Crossing Thresholds

Description

The Introduction presents a conceptual framework of public/private spheres, attempts to retrieve women’s subjectivity through their published narratives, and discusses questions of representation and ‘voice’.

The ten essays that follow span a variety of topics—the politics of iconizing individual women, women’s complex relationships to their homes and their bodies, women’s exposure to education and nationalism, the nature of conjugality and ‘consent’, ideas of motherhood and widowhood.

Uniting all these themes is the effort to amplify women’s voices and reconstruct their experiential worlds.

The book straddles the areas of Gender Studies, History, and Asian Studies while underscoring the resonance of these women’s lives with those of other women across South Asia and the West.