Q - "print culture improve women empowerment" how ? (3 marks)
Answers
culture improve women empowerment:
Women became important as readers as well as writers. Penny magazines were especially meant for women, as were manuals teaching proper behaviour and housekeeping. When hovels began to be written in the nineteenth century, women were seen as important readers. Some of the best-known novelists were women : Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot. Their writings became important in defining a new type of woman: A person with will, strength of personality, determination and the power to think.
(ii) Social reformers and novels created a great interest in women’s lives and emotions, there was also an interest in what women would have to say about their own lives. From the 1860s, a few Bengali women like Kailashbashini Debi wrote books highlighting the experiences of women-about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance, forced to do hard domestic labour and treated unjustly by the very people they served. In the 1880s, in present-day Maharashtra, Tarabai Shinde and Pandita Ramabai wrote with passionate anger about the miserable lives of upper-caste Hindu women, especially widows. A woman in a Tamil novel expressed what reading meant to women who were so greatly novel confined by social regulations : ‘For various reasons, my world is small … More than half my life’s happiness has come from books.