[Reader-list] Historical and Cultural Conditions: The Agenda of Women's Education, posting 4

[sabitha t p]

Women and the Issue of Education in Women’s Magazines
up to 1920: Part II

In the essay titled “Malayali Women and Education”
that appeared in the Aug-Sep 1907 issue of Sarada,
Vasudevan Moosath advocates a knowledge of literature,
particularly in Sanskrit, as essential to a woman’s
education. He cites the example of mythical women such
as Gargi and Maitreyi to suggest that women should
become learned (references to mythical women scholars
abound in many essays). “What they mainly need is an
education in the puranas, poetry, drama, figures of
speech etc., particularly in Malayalam and a little in
English. In any case, the language that women need to
learn the most is Sanskrit
The source of all the books
that can refine the intellect and are particularly
pleasing to women is the Sanskrit language
Therefore
it is my belief that all women who naturally aspire to
the honour of a rasika  (aesthete) will agree with my
opinion.” In other essays too is os often stated that
an ideal education for women should include the
learning of music and embroidery. Women, even
respectable housewives, should now aspire to a degree
of refinement earlier thought to be the realm of the
veshya. This kind of argument is deployed by women too
in support of education, that when a woman can hold
her own in conversation with her educated husband,
there will be marital harmony and this will keep both
parties from straying away from the marriage. In the
context of the polyandrous and/or serially monogamous
Nair women of Kerala this becomes an important tool to
curtail her sexual freedom and regulate her sexuality
within an institution such as marriage. This is also
the time that the proposed Nair Marriage Bill (which
legalised Nair marriages and thus legally sanctioned
monogamy which was alien to Nairs till now) is being
hotly debated in the public sphere. The regulation of
the woman’s desire figures vastly in the debate on
education as much as in essays directly concerning the
Nair Marriage Bill. In essays concerning Mohini Attam
dancers, one gets a sense of the reformist need to
condemn a certain mode of aestheticising the female
body and an aestheticised representation of desire. A
project for an interior aestheticising of the woman
replaces the exterior aestheticising in reformist
literature just as cleanliness and refinement replace
excessive use of jewellery and make-up as markers of
the woman’s attractiveness in essays dealing with
physical appearance. 

The woman’s role as mother too comes in for
considerable scrutiny in the reformist agenda of
education. She becomes the primary tutor of her
children and therefore must needs be educated herself.
Padmavati Amma, in an essay in Sarada in 1905 argues
in favour of a woman’s education by pointing out the
need for it in order for the woman to be a
companionable wife and an efficient mother even as she
protests that “men are of the opinion that women are
meant only for reproduction.” The role of motherhood
demands that the woman be educated in matters of
healthcare, hygiene and medicine. In the essay titled
“The Role of Women in Education” in the 1913 Sep-Oct
issue of Lakshmibhai, K. Chinnamma writes about
child-care, “Their (children’s) food and clothes
should be regulated so that they will be able-bodied
and healthy. They should be given food that is good
for their brains and that increases their intelligence
rather than slows it down. It is very essential that
there be cleanliness in their clothing.” Chinnamma
goes on to advocate special food for children, thereby
bringing a quasi-scientific argument to recognise
childhood as a separate state of being from adulthood
and to recognise the educated woman’s role in
child-care. There are numerous essays pointing out the
advantages of women being given a scientific
education. In these essays we also see a moral
argument coming up because it is repeatedly stated
that only an educated mother will have the necessary
value-system to impart to her children and make them
capable of always choosing the path of righteousness,
for their own sake and for the sake of the community
they live in.

With the beginning of the nationalist movement we see
the emergence of new discourses shaping ideal
femininity. The essay I had translated earlier by
Puthelath Govinda Menon in Lakshmibhai in 1930 titled
“Two Words to our Girl children,” warns women that
English education was introduced in India to create
go-betweens for the British administrative system and
that even men find it very hard to subsist with what
they earn as clerks and lawyers. At the end of the
essay he exhorts women to take up spinning and
weaving, “an activity you can easily undertake and
that will enlighten the whole country”. Govinda Menon
concludes, “May the sacred clothes that your pure
hands weave spread throughout Kerala.” Here we see a
new public role imagined for women that does not
disrupt the essentialist gendered division of space
into the public and the domestic.

However, this use of the nationalist discourse to keep
women away from a modern education seems to have been
anticipated by K. Padmavati Amma as early as in 1918.
In the essay titled “Do Our Women Need English
Education?” in the Aug-Sep issue of Lakshmibhai – a
curious essay that presents the opposite case
satirically – she says that the retrogressive Panchu
Menon and Pangassa Menon (two humorous characters from
early reformist Malayalam novels, Indulekha and
Meenakshi, both of which advocate modern education for
women) seem to have woken up again to protest against
the changes that are happening due to women’s
education. They ascribe these changes to a “bhramam”
(craze) brought on by English education. She lists the
various complaint that they have against women
educated in the Western manner: that they wake up
late, expect maidservants to serve them breakfast in
bed, do not care for the household or the well-being
of the husband, insist on wearing a blouse, do not
wear jewellery that so attracts men and thus lack
sringara, read novels, play the fiddle and sing
Hindustani songs. She adds that since everyone is in
the grip of ‘Swadeshi’ and ‘Home Rule’ now, this is an
opportune time to ask women to give up English and
everything associated with it. She ends her essay with
a wake-up call to women, “Respectable sisters! You
should not be disheartened by such gossip and malice
or be frightened by the likes of Panchu Menon and
Pangassa Menon. Instead, you should put all your
effort into acquiring a relevant English education and
fulfilling your obligations arising from such an
education.” Like in the earlier essay by P.Kavamma,
Padmavati Amma too recognises the colonial
inevitability of an English education and seems to
delink English education from servility to the
English. Instead she associates English education with
access to the radicalism of European liberal thought.

What I have attempted to demonstrate here are the
numerous kinds of arguments mobilised in the debate on
women’s education and how they discursively construct
certain notions regarding femininity. I will take
these arguments up again in the course of my
presentation and will attempt to contextualise it
further in the exciting public sphere of late
nineteenth-early twentieth century Kerala.


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