SUNY PRESS Images of Women in Maharashtrian Society

This volume, a companion to Images of Women in Maharashtrian Literature and Religion (SUNY Press, 1996), approaches more closely the realities of women's lives. Using historical documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and photographs, interviews, and conversations from the twentieth, the book constructs images of the conditions of women's lives in the modern state and traditional region of Maharashtra over the past three hundred years. The authors search for the ideas, understandings, and judgments that have shaped those conditions, for the conscious and unconscious images that have made women's lives what they have been. The contributors examine ways femininity and the power, status, and potential of women have been viewed; actual women emphasizing ideas about women. Understanding ideas of this kind is a necessary first step toward understanding, and perhaps eventually affecting, the actualities of women's lives. This book is divided into three parts. Part I is based on documentary sources from the eighteenth century. Part II explores the subjects and terms of the conservatism versus reform debate in Maharashtra, and thus complements recent studies on images of women in Bengal and other parts of North India during the colonial period. Part III, which presents contemporary images of women in Maharashtra, includes an examination of village women's work, a photo essay, an oral life history, and a bibliographical essay. Review "Maharashtrian leaders have had an especially important influence in shaping the contemporary fate of women. A number of early social reformers were based here, as were important leaders of the reaction that derailed India's first 'female emancipation' movement. This book offers very rich materials on this movement and reaction, as well as additional valuable insights into Maharashtrian women's own perspectives and lives." -- Nancy Auer Falk, Western Michigan University About the Author Anne Feldhaus is Professor of Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She has published several books, including Water and Womanhood: Religious Meanings of Rivers in Maharashtra .