‘Civilizing Sisters’: Writings on How to Save Women, Men, Society and the Nation in Late Colonial India
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The early twentieth century witnessed a diversity of social and religious reforms as well as nationalist efforts to ‘elevate’ segments of Indian society to a supposedly ‘higher’ stage of civilization. In ‘civilizing’ discourses of this time period, the degradation of women in Indian society featured central not only amongst colonial rulers and missionaries; it also inserted itself into the consciousness of indigenous elites and the emerging middle classes, including elite and middle-class women. This chapter explores the interventions of Hindi women's periodicals in colonial and nationalist ‘civilizing missions’ of the late 1910s. More precisely, it analyses how contributors to women's periodicals examined the arguments brought forth by agents of the British civilizing mission such as James Mill, James Tod and Herbert Spencer. It also addresses (male) social reformist and nationalist positions on the topic of the woman question. Most importantly, though, it presents examples of women writers and activists proffering their very own civilizing missions. The central question of such contributors revolved around the implications of ‘improvement’ and ‘development’ for Indian middle-class women. The contributors also assessed notions of ‘civilization’ both in theory and in practice, specifically considering what could be in the best interest of women (as defined by both women and men). Some contributors suggested that more attention be turned towards a presumed ideal Hindu past and women's revered status therein. Others called for a break with tradition and a redefinition of gender roles.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".