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I n 1905 an Indian journal published the fanciful story of a nation called Ladyland, where men were secluded in the zenana—the portion of the home reserved for women—while women ran the economy and political affairs. “The Sultana’s Dream” showed women using their brains to harness the sun’s energy to repel invaders, for example, and to engineer all sorts of feats to make public life easier and pleasant. The author of “The Sultana’s Dream,” Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain (1880–1932), was a self-educated Bengali woman who, as part of her patriotism, advocated the education of women and a more scientific mind-set for all of her contemporaries. Hosain supported the wearing of the burka and veiling when among friends, while simultaneously working tirelessly as the founder of a school for young women and as a reformer more generally. As such, she was part of the activist spirit that has inspired women down through the twentieth century to the present day. She foresaw women in power and hard at work, using their brains for technological progress and the public good. She also envisioned a day when men might be helpful in the household, although she actually had them confined to the zenanas in Ladyland—mostly so that public life would be more peaceful. Hosain wrote at the dawn of the twentieth century, when the world’s women participated in feminist and other political movements that shaped the course of history, even as they held jobs, cared for their households, and participated in cultural movements of the day. These activities only increased across the course of the century, despite devastating wars, global depression, rising conflicts for independence from colonialism, and a deepening interconnectedness— both for good and for ill—of the world’s peoples. In fact, historians have CHAPTER 3 Women in the Twentieth-Century World _ Bonnie G. Smith 84 • CHAPTER 3 remarked on the coming to the forefront of women, self-consciously as women, across the globe during the twentieth century. Additionally, from the twentieth century on, there was regular global commentary about women instead of the sporadic eruption of debates that alternately denigrated or defended them that cropped up from time to time—in fourteenth-century Europe or eighteenth-century China, for example. Nor was this eruption of awareness about womanhood confined to the elites. Although workingwomen had been active in previous centuries on behalf of themselves and their families, such advocacy became more consistent and widespread than ever before, leaving historians today still charting the course of women’s recent, consequential past. Work and Politics as the Century Opens As the twentieth century opened, few women led the privileged and secure life of Rokeya Sakhawat Hosain, and most lacked the wherewithal to give their efforts over to helping others. In contrast to her wealth and literacy, they eked out a living as unschooled peasants, domestic workers, craftswomen, and factory hands. Some performed their work as slaves. In addition to earning a living , they cared for children and aged parents and maintained their households. By far the greatest work responsibilities in the first decades of the twentieth century occurred on farms and in households. Women tended crops such as rice, manioc, and cotton, oversaw the production of milk, cheese, and other dairy products, and did the onerous work of preparing food in days before there were many modern household appliances. They also gathered wood, peat, dung, and other materials for heating homes and cooking in them. Additionally, the women and their children had to fetch water in the days before widespread public systems provided utilities to individual homes. Production of textiles still occurred in the home in many areas in 1900, and the household was also the site of health care, which included gathering herbs, tending the sick and dying, and birthing infants. Midwifery was a central women’s job. At that time, especially where there was no formal schooling for working people (the case in most societies), both men and women raised children, educating them to fulfill their respective adult roles. Women often helped arrange marriages for their children and monitored their sexuality until these partnerships were formed. Sometimes, the responsibilities of powerful women for generating wealth were so vast that they took “wives” themselves, as happened among Africans. In Africa, agricultural production meant prosperity, so that men and women alike would want many wives to help produce riches through their work on farms. Worldwide, the majority of work thus took place in...

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