Rangu Souriya

#62/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” a quote by Mahatma Gandhi clearly explains Rangu Souriya’s fight against human trafficking. 

She had grown up in tea gardens where her father was an employee and had as a child witnessed many children going missing from tea gardens. These incidences created awareness of human trafficking racket rampant in Darjeeling. Her close association with social activists at college gave her the foundation for becoming a full-time social activist in future. She studied at the Darjeeling Government College, and a senior there told her how he had met a woman by the name of Anuradha Koirala, who was a huge anti-sex trafficking activist in Nepal. She remembered Anuradha mentioning once that she often rescued girls from the Bengal area, but because they were from another country, she was limited in how she could help them. While in college itself and inspired by Anuradha Koirala, she decided to take action, and started an organization called Kanchanjunga Uddhar Kendra in 2004 with the help of friends and family. Word spread quickly throughout the community about what they were doing an many more parents started to come to Rangu reporting their children were going missing.

The determination is fine, but every activity demands financial stability. Rangu worked out a model of dairy farming to fund her activities. For which she borrowed savings of her parents and also took 1 lakh INR as the bank loan. Through this diary, she managed to sustain her missions needs. But later on, she was so busy with her social activist role that she couldn’t concentrate on farming. So she sold off all the cows and invested that money for this social cause. In this process, she had to cross several obstacles, face life threats, ignore the offer of bribes in the form of a huge sum of money to stop her fight against these mafias. Also on many occasions, she had to spend lots of money from her pocket to rescue these victims.

First Rescue operation from Rangu was a small girl who was hired by a tout as a maid and sent to Delhi. When the parents of the girl couldn’t know whereabouts of their daughter for nearly one year, they approached Rangu to trace her. Rangu successfully traced the girl and she was in a locality near Rohini area of Delhi in such a pathetic condition that she was made to sleep with a dog in its kennel and had to work marathon hours without any breaks. This gave confidence to Rangu to take up more such cases and save children from such mafias. Another rescue operation she often recalls is of 2005, where she went to Pune in search of two missing girls from Darjeeling and succeeded in nailing down a brothel despite no proper backup. She had an expectation of saving two girls but for her surprise, there were six girls pleading to get them out of that hell. This success she rates as her best effort.

A lot of their information came from tips, and with the help of local police and various organizations, Rangu and her team were able to rescue some of the victims caught in this trade. However, one of the most frustrating aspects of her work since beginning 12 years ago is that they have had no understanding or help from the local government, which means they rely on donations and even use their own money to keep this important mission going. Rangu says her organization is not only focused on helping the victims re-integrate into life after being rescued, but also spreading awareness in order to prevent it from happening to others.

“Once the children are rescued we keep them with us till all the legal formalities are completed, and till the child is given proper counseling. So we stay with a case till the missing children are properly repatriated with their family. Once a child is rescued from somewhere, that child is at her/his most vulnerable stage… by the time we have rescued them, their self-esteem, their will to live is already lost. So these children and youths need all the help and support that they can get,” she said.

Their efforts, despite the lack of financial help from the government, has not been without success. “In the past 11 years, Kanchanjunga Uddhar Kendra has rescued over 600 children from brothels of Pune, Mumbai, Bihar, Kolkata, Siliguri, Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Haryana, and also child traffickers and bonded labour situations from almost all the north Indian states. Though some of the children we have rescued have been male, almost 95% of the children we rescue are female. Just goes on to show how vulnerable our girls are,” she said.

She has received death threats, pressure to drop her cases in court and even physical abuse from traffickers who she is actively working against every day, but counts her faith in God as a reason for not giving up despite the danger. “I was threatened by goons and mafia on several occasions and even lured with handsome sums of money, but my aim and vision is to free women from their bondage. It would be unwise for me to say that I do not fear for my safety, however, I believe that since God showed which path to walk on, God will take care of my safety as well. Having said that [I get] threats on an almost every day basis,” she said, but also adds this is not the biggest threat to her work, the indifference and ignorance from the government is.

Rangu has already saved more than 8000 children and grown up girls from these rackets and ended their lives as sex slaves. Till date, she has saved over 20,000 children and girls (under 18 years of age) from getting trafficked along the Nepal border and different parts of North East India. These girls and children are usually trafficked from North Bengal, Assam, Sikkim, and Nepal to get them sold for mainly as sex slaves or bonded labors. She has always told that fighting for the cause of children and women gives her immense satisfaction. She often recalls one particular rescue operation of 2005, where she went to Pune in search of two missing girls from Darjeeling and succeeded in nailing down a brothel despite no proper backup. She had an expectation of saving two girls but for her surprise, there were six girls pleading to get them out of that hell. This success she rates as her best effort.

Obviously, it requires a lot of courage to become an activist against crime like trafficking, and Rangu Souriya has exhibited that by overcoming various obstacles. Rightly she has been recognized with numerous awards; she has nearly 20 awards of recognition from various organizations. Prominent among them are Godfrey Phillips Social Bravery Award (The year 2011) and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry’s Women Achievers’ Award (The year 2009). She has received Prestigious 100 Women Awards given by President of India for the year 2016. 

When asked how she feels about being a woman in her line of work, Rangu says she is proud and believes her feminine perspective enables her to sympathize with the victims of this grave injustice. “As history is our witness, there is nothing that woman cannot do… we can do what any man does, and in a better way… I think the inner interest, courage, bravery and sense of responsibility towards my society is perhaps because I am a woman. To be honest, I am thankful that I am a Woman,” she said. 

Source: Google search.

Rukhmabai

#61/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Google dedicated a doodle to Rukhmabai today. “Today’s Doodle by illustrator Shreya Gupta shows the courageous doctor among her patients, doing the dedicated work of a skilled physician,” said Google’s blog post on its doodles.

Rukhmabai, is often credited as the first Indian woman to practice medicine in colonial India. However, that is not true. First practicing lady doctor in India was Dr. Kadambini Ganguly and first non practicing lady physician of India was Dr. Anandi Gopal Joshi, who got their degree in 1886. Rukhmabai joined her medical course in 1889 and returned to India in 1894. But Rukhmabai has another feather in her cap. She not only fought patriarchal mindset to become a physician but also fought for other social causes. If women in modern India can assert their rights of consent, it is due to Rukhmabai refusing to recognise her marriage and the case filed by her husband thereafter. 

Born in 1864 to Janardhan Pandurang and Jayantibai in the present-day Mumbai, she lost her father at the age of eight. Jayantibai transferred her property to Rukhmabai after her father’s death. Her parents were from a community of carpenters. Among the many social evils prevailing at that time was child marriage and Rukhmabai was also married at the age of 11 to Dadaji Bhikaji, then aged nineteen. Her mother later married a widower, Dr. Sakharam Arjun, an eminent physician and the founding member of Bombay Natural History Society. 

Rukhmabai continued to stay with her mother and step-father in the family home even after marriage and studied at home using books from a Free Church Mission library. Rukhmabai and her mother were regulars at the weekly meetings of the Prarthanä Samäj and the Arya Mahilä Samäj. Meanwhile, Dadaji lost his mother and took to living with his maternal uncle Narayan Dhurmaji. The environment of Dhurmaji’s home pushed Dadaji into a life of indolence and waywardness. Dhurmaji had a mistress at home and his wife attempted suicide. Rukhmabai at the age of twelve refused to move to the household of Dhurmaji to live with Dadaji and Sakharam Arjun supported her decision. Seven years later, Dadaji moved court seeking it to order his wife to live with him. In March 1884, Dadaji sent a letter, through his lawyers Chalk and Walker, to Sakharam Arjun asking him to stop preventing Rukhmabai from joining him. Sakharam Arjun responded through civil letters that he was not preventing her but soon he too was forced to obtain legal . Through lawyers Payne, Gilbert, and Sayani, Rukhmabai provided grounds for refusing to join Dadaji. Dadaji claimed that Rukhmabai was being kept away because she could assert the rights to the property of her father’s. Rukhmabai refused to move in with her husband stating that a woman cannot be compelled to stay in a wedlock when she is not interested. 

The Dadaji vs. