The Global New Woman and the Invention of Modern Feminism

Abstract

AbstractNew Woman literature is typically regarded as an Anglo-American invention, but this assessment ignores the contributions of global authors who shaped the genre's rise in the decades before its more familiar Western emergence. This essay demonstrates that in the late nineteenth century, Indian women authors crafted both fictional and nonfictional writings that anticipate, expand, and complicate standard narratives of the New Woman. These understudied texts—by authors like Toru Dutt, Krupa Satthianadhan, Shèvantibāi Nikambé, and Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain—also centrally shaped mainstream Indian feminism while occluding alternative counterstrains. New Woman literature and the wider feminist movement cannot be understood without analyzing these transnational incarnations; indeed, I argue, both had transimperial origins. The works analyzed here reframe early feminism as an international enterprise—one more diverse and global in scope than most existing scholarship recognizes.