Hostname: page-component-77f85d65b8-6c7dr Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-03-28T01:08:13.578Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Global New Woman and the Invention of Modern Feminism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 April 2024

Jesse Cordes Selbin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

New Woman literature is typically regarded as an Anglo-American invention, but this assessment ignores the contributions of global authors who shaped the genre's rise in the decades before its more familiar Western emergence. This essay demonstrates that in the late nineteenth century, Indian women authors crafted both fictional and nonfictional writings that anticipate, expand, and complicate standard narratives of the New Woman. These understudied texts—by authors like Toru Dutt, Krupa Satthianadhan, Shèvantibāi Nikambé, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain—also centrally shaped mainstream Indian feminism while occluding alternative counterstrains. New Woman literature and the wider feminist movement cannot be understood without analyzing these transnational incarnations; indeed, I argue, both had transimperial origins. The works analyzed here reframe early feminism as an international enterprise—one more diverse and global in scope than most existing scholarship recognizes.

Information

Type
Essay
Information
PMLA , Volume 139 , Issue 1 , January 2024 , pp. 32 - 49
Copyright
Copyright © 2024 The Author(s). Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Article purchase

Temporarily unavailable

References

Works Cited

Amīn, Qāsim. The Liberation of Women and The New Woman: Two Documents in the History of Egyptian Feminism. Translated by Peterson, Samiha Sidhom, Oxford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Anagol, Padma. The Emergence of Feminism in India, 1850–1920. Ashgate Publishing, 2005.Google Scholar
Anjaria, Ulka. Introduction. A History of the Indian Novel in English, edited by Anjaria, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 1–30.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Apter, Emily. Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability. Verso, 2013.Google Scholar
Aravamudan, Srinivas. Tropicopolitans: Colonialism and Agency, 1688–1804. Duke UP, 1999.Google Scholar
Ardis, Ann. New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism. Rutgers UP, 1990.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arora, Bharti. “Democratising the Language of Feminist Expression: English and Bhasha Contexts of Indian Women's Writing.” English Studies in India: Contemporary and Evolving Paradigms, edited by Mahanta, Banibrata and Sharma, Rajesh Babu, Springer Singapore, 2018, pp. 109–20.Google Scholar
Bagchi, Barnita. “Analyzing Toru Dutt's Oeuvre Today: How a Transnational Literary-Educational Case from Colonial India Can Enrich Our Conception of Transnational History.” The Transnational in the History of Education, edited by Fuchs, E. and Roldán Vera, E., Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, pp. 179–99.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bagchi, Barnita. “‘Because Novels Are True, and Histories Are False’: Indian Women Writing Fiction in English, 1860–1918.” A History of the Indian Novel in English, edited by Anjaria, Ulka, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 59–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bagchi, Barnita. “Ladylands and Sacrificial Holes: Utopias and Dystopias in Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Writings.” The Politics of the (Im)Possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered, edited by Bagchi, Sage, 2012, pp. 166–78.Google Scholar
Banerjee, Sukanya. “Troubling Conjugal Loyalties: The First Indian Novel in English and the Transimperial Framework of Sensation.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 42, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 475–89.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banerjee, Sukanya, et al. “Introduction: Widening the Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 49, no. 1, 2021, pp. 1–26.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Beetham, Margaret, and Heilmann, Ann, editors. New Woman Hybridities: Femininity, Feminism, and International Consumer Culture, 1880–1930. Routledge, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Boehmer, Elleke. Empire, the National, and the Postcolonial, 1890–1920: Resistance in Interaction. Oxford UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Boehmer, Elleke. Indian Arrivals, 1870–1915: Networks of British Empire. Oxford UP, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Bonea, Amelia. The News of Empire: Telegraphy, Journalism, and the Politics of Reporting in Colonial India, c. 1830–1900. Oxford UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Borthwick, Meredith. The Changing Role of Women in Bengal, 1849–1905. Princeton UP, 1984.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. U of North Carolina P, 1994.Google Scholar
Burton, Antoinette. Empire in Question: Reading, Writing, and Teaching British Imperialism. Duke UP, 2011.Google Scholar
Carroll, Alicia. New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond. U of Virginia P, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chander, Manu Samriti [@profchander]. “What are the monuments to racism in your field? / the norton anthology of english literature.” Twitter, 5 July 2020.Google Scholar
Chapman, Alison. “Internationalising the Sonnet: Toru Dutt's ‘Sonnet—Baugmaree.’” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 42, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 595–608.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chapman, Georgiana [published as Mrs. E. F. Chapman]. Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women. W. H. Allen, 1891.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Partha. “The Nationalist Resolution of the Women's Question.” Recasting Women: Essays in Colonial History, edited by Sangari, Kumkum and Vaid, Sudesh, Rutgers UP, 1990, pp. 233–53.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Rimi. Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India during the Raj. Oxford UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Chatterjee, Ronjaunee, et al. “Undisciplining Victorian Studies.” Victorian Studies, vol. 62, no. 3, spring 2020, pp. 369–91.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Chattopadhyay, Bodhisattva. Bangla Kalpavigyan: Science Fiction in a Transcultural Context. 2013. U of Oslo, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Chaudhuri, Rosinka. “The Dutt Family Album and Toru Dutt.” A History of Indian Literature in English, edited by Mehrotra, Arvind Krishna, Columbia UP, 2003, pp. 53–69.Google Scholar
Choi, Hyaeweol. New Women in Colonial Korea: A Sourcebook. Routledge, 2013.Google Scholar
Codell, Julie F., editor. The Nineteenth-Century Press in India. Special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review. Vol. 37, no. 2, summer 2004.Google Scholar
Cooper, Brittney. Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women. U of Illinois P, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cordell, Sigrid Anderson. “Edith Maturin and the ‘Wide World Magazine’: New Woman Rewritings of Imperial Adventure.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 42, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 457–74.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cunningham, Gail. The New Woman and the Victorian Novel. Macmillan Press, 1978.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Darmesteter, James. Essais de littérature anglaise. Librarie C. H. Delagrave, 1883.Google Scholar
Das, Harihar. The Life and Letters of Toru Dutt. Oxford UP, 1921.Google Scholar
Dutt, Toru. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. K. Paul, Trench, 1882.Google Scholar
Dutt, Toru. Bianca; or, The Young Spanish Maiden. Thacker, Spink, 1878.Google Scholar
Dutt, Toru. The Diary of Mademoiselle D'Arvers. Edited by Kamala, N., Penguin Books, 2005.Google Scholar
Eldredge, Helen Woodsmall. The New Woman of India. Foreign Department National Board of the Young Women's Christian Associations of the United States, 1919.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. Middlemarch. Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Eliot, George. The Mill on the Floss. Oxford UP, 1980.Google Scholar
Felski, Rita, and Friedman, Susan Stanford, editors. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fisher, H. A. L. Foreword. Das, pp. vii–ix.Google Scholar
Forbes, Geraldine. The New Cambridge History of India: Women in Modern India. Cambridge UP, 1996.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gandhi, Leela. Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siècle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship. Duke UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Ghosal, Swarnakumari Devi. An Unfinished Song. Macmillan, 1913.Google Scholar
Gibson, Mary Ellis. Science Fiction in Colonial India, 1835–1905. Anthem, 2019.Google Scholar
Gibson, Mary Ellis, and Rudy, Jason. “Colonial and Imperial Writing.” The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women's Writing, edited by Peterson, Linda, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 189–205.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gopal, Priyamvada. The Indian English Novel: Nation, History, and Narration. Oxford UP, 2009.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gosse, Edmund. Introduction. Dutt, Ancient Ballads, pp. vii–xxvii.Google Scholar
Gray, Alexandra. Self-Harm in New Woman Writing. Edinburgh UP, 2018.Google Scholar
Grigg, Elizabeth L. “Memoir of Krupabai Satthianadhan.” Satthianadhan, Kamala, pp. i–xxxvii.Google Scholar
Heaney, Emma. The New Woman: Literary Modernism, Queer Theory, and the Trans Feminine Allegory. Northwestern UP, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Heilmann, Ann, editor. Feminist Forerunners: New Womanism and Feminism in the Early Twentieth Century. Pandora, 2003.Google Scholar
