Foremothers, Othermothers and College Girls

This paper draws on the final chapter of my book-in-progress to discuss a common trope in histories of girlhood and education: that of leaving home, of leaving our mothers behind so that we might become otherwise. Stories of first-generation college education are often told - in coming of age novels, in autobiographies, and in other forms of self-writing and life-writing, as much as in the moral panic literature of cautionary tales published in periodicals and novels - as stories of a break from generational continuity. Daughters leave home, and become somewhat alien to their families as the are educated, become involved in new social circles, come into contact with political collectivities beyond their families’ reach, and come to belong to communities more expansive than that of their families. Foremothers in the new educational institution - women who lived life outside the norm of heteronormative family-making, who became teachers and founded colleges - come to figure significantly in these new kin arrangements in young women’s lives. This paper draws on letters, and other writing of Indian women in the early 20th century to argue that young women who went to university did not so much experience a radical break from their lives enfolded within their families but instead traveled back and forth between different domestic arrangements - the caste conjugality of their families on the one hand, and the more experimental living community of the women’s college on the other. In doing so, they reimagined community beyond its centring on the family, but remained connected in complex ways to webs of familial relation and social reproduction.