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change was the standards by which Bengali middle-class women were judged. By the dawn of the twentieth century, a new woman had emerged, one who, in Borthwick’s words, “appeared in mixed social gatherings, and was a member of various philanthropic and social women’s organizations.” This woman “had received a basic education and read improving literature—domestic instruction manuals and ‘refined’ fiction.” The new woman represented the values of “cleanliness, orderliness, thrift, responsibility, intelligence,” and had “a moderate interest in and knowledge of the public world of men. These were added to, rather than substituted for, the traditional virtues of self-sacrifice, benevolence, devotion to the husband, respect for elders, and household competence.”
    It was this new middle-class woman who responded to the upheavals that began in Indian life with the birth of the nationalist movement at the end of the nineteenth century. Women’s emancipation was one of the goals of the nationalists, and by 1905 the men were encouraging women to participate in the Swadeshi movement to boycott foreign goods. Within the next twenty-five years, three major women’s organizationswere founded, the first of them with links to the British movement for women’s suffrage. The most influential of the organizations, the All India Women’s Conference, began in 1927 as a forum that met to discuss women’s education but soon expanded into a group that worked to stop purdah, child marriage and the other problems first tackled by the nineteenth-century reformers. This time, however, it was women who discussed women’s issues, and it was women who determined that these issues should not be separated from the larger concern of India’s subordination to England.
    The women had their first chance to prove themselves on a massive scale in 1930, when Mahatma Gandhi launched the first of his civil disobedience campaigns. The British responded by arresting most of the nationalist leaders and throwing them into jail. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s founding prime minister and a leader in the civil disobedience campaign, recounted what the women did to keep the movement alive in
The Discovery of India
, a book he wrote largely in jail: “Most of us menfolk were in prison,” Nehru explained. “And then a remarkable thing happened. Our women came to the front and took charge of the struggle. Women had always been there, of course, but now there was an avalanche of them, which took not only the British government but their own menfolk by surprise. Here were these women, women of the upper or middle classes, leading sheltered lives in their homes—peasant women, working-class women, rich women—pouring out in their tens of thousands in defiance of government order.… It was not only that display of courage and daring, but what was even more surprising was the organizational power they showed.”
    The women had been in large part inspired by Mahatma Gandhi, who saw women as autonomous, independent people, and also as an important social base for the movement. No man before or since has done so much for women’s rights in India. In summoning the masses of women into the freedom struggle, Gandhi told them they must no longer be “dolls and objects of indulgence” but rather “comrades in common service” with their husbands. “Man has regarded woman as his tool,” Gandhi wrote. “She has learnt to be this tool and in the end found it easy and pleasurable to be such, because when one drags another in his fall the descent is easy.” In 1925, Gandhi had chosen Sarojini Naidu, one of the leading women freedom fighters, as president of the nationalist Congress party. In 1931, largely as a response to women’s participation in the civil disobedience campaign, the Congress party passed a resolution endorsing political equality for allwomen, regardless of qualifications. This was at a time when women in some European countries had