Artha J Soc Sci, 12, 3 (2013), 19-42 ISSN 0975-329X|doi.org/10.12724/ajss.26.2 Women’s Education: A Reading of Early Malayalam Magazines Teena Antony* Abstract This work analyses discussions on women‟s education (formal and informal) in Malayalam magazines from the late 19th and early 20th century and demonstrates how these discussions were instrumental in imagining a new figure of the Malayali woman. The work provides a cultural history of Malayali women‟s education through this analysis and probes the nuances of what it meant to get educated for the Malayali women. While developmental discourse on Kerala tends to provide a linear and celebratory account of women‟s educational progress in the state, this article tries to show that progress was not easy: women had to prove that education was necessary, and that education would not lead them astray, that education would not take them away from the space of the domestic, that women could work in spaces outside the family. Keywords: Culture, History, Women, Magazines, Education, Kerala, Modernity Introduction My project goes back in history to the time of social reform movements in the 19th and early 20th centuries and tries to locate the shaping of the hegemonic culture with relation to women - their position within their families and within the larger Malayali society. It does this through a reading of Malayalam magazines from the early 20th century, particularly the articles on women‟s * Freelance content writer, Coffeegraphy Content solutions, Bangalore, India;
[email protected] 19 Teena Antony ISSN 0975-329X education1 and shows how these articles were instrumental in constructing the image of an “ideal Malayali woman” that cut across caste, class and religious groups.