ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses upon two transgressive women Pandita Ramabai and Emily Ryder, and the transnational networks they developed. It explores interventions into Indian marriage and family practices by Ramabai, the Indian Christian feminist, who rescued child widows at her Mukti Mission. Missionary texts drew women to support Mukti Mission, promoting the mutual imbrication of Western women with Indian women. Countless members of the World Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WWCTU) and women missionaries from the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and Scandinavia committed themselves to assist in this effort. American physician Dr. Emily Brainerd Ryder published The Little Wives of India in 1893, a book of her public lectures on child marriage and Indian widows before Protestant church gatherings in the Australian colonies. This publication helped establish “Little Wives of India” circles supporting Mukti and marriage reforms in India and promoted transnational cultural understandings. The chapter further argues that the entanglement of these various women was consolidated by their mutual need to address their own differing problems.
