Since
knowledge of world affairs is only useful if you take
up an administrative job and because this knowledge
will divest women of their natural shame and make them
promiscuous, women should not learn such things. He
also warns progressive husbands against appointing
male tutors for their wives since educated women will
be inclined towards adultery and liberty. Since the
domain of women is the domestic space and her primary
duties are taking care of the husband and children and
running the household, N.R.V. advocates that women may
only be given an oral and physical education.

This essay employs various kinds of arguments to
restrict women’s education to the management of the
domestic space. Primary among these are the moral and
the essentialist modes of arguments: what a woman IS
and what it is good for her to do. 
N. A. Amma’s article titled “A Refutation of the
Demerits of Education” that appeared in Vidyavinodini
in the Aug-Sep 1898 issue is in reply to the article
by N.R.V. Her essay begins like this: “A pundit is of
the opinion that an uneducated human being is just a
kind of animal. It is clear to us from experience that
it is true.” Immediately we recognise a shift of
register here in asserting the difference between
humans and animals primarily as that of rationality.
She counters N.R.V.’s essay point by point. “It is
said that the knowledge of letters is useful only in
managing affairs of the State.” She counters this
pragmatically expressed protest with her own pragmatic
points: a) half the educated men in this country are
not involved in managing the State, therefore it must
follow that education is useful even otherwise, b)
Queen Elizabeth, Queen Victoria etc. have been proven
to be better administrators than even men, and c) even
to manage domestic affairs efficiently you need
intelligence and education. About the assertion that
women are the weaker sex due to blood-loss every
month, N.A. Amma argues that this process in fact
cleanses a woman’s body of impurities. This helps
their bodies remain well and minds grow. Her reply to
the moral argument about women becoming licentious is
that since men are merely called ignorant if they
indulge in promiscuity, it cannot be different for
women. Therefore women as well as men require
knowledge to teach them discretion and virtuous
behaviour.

In this essay we notice how a pragmatic argument can
be employed to counter a pragmatic point and how a
moral argument can be deployed to counter another
moral argument. Amma uses the same vocabulary of
morality when it comes to sexuality, but to make a
contrary point. She also seems to suggest that indeed
if the role of women is in the domestic sphere, even
to manage that realm well, she requires an education.
However the central difference between the two essays
is the near absence of essentialism in Amma’s
argument. She seems to adopt a rational humanist
position to apply the same yardstick to men and women
based on the faculty they share: rational
intelligence.

In the essay by P.Kavamma that I had translated
earlier, we see some of these arguments repeated even
though her essay is written fifteen years after N.A.
Amma’s (in 1913). Kavamma’s essay shows an awareness
of the historical inevitability of learning English
when she says that everything around us is becoming
English. She argues too, that if a woman were to
travel she would need to know English even to
understand the names of places as seen on signboards
because Varanasi has become Benares and Mayyazhi has
become Mahe with Anglisication. She takes the rational
humanist position of N.A.Amma further by saying that
all of us, as citizens, have certain duties to perform
towards themselves and the community and these can be
carried out only if you are educated. The humanist
argument metamorphoses here into an argument that
recognises women as belonging to a common civil space
as men do.

In the essay titled “The Education that Women Need,”
that appeared in the June-July issue of Sarada, K.
Padmavati Amma first counters the point by V. Narayani
Amma in an earlier article that women cannot aspire to
higher education because even men find it difficult to
pass the Bachelor examinations. Padmavati Amma retorts
that there are no easy ways of acquiring a degree and
if Narayani Amma thinks it is impossible for women to
do that, she is mistaken since two Tamil Brahmin women
have just finished a B.A. degree successfully. She
then goes on a tirade against indigenous education.
She says that if one has studied under a native
teacher, one would not know if the region of Kerala
was to India’s north or south. Even the word “India”
would be unfamiliar to them and they would say that
the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Sea are the same. So
much for geography. As for History, they would think
that Hyder Ali was Tipu’s son and that Aurangzeb and
Queen Victoria lived in the same age. Padmavati Amma
argues that such an education would be useless for
women. She cautiously adds that she does mean that
women should be educated because it is useful for jobs
but because scholars are respected everywhere. Her
argument then can be characterised as an idealist
argument, which advocates the acquisition of knowledge
for the sake of knowledge itself. 
The fashioning of the woman, we find is not done
through a moral, humanist, idealist or pragmatic
discourse alone. In the next part I will demonstrate,
with illustrations, how the subjectivity of woman in
early modern Kerala is shaped by other modes of
arguments as well as the ones listed above and how
these modes of constructing a gendered subjectivity
arise from certain historical and cultural conditions.


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