Paper long abstract:

In late nineteenth and early twentieth century-Bengal the prescriptive discourses on child rearing and children's education, written mostly by men like Shibnath Shastri, Satishchandra Chakravarti and others, dealt with character building and focused only on sons. Most of these authors felt that people have little control over the outside world because of their colonized status but they have control over home and family and the child's character should be built by the family or the parents. As mothers, women became very important to formulate and influence male children's character. Pratapchandra Majumdar, one of the male authors, wrote about the responsibility of a mother that because of the flaws of the mother, the child is ruined. When the child is ruined, the family is ruined; when the family life crumbles, society decays, when the society is polluted, no nation can advance. Although the normative literature emphasized taking care of male children and their education, but there were some Bengali women who wrote about raising female children and girls' education. Krishnobhabini Das, Kamini Roy, Swarnalata Devi, and Nirupama Devi, are some of the authors who wrote about raising children and Bengali girls' education. This paper briefly examines the writings of these authors to show how these female authors rebelled against the traditional beliefs of raising female children and their visions of proper education of Bengali girls and women.