Memsahibs such as Mary Carpenter and socalled ‘Indianised’ white women such as Annie Besant also established girls’ schools.8 Similarly, the colonial government provided girls’ schools in Bengal in the 1850s

A number of Indian women – almost exclusively drawn from higher castes – also took a central role in the debates over girls’ education. Rashsundari Debi famously wrote Amar Jiban, the first Bengali autobiography, but she was not alone in contributing to the question of girls’ education. Indian women teachers agitated for reform, or represented the successes of the reform agenda simply by virtue of their professional attainments: their number included the Bengali women Bamasundari Debi, who taught married women in their homes, and Bhagabati Debi, who was employed in Faridpur, which had seven schools by the 1860s

According to Geraldine Forbes, ‘patriarchal systems offer women few opportunities until men decide it is time for change.’48 As this essay has demonstrated, Indian women remained marginal to debates on gender roles and social reform. Campaigns such as those waged to abolish sati, to permit widow remarriage and to raise the age of consent were initiated by men, and culminated in legislative provisions instituted by the male-led colonial state. While women had some more agency to engage in debates around strishiksha, purdah and the zenana, even in these realms, higher caste Indian women led the way in writing about

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