Publisher's Synopsis
This is an anthropological study and portrait of many courageous women who questioned and commented on their own lives and times in 19th and early 20th century Bengal. Excerpts from biographies, memoirs and letters have been used to bring them to life. What also comes alive is a pattern of the lives of upper middle class women in large and often joint families, and their relationships with the men of the family as well as with other women. As persons who held up family traditions in the face of rapid social change, these women reflected the social norms and values which were current at the time.;Some of the most sensitive accounts in this book are about the traumas of child marriage, of fathers and husbands trying, with great tenderness, to emancipate their daughters and wives in order to share some corner of their own lives, of educated daughters offering new possibilities to their mothers and also of the struggle of women to break down established barriers.
