When well-behaved women make history: A case study in colonial Bengal (1930-1947)

Historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich famously wrote that ‘well-behaved women seldom make history’. This idea seems apt for colonial India: historiography has tended to focus on ‘ill-behaved’ women (such as the Bengali terrorist Bina Das), who seem to stand out as ruptures against a background of otherwise-respected gendered norms of respectability, passivity, and subalternity.
Through the memoir written by Mrs. Ghoshal, an externally impeccable bhadramahila yet with strong nationalist views, this paper contends that the emphasis on ‘ill-behaved’ women obscured forms of political awareness expressed by ‘conventional’ Bengali bhadramahilas. Women like Ghoshal, who were not ‘exceptional’ but instead ‘well-behaved’, usually do not find a place in archives and historiography. This paper argues that we must look for stories like Ghoshal’s to claim that also ‘well-behaved’ women can, and should, make history, thus revealing a nuanced picture of otherwise black-and-white narrations.