Bigger India
How India inspired American feminists
In the 1960s and 1970s, African Americans also looked to India as they campaigned against racial segregation. While civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. famously made Gandhian civil disobedience central to his work, India provided additional forms of inspiration to African-American women.
As an American historian living in India, I have been struck by the frequency with which India and Indian women appear in the history of the feminist movement in the US. Some people might be familiar with the ways in which the history of women’s rights in India garnered negative international attention: the anti-sati campaigns of 19th-century Britain; Christian missionaries’ lurid descriptions of female infanticide; and the American Katherine Mayo’s portrayal of child marriage in the inflammatory 1927 book Mother India.