A historical analysis of a book-inspired controversy that in its dimensions rivalled Hernnstein and Murray's "The Bell Curve" and Rushdie's "The Satanic Verses" and brought forth a new political collectivity in India's women.

Specters of Mother India tells the complex story of one episode that became the tipping point for an important historical transformation. The event at the center of the book is the massive international controversy that followed the 1927 publication of Mother India, an exposé written by the American journalist Katherine Mayo. Mother India provided graphic details of a variety of social ills in India, especially those related to the status of women and to the particular plight of the country’s child wives. According to Mayo, the roots of the social problems she chronicled lay in an irredeemable Hindu culture that rendered India unfit for political self-government. Mother India was reprinted many times in the United States, Great Britain, and India; it was translated into more than a dozen languages; and it was reviewed in virtually every major publication on five continents. Sinha provides a rich historical narrative of the controversy surrounding Mother India, from the book’s publication through the passage in India of the Child Marriage Restraint Act in the closing months of 1929. She traces the unexpected trajectory of the controversy as critics acknowledged many of the book’s facts only to overturn its central premise. Where Mayo located blame for India’s social backwardness within the beliefs and practices of Hinduism, the critics laid it at the feet of the colonial state, which they charged with impeding necessary social reforms. As Sinha shows, the controversy became a catalyst for some far-reaching changes, including a reconfiguration of the relationship between the political and social spheres in colonial India and the coalescence of a collective identity for women.

Reforming the World offers a sophisticated account of how and why, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American missionaries and moral reformers undertook work abroad at an unprecedented rate and scale. Looking at various organizations such as the Young Men's Christian Association and the Student Volunteer Movement for Foreign Missions, Ian Tyrrell describes the influence that the export of American values had back home, and explores the methods and networks used by reformers to fashion a global and nonterritorial empire. He follows the transnational American response to internal pressures, the European colonies, and dynamic changes in global society. Examining the cultural context of American expansionism from the 1870s to the 1920s, Tyrrell provides a new interpretation of Christian and evangelical missionary work, and he addresses America's use of "soft power." He describes evangelical reform's influence on American colonial and diplomatic policy, emphasizes the limits of that impact, and documents the often idiosyncratic personal histories, aspirations, and cultural heritage of moral reformers such as Margaret and Mary Leitch, Louis Klopsch, Clara Barton, and Ida Wells. The book illustrates that moral reform influenced the United States as much as it did the colonial and quasi-colonial peoples Americans came in contact with, and shaped the architecture of American dealings with the larger world of empires through to the era of Woodrow Wilson. Investigating the wide-reaching and diverse influence of evangelical reform movements, Reforming the World establishes how transnational organizing played a vital role in America's political and economic expansion.

A generation after the publication of Joan W. Scott's influential essay, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," this volume explores the current uses of the term—and the ongoing influence of Scott's agenda-setting work in history and other disciplines. How has the study of gender, independently or in conjunction with other axes of difference—such as race, class, and sexuality—inflected existing fields of study and created new ones? To what extent has this concept modified or been modified by related paradigms such as women's and queer studies? With what discursive politics does the term engage, and with what effects? In what settings, and through what kinds of operations and transformations, can gender remain a useful category in the 21st century? Leading scholars from history, philosophy, literature, art history, and other fields examine how gender has translated into their own disciplinary perspectives.

'Civilizing Missions in Colonial and Postcolonial South Asia' offers a series of analyses that highlights the complexities of British and Indian civilizing missions in original ways and through various historiographical approaches. The book applies the concept of the civilizing mission to a number of issues in the colonial and postcolonial eras in South Asia: economic development, state-building, pacification, nationalism, cultural improvement, gender and generational relations, caste and untouchability, religion and missionaries, class relations, urbanization, NGOs, and civil society.

Motherhood is a powerful virtue. However, in a patriarchal society, it is construed narrowly to uphold the heteronormative family norms which prioritize men over women. This traditional framework overlooks the diverse family forms and alienates female-headed households. Rather, families headed by lone mothers are chastened and labelled as broken, pathological, and degenerative. Despite constitutional guarantees of equality and justice, the state and society alienate them, deny them visibility, and absolve themselves of the responsibilities of protecting their citizenship rights. Nevertheless, for ages, single mothers, despite all hardships, have been defying patriarchal norms and are bringing up their children solely, with little support available from their families, society, or the state. Rather, they are challenging the dominant and hegemonic `male breadwinner and provider’ model. This work examines this active and empowered notion of motherhood, or feminist and emancipatory mothering, while focusing on how lone mothers are redefining and reshaping the socio-cultural norms to pave the social transformation through their maternal activism. With the increase in the number of female-headed households, this work recommends the need for an alternative approach to disrupt the dominant themes of victimhood, poverty, destitution, and neglect by deploying the axis of intersectionality. It suggests that the state needs to evolve a comprehensive empowerment framework to specifically recognize the entitlements of single mothers as citizens and take steps to advance their citizenship rights.

Cornelia Sorabji was the first Indian female lawyer. She was "original and often outspoken in her views - for example in her criticism of Gandhi and her surprising friendship with Katherine Mayo". Cornelia was "a passionate advocate of women's rights whose own career was nearly compromised through her relationsip with a married man". -- Book jacket.

Citizens of Everywhere is a global history of Indian women's activism during the final decades of colonial rule, demonstrating their contributions to both the international women's movement and to the Indian independence struggle.

Examining a range of South Asian Anglophone diasporic fiction and poetry, this monograph opens a new dialogue between diaspora studies and gender studies. It shows how discourses of diaspora benefit from re-examining their own critical relation to concepts of the maternal and the motherland. Rather than considering maternity as a fixed or naturally given category, it challenges essentialist conceptions and explores mothering as a performative practice which actively produces discursive meaning. This innovative approach also involves an investigation of central metaphors in nationalist and diasporic rhetorics, bringing critical attention to the strategies they employ and the unique aesthetic forms they produce.

The Chinese style of prostitution regulation