ABSTRACT

In 1896, Pandita Ramabai, a pioneering early Indian feminist and champion of women’s education, embarked on a journey to the US that led to an early example of a universal, transnational feminist experience. Ramabai had been invited by Rachel Bodley, the dean of the Woman’s Medical college of Pennsylvania, to witness the graduation ceremony of Anandibai Joshi. Dean Bodley, a product of the nascent American women’s movement of the 19th century, was interested in building international linkages for women’s education. While in the US, Ramabai published her essay The High Caste Hindu Woman as a fund-raising tool for a school for widows in India. The book described the gender constraints that limited the lives of Indian women in traditional upper-caste households.1 With Bodley’s help, Ramabai’s cause came to be embraced widely by the early American feminists and generated much popular interest in the media as well.2 But Ramabai was no mere passive protégé of the American feminists. A strong and independent social thinker in her own right, she returned the “American gaze”3 by writing a critical anthropological account of American society. In her book, The Peoples of The United States, Ramabai presents an insightful discussion of social life in the US. While highlighting the positive egalitarian aspects of US society and the possibilities of an emerging woman’s movement, Ramabai’s keen gaze recognized and questioned the restrictive notions of femininity that constrained American women. She also recognized the central fissures in American society:

The United States of America is famous for its wealth, education, and advancement, and with reason. But racial discrimination and prejudice, which are most inimical to all progress and civility, are not altogether absent in this country.4