Emancipation of women

In the same decades that Raja Ram Mohan Roy was arguing that Sati had no scriptural basis, most Indian women could not own property, remarry as widows, or expect an education beyond the household. The story of women's emancipation in this paper runs across a century and a half — from a regulation that banned a single practice, through a freedom movement that gave women a public political role, to a Constitution that finally wrote equality into the country's founding text.

In two minutes

Women's emancipation in colonial and constitutional India moved through legislative reform against specific practices (Sati, child marriage, denial of widow remarriage), mass participation in the freedom struggle after 1920, and finally constitutional and statutory guarantees after independence including the Hindu Code Bills.

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