The Department of English and Humanities invites you to a lecture entitled, Changing Women’s Lives: The first “modern” education for women in Bengal. The speaker is Shahla Young, who is teaching History at California State University and University of California, Irvine. The subject of the lecture to be delivered, is a part of her PhD thesis submitted to SOAS, University of London.
This talk will look at four government girls’ high schools in Eastern Bengal that were “models” for other girls’ schools in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Bengal. It has three objectives. First, it aims to show how these schools were established to change the role and perceptions of women’s higher education in the metropolis, as well as in the mofussils (districts). Second, it investigates the connections between colonial administrative policies and local politics that engineered the transformation of these schools. Third, it considers the crucial importance and implications of government-led education for Bengali women within the wider context of colonial education in the period.