Early defenders of women’s intellectual rights: Wollstonecraft’s and Rokeya’s strategies to promote female education

ABSTRACT

Given that social constructions and deeply embedded cultural misapprehensions about gender, together with conventional views of female intellectual ability, denied women entry into institutional education, Wollstonecraft and Rokeya mounted a literary campaign to promote female education in their respective societies. They argued that female education would not only advance the cause of women, it would also be conducive to the interests of men as well as the wider society. Given these cultural backgrounds, this article examines the traditional notion of gendered intellect within their respective cultural contexts, discusses their arguments against cultural mythologies of women’s cerebral capabilities, and makes an in-depth analysis of their strategies for, and philosophy of, female education. It analyses social restrictions on women’s education and pits them against Rokeya’s and Wollstonecraft’s ideas that envisage equal educational opportunities for both genders.

KEYWORDS:

• Mary Wollstonecraft
• Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain
• female education
• gendered intellect
• Original Sin

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ Elizabeth Eger and Lucy Peltz, Brilliant Women: 18th-century Bluestockings (London: Yale University Press, 2008), 21.

² Elizabeth Eger, Bluestockings: Women of Reason from Enlightenment to Romanticism (New York: Palgrave), 80.

³ Souren Melikian, “The ‘Bluestocking Circle’ and the Fight for Women’s Rights in Literary Salons,” The New York Times, May 29, 2008, https://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/31/arts/31iht-melik31.1.13311827.html (accessed May 19, 2018).

⁴ Following the Bengali convention, in the body of the text of this article, I use 'Rokeya' in short and, for reasons of consistency, 'Hossain' for bibliographical details; however, with regard to Mary Wollstonecraft, I follow the Western academic practice of using an author’s surname.

⁵ Alan Grob, “William and Dorothy: A Case Study in the Hermeneutics of Disparagement,” ELH 65, no. 1 (1998): 187–221, 193.

⁶ For a detailed discussion on Rokeya’s predecessors, see Md. Mahmudul Hasan’s review of Nawab Faizunnesa’s Rupjalal, in The Muslim World Book Review 30, no. 2 (2010): 65–9.

⁷ Md. Mahmudul Hasan, “Commemorating Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and Contextualising Her Work in South Asian Muslim Feminism,” Asiatic 7, no. 2 (2013): 39–59, 53.

⁸ Judith E. Walsh, Domesticity in Colonial India: What Women Learned when Men Gave Them Advice (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 47–48.

⁹ Gouri Srivastava, The Legend Makers: Some Prominent Muslim Women of India (New Delhi: Concept, 2003), 3.

¹⁰ Sonia Nishat Amin, The World of Muslim Women in Colonial Bengal, 1876–1939 (Leiden: Brill, 1996), xiii.

¹¹ Barnita Bagchi, “Towards Ladyland: Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the Movement for Women’s Education in Bengal, c. 1900–c. 1932,” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 6 (2009): 743–55, 743.

¹² Natalie Fuehrer Taylor, The Rights of Woman as Chimera: The Political Philosophy of Mary Wollstonecraft (London: Routledge, 2007), 74.

¹³ Sandrine Berges, The Routledge Guidebook to Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: Routledge, 2013), 25–6.

¹⁴ Ibid., 25–6.

¹⁵ Fatima Z. Bilgrami, “Sir Syed’s Views on Female Education,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society 44, no. 3 (1996): 243–57, 244.

¹⁶ Mohammad A. Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan, “Introduction,” in A Feminist Foremother: Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, ed. Mohammad A. Quayum and Md. Mahmudul Hasan (Hyderabad: Orient Blackswan, 2017), xi–xxvii, xiii.

¹⁷ Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson, 1796 [1792]), 1.

¹⁸ Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, ed. Abdul Quadir (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 2006), 242 (English translations of all Bangla source texts used throughout this article are mine, unless otherwise stated).

