The Women of Totagadde

Abstract

This book depicts one South Indian village during the fifty-year period when women's education became a possibility-and then a reality. Despite illiteracy, religious ritual marking them as inferior, and pre-pubertal marriages, the daughters and granddaughters of the silent, passive women of the 1960s have morphed into assertive, self-confident millennial women. Helen E. Ullrich considers the following questions: can education alter the perception of women as inferior and forever childlike? What happens when women refuse the mantle of socialized passivity? Throughout The Women of Totagadde, Helen Ullrich pushes us to consider how women's lives and society at large have been altered through education.