Liberating the Women of India

Liberating the Women of India

Flora Annie Steel and Annie Besant were educated Englishwomen who live in India at the turn of the century. Being Englishwomen, they thought themselves superior to Indian women. To them the women of India need to be instructed on the correct way to run their households and the need for them to seek education. Through their very informative works, they portrayed the “suitable” (according to the English way of life) way to live life as a woman in India.

Annie Steel promoted that a woman’s home should be well managed and ran with much care. She should continuously be involved in how the servants ran her home. Obviously speaking to the upper class women who live in India, she explained the and Indians servant was “by nature untrained and dirty; women must stay on top of the them, guiding them.” She explained that is was the woman’s duty to give intelligible orders because the Indian servants were “as a child in everything except age.” She also encourages women to never overlook faults, for if one does than that would be a “missed opportunity of preventing it becoming a habit.” Finally she charges the women to take care of her servants to see to their basic needs. This is important if the house is to stay in order “ a little reasonable human sympathy is the best oil for the household.”

Clearly Steel considers even the upper class women of Indian to be her inferior. She also sees the English culture as the supreme way of life. She implies this by instructing a culture that had been going on long before her arrival, to her way of life. She has almost a slave mentality towards Indian servants, comparing them to “household machines.” End the end however, she encourage women to be the best they could be in their role as the homemaker.

Annie Besant promoted education, preferable English education. She claimed “the England high education is wanted largely.” In her work, she was addressing society as a whole, especially men, on the important role women’s education played in Indian culture. She encourages women to be educated in religion, literary, scientific, and artistic and physical education. Women who were she argued would be an attribute to any man. She believed that an “English educated man should marry and English educated women.” She argued