¹⁹ James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, vol. 2, 4th ed. (London: A Miller and T Cadell, 1767), 220.

²⁰ John Gregory, A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (London: Osborne and Griffin, 1789 [1774]), 31–2.

²¹ George Eliot, “Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft” [1855], in Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 203.

²² Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (Oxford: Routledge, 2013), 151.

²³ Tahmina Alam, Begum Roquiah Sakhawat Hossain: Chinta Chetonar Dhara O Samajkarma [Begum Roquiah Sakhawat Hossain: Her thoughts and social work] (Dhaka: Bangla Academy, 1992), 32.

²⁴ Mohammad A. Quayum, “Gender and Education: The Vision and Activism of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,” Journal of Human Values 22, no. 2 (2016): 139–50, 150.

²⁵ Barnita Bagchi, “Two Lives: Voices, Resources, and Networks in the History of Female Education in Bengal and South Asia,” Women’s History Review 19, no. 1(2010): 51–69, 53.

²⁶ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 228; Mukti Barton, “Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain and the Bengali Muslim Women’s Movement,” Dialogue and Alliance 12, no. 1 (1998): 105–16, 108.

²⁷ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 88.

²⁸ Ibid., 89.

²⁹ Mohammad A. Quayum, “Hindu–Muslim Relations in the Work of Rabindranath Tagore and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,” South Asia Research 35, no. 2 (2015): 177–94, 180.

³⁰ Bagchi, “Two Lives”, 53.

³¹ Barton, “Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,” 107.

³² Sally Shuttleworth, Charlotte Bronte and Victorian Psychology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 4.

³³ Md. Mahmudul Hasan, “The Orientalization of Gender,” The American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 22, no. 4 (2005): 26–56, 37.

³⁴ John Richardson, “The Menstrual Cycle, Cognition, and Paramenstrual Symptomatology,” in John Richardson, ed., Cognition and the Menstrual Cycle (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1992), 1–38, 25.

³⁵ Quoted in Carol Bock, Charlotte Brontë and the Storyteller’s Audience (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992), 167.

³⁶ Krupabai Satthianadhan, Saguna: The First Autobiographical Novel in English by an Indian Woman (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999 [1895]), 151.

³⁷ Susie Tharu and K. Lalita, Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present, vol II (London: Pandora, 1993), xx.

³⁸ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 130.

³⁹ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 242.

⁴⁰ Quayum, “Gender and Education,” 141.

⁴¹ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 92.

⁴² Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 20–2.

⁴³ M. J. Falco, “Introduction: Who Was Mary Wollstonecraft?” in Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft, ed. M. J. Falco (Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010), 1–14, 3.

⁴⁴ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 2.

⁴⁵ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 494–5.

⁴⁶ Nikki Stafford, Finding Lost: The Unofficial Guide (Toronto: ECW, 2006), 62.

⁴⁷ Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Emile for Today: The Emile of Jean Jacques Rousseau, ed. William Boyd (London: Heinemann, 1956 [1762]), 153.

⁴⁸ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 276.

⁴⁹ Roushan Jahan, Sultana’s Dream and Selection from The Secluded Ones (New York: The Feminist Press, 1988), 51.

⁵⁰ Susie Tharu, “Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,” in Women Writing in India: 600 BC to the Present, vol. I, ed. Susie Tharu and K. Lalita (London: Pandora, 1991), 340–3, 340.

⁵¹ Aparna Basu, “A Century and a Half’s Journey: Women’s Education in India, 1850s to 2000,” in Women of India: Colonial and Post-colonial Periods, ed. Bharati Ray (New Delhi: Centre for Studies in Civilizations, 2005), 183–207, 184; Barnita Bagchi, “Connected and Entangled Histories: Writing Histories of Education in the Indian Context”, Paedagogica Historica 50, no. 6 (2014): 813–21, 816.

⁵² Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 395.

⁵³ Ibid., 37.

⁵⁴ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 19.