Heilmann, Ann “The New Woman in the New Millennium: Recent Trends in Criticism of New Woman Fiction,” Literature Compass, vol. 3, no. 1, Jan. 2006, pp. 32–42.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hensley, Nathan K. “The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Tenth Edition: Volume E, the Victorian Age: Reader's Comments.” Nathan K. Hensley, 21 July 2020, www.nathankhensley.net/blog/category/all/3.html.Google Scholar
hooks, bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Routledge, 1981.Google Scholar
Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat. Motichur: “Sultana's Dream” and Other Writings. Translated by Ray, Ratri and Bandyopadhyay, Prantosh, Oxford UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Hu, Ying. Tales of Translation: Composing the New Woman in China, 1899–1918. Stanford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Jagannathan, Meera. “The Enigma of Toru Dutt.” Dalhousie French Studies, vol. 94, spring 2011, pp. 13–25.Google Scholar
Jayawardena, Kumari. The White Woman's Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule. Routledge, 1995.Google Scholar
Joshi, Priti. Empire News: The Anglo-Indian Press Writes India. State U of New York P, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Joshi, Priya. In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India. Columbia UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jusová, Iveta. The New Woman and the Empire. Ohio State UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Kamala, N. “Toru Dutt: Ecrivaine francophile et francophone.” Synergies Inde, vol. 4, 2009, pp. 101–13.Google Scholar
Kamra, Sukeshi. The Indian Periodical Press and the Production of Nationalist Rhetoric. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kothari, Rita. “Caste in a Casteless Language? English as a Language of ‘Dalit’ Expression.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 48, no. 39, 28 Sept. 2013, pp. 60–68.Google Scholar
Liggins, Emma. Odd Women: Spinsters, Lesbians, and Widows in British Women's Fiction, 1850s–1930s. Manchester UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Linton, Eliza Lynn. “The Wild Women as Social Insurgents.” Nineteenth Century, vol. 30, 1891, pp. 596–605.Google Scholar
Logan, Deborah. The Indian Ladies’ Magazine, 1901–1938: From Raj to Swaraj. Lehigh UP, 2017.Google Scholar
Lokugé, Chandani, editor. Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel in English by an Indian Woman. Oxford UP, 1998.Google Scholar
Lokugé, Chandani Toru Dutt: Collected Prose and Poetry. Oxford UP, 2006.Google Scholar
Lootens, Tricia. “Between Treasuries and the Web: Compendious Victorian Poetry Anthologies in Transition.” Victorian Studies, vol. 47, no. 4, summer 2005, pp. 577–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Lowy, Dina. The Japanese ‘New Woman’: Images of Gender and Modernity. Rutgers UP, 2007.Google Scholar
Mahmood, Saba. Politics of Piety. Princeton UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Miller, Florence Fenwick. “A Book of the House: Review of Kamala and Saguna by Krupabai Satthianadhan.” The Woman's Signal, 13 June 1895, p. 379.Google Scholar
Moitra, Swati. “Reading Together: ‘Communitarian Reading’ and Women Readers in Colonial Bengal.” Hypatia, vol. 32, no. 2, summer 2017, pp. 627–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mufti, Aamir R. Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures. Harvard UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mukherjee, Meenakshi. The Perishable Empire: Essays on Indian Writing in English. Oxford UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Nayar, Pramod K. “Subalternity and Translation: The Cultural Apparatus of Human Rights.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 46, no. 9, 2011, pp. 23–26.Google Scholar
Nikambé, Shèvantibāi. Ratanbai: A Sketch of a Bombay High Caste Hindu Young Wife. Marshall Brothers, Keswick House, 1895.Google Scholar
O'Dell, Benjamin D. “Beyond Bengal: Gender, Education, and the Writing of Colonial Indian History.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 42, no. 3, Sept. 2014, pp. 535–51.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pan, Anandita. Mapping Dalit Feminism: Towards an Intersectional Standpoint. Sage Publishing India, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Paranjape, M. “Vernacularizing the ‘Master’ Tongue: Indian English and Its Contexts.” Indian English and Vernacular India, edited by Paranjape and G. J. V. Prasad, Pearson, 2010, pp. 91–110.Google Scholar
Parinitha, Shetty. “‘Re-formed’ Women and Narratives of the Self.” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature, vol. 37, no. 1, 2006, pp. 45–60.Google Scholar
Patterson, Martha H. The American New Woman Revisited: A Reader, 1894–1930. Rutgers UP, 2008.Google Scholar
“Poetry—Sonnets from the French of Le Compte F. De Gramont, Translated by Miss Toru Dutt.” The Calcutta Review, vol. 65, 1877, pp. 418–21.Google Scholar
Ramabai, Pandita. The High-Caste Hindu Woman. Jas. B. Rodgers Printing, 1887.Google Scholar
Rani, Suneetha. “Women's Worlds in the Novels of Kandukuri and Gilman.” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, vol. 14, no. 2, 2012, pp. 1–8.Google Scholar
Ray, Bharati. Early Feminists of Colonial India: Sarala Devi Chaudhurani and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. Oxford UP, 2002.Google Scholar
Rich, Charlotte J. Transcending the New Woman: Multiethnic Narratives in the Progressive Era. U of Missouri P, 2009.Google Scholar
Richardson, LeeAnne. Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Empire. UP of Florida, 2006.Google Scholar
Rosenberg, Leah. “The New Woman and ‘The Dusky Strand’: The Place of Feminism and Women's Literature in Early Jamaican Nationalism.” Feminist Review, vol. 95, 2010, pp. 45–63.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Shampa. Gender and Criminality in Bangla Crime Narratives: Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Roy, Shampa. True Crime Writings in Colonial India: Offending Bodies and Darogas in Nineteenth-Century Bengal. Routledge India, 2021.Google Scholar
Roye, Susmita. Mothering India: Women's Fiction in English Shaping Cultural History (1890–1947). Oxford UP, 2020.Google Scholar
Russell, Mona L. Creating the New Egyptian Woman: Consumerism, Education, and National Identity, 1863–1922. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Saha, Poulomi. An Empire of Touch: Women's Political Labor and the Fabrication of East Bengal. Columbia UP, 2019.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sardar, Sunil, and Paul, Victor. “Pioneering Engaged Writing: Savitribai Phule's Poetry.” A Forgotten Liberator: The Life and Struggles of Savitribai Phule, edited by Mani, Braj Ranjan and Sardar, Pamela, Mountain Peak, 2008, pp. 65–69.Google Scholar
Sarkar, Tanika. “Gendering of Public and Private Selves in Colonial Times.” India and the British Empire, edited by Peers, Douglas M. and Gooptu, Nandini, Oxford UP, 2012, pp. 284–312.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarkar, Tanika. “Many Faces of Love: Country, Woman, and God in The Home and the World.” Rabindranath Tagore's The Home and the World: A Critical Companion, edited by Datta, Pradip Kumar, Anthem Press, 2003, pp. 27–44.Google Scholar
Sasaki, Motoe. Redemption and Revolution: American and Chinese New Women in the Early Twentieth Century. Cornell UP, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Satthianadhan, Krupa. Kamala: A Story of Hindu Life. Srinivasa, Varadachari, 1894.Google Scholar
Satthianadhan, Krupa. Miscellaneous Writings. Srinivasa, Varadachari, 1896.Google Scholar
Satthianadhan, Krupa. Saguna: A Story of Native Christian Life. Srinivasa, Varadachari, 1895.Google Scholar
Schaffer, Talia. “The Victorian Novel and the New Woman.” The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel, edited by Rodensky, Lisa, Oxford UP, 2013, pp. 729–45.Google Scholar
Schuller, Kyla. The Trouble with White Women: A Counterhistory of Feminism. Public Affairs, 2021.Google Scholar
Sen, Krishna. “Lessons in Self-Fashioning: Bamabodhini Patrika and the Education of Women in Colonial Bengal.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 37, no. 2, summer 2004, pp. 176–91.Google Scholar
Sen, Samita. “A Parliament of Women Dystopia in Nineteenth-Century Bengali Imagination.” The Politics of the (Im)Possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered, edited by Bagchi, Barnita, Sage, 2012, pp. 123–46.Google Scholar
Showalter, Elaine. A Literature of Their Own: British Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present. Harvard UP, 1999.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stafford, Jane. Colonial Literature and the Native Author: Indigeneity and Empire. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Stedman, Edmund Clarence, editor. A Victorian Anthology, 1837–1895. Houghton Mifflin, 1895.Google Scholar
Suh, Jiyoung. “The ‘New Woman’ and the Topography of Modernity in Colonial Korea.” Korean Studies, vol. 37, 2013, pp. 11–43.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tharu, Susie, and Lalita, K., editors. Women Writing in India: Six Hundred B.C. to the Present. Feminist Press, 1993. 2 vols.Google Scholar
Viswanathan, Gauri. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. Columbia UP, 1989.Google Scholar
Wånggren, Lena. Gender, Technology, and the New Woman. Edinburgh UP, 2017.Google Scholar
White, Daniel E. From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793–1835. Johns Hopkins UP, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Xie, Ming. Conditions of Comparison: Reflections on Comparative Intercultural Inquiry. Continuum, 2011.Google Scholar
Youngkin, Molly. “New Woman Writing.” The Routledge Companion to Victorian Literature, edited by Denisoff, Dennis and Schaffer, Talia, Routledge, 2020, pp. 296–306.Google Scholar