Women: As a result of the spread of print culture in the 19 century India, books became cheaper. Many hawkers started selling books from door to door. This created easy availability of books for majority of women. Women’s reading increased enormously in middle classes homes. Liberal husbands and fathers began educating their women folk at home, and sent them to schools when women’s schools were getting up in the cities and towns after mid 19^th century. But conservatives Hindus and Muslims were not in favour of educating women. Sometimes rebel women defied them. The story of a Muslim girl is worth-mentioning here. Her family wanted her to read only the Arabic Quran which she did not understand. So she insisted on learning to read and write in Urdu, a language that was her own.

These are some examples of women writers from 19^th century:

Rashsundari Devi: A young married girl in a very orthodox household learnt to read in the secrecy of her kitchen. She wrote her autobiography Amar Jiban which was published in 1876, became the first full –length autobiography published in the Bengali language.

Kailashbhashini Devi: In 1860s, she wrote books high lighting the experiences of women about how women were imprisoned at home, kept in ignorance and forced to dohard domestic labour.

Tarabaishinde and Pandita Ramabai: wrote about the miserable lives of upper – caste Hindu women, especially widows.

Begum Rokeya Sakhawathossein: In 1926, an educationist and literacy figure Begum Rokeya Sakhawathossein, strongly condemned men for withholdings education from women.

Women, who were earlier cocooned inside their homes, could now know about the outside world thanks to the print technology. This created a spurt of many women writers in India. It can be said that print culture not only created readers among women but also writers among them.