⁵⁵ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 81.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 69.

⁵⁷ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 206.

⁵⁸ Quayum, “Gender and Education,” 148.

⁵⁹ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 106.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 331.

⁶¹ Barbara Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (Cambridge: CUP, 2003), 28.

⁶² D. M. Juschka, “General Introduction,” in Feminism in the Study of Religion: A Reader, ed. D. M. Juschka (London: Continuum), 1–24, 3.

⁶³ Wollstonecraft, A Vindication, 128.

⁶⁴ Gillian Beer, “Representing Women: Re-presenting the Past [Extract],” in Biography in Theory: Key Texts with Commentaries, ed. Wilhelm Hemecker and Edward Saunders (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 229–37, 231.

⁶⁵ Roy Porter, Flesh in the Age of Reason: The Modern Foundations of Body and Soul (New York: Norton, 2003), 41.

⁶⁶ Rebecca Davies, Written Maternal Authority and Eighteenth-Century Education in Britain: Educating by the Book (London: Routledge, 2016), 23.

⁶⁷ Amelia Defalco, “Haunting Physicality: Corpses, Cannibalism, and Carnality in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace,” University of Toronto Quarterly 75, no. 2 (2006):771–83, 781.

⁶⁸ Eger and Peltz, Brilliant Women, 106.

⁶⁹ Mary Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters: With Reflections on Female Conduct, in the more important Duties of Life (London: Johnson, 1787), 93.

⁷⁰ James Fordyce, Sermons to Young Women, vol. 2, 4th ed. (London: A Miller and T Cadell, 1767), 221.

⁷¹ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 481.

⁷² Ibid., 479.

⁷³ Ibid., 206.

⁷⁴ Ibid., 18–19.

⁷⁵ Bagchi, “Towards Ladyland,” 748, 749.

⁷⁶ Quayum, “Gender and Education,” 145.

⁷⁷ Ibid.

⁷⁸ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 227.

⁷⁹ Ibid., 491.

⁸⁰ Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 139–40.

⁸¹ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 227.

⁸² Md. Mahmudul Hasan, “Nasrin Gone Global: A Critique of Taslima Nasrin’s Criticism of Islam and Her Feminist Strategy,” South Asia Research 36, no. 2 (2016): 167–85, 177.

⁸³ Berges, The Routledge Guidebook, 26.

⁸⁴ Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, 25, 27.

⁸⁵ Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, 157, 101.

⁸⁶ Berges, The Routledge Guidebook, 26.

⁸⁷ Hossain, Rokeya Rachanabali, 44, 491.

⁸⁸ Wollstonecraft, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, iv.

⁸⁹ Md. Mahmudul Hasan, “Indictment of Misogyny on Mary Wollstonecraft and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain,” BRAC University Journal 1, no. 2 (2004): 1–12, 11.

⁹⁰ Quayum and Hasan, “Introduction,” xiii.

⁹¹ Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, 245.

⁹² Bagchi, “Towards Ladyland,” 744, 754.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Research Management Centre, International Islamic University Malaysia [grant no. RIGS16-216-0380].

Notes on contributors

Md. Mahmudul Hasan

Md. Mahmudul Hasan teaches English and postcolonial literature at International Islamic University Malaysia (IIUM). He previously taught at the University of Dhaka and had a research stint at the University of Heidelberg. He holds a PhD in feminist comparative literature from the University of Portsmouth. He is the author of Islamic Perspectives on Twentieth-Century English Literature (2017). His edited and co-edited books include A Feminist Foremother: Critical Essays on Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (2017), Displaced & Forgotten: Memoirs of Refugees (2017), Islam and Gender: The Bangladesh Perspective (2016), Tales of Mothers: The Greatest Love (2015), and Crossing Boundaries: Musings on Language, Literature and Culture (2011). His articles have appeared in journals published by Brill, IIIT, Routledge, Sage, and IIUM.