Women's History

There has always been a women's version of the Western civilizing narrative in Asia; in many times and places, Western colonizers sought to use the "oppression of women" in Asian cultures as a rationale for their self-proclaimed civilizing mission. The treatment of women, they often said, was the standard by which civilizations could be judged, and on that basis it was clear that Asia "needed civilizing." The history of women in Asia has convincingly demonstrated that the "Western impact" on Asia not only complicated women's ability to improve their lives but also generated an anticolonial, nationalist engagement that did not aid, but typically subverted, feminist agendas.

Growing recognition of the intellectual significance of feminism since the late nineteenth century has been coupled with the assumption that feminism's natural competitors—nationalism and socialism—have eclipsed feminism's impact in the modern period. Women have been critical to the development of nationalism and socialism in China, India, Korea, and Southeast Asia: as symbols of "tradition," workers, educators, and soldiers. Women were asked to postpone their agendas in China's great twentieth-century revolution, where leaders pursued a "backward to revolution" strategy, and in India, where connections with nationalism and anti-imperialist movements were complicated by geography, ethnicity, caste, class, and religious diversity. While South Asia may present the greatest challenges for historians of women, it is also true that, in the 1990s, scholars there such as Kumkum Sangari and Sudesh Vaid pointedly demonstrated how much a feminist standpoint adds to our understanding of nationalism, colonialism, and anticolonial movements. Independence may have brought an improvement in the legal status of women, but the partition that created the new states of India and Pakistan ushered in a long period of conflict in which large numbers of women were abducted, raped, and/or killed as part of a continuing political, ethnic, and religious struggle. Until 1990, women were an invisible part of historical analysis of this conflict; since then, historians of women, such as Urvashi Butalia in South Asia, have made clear how important women and gender are to any understanding of these conflicts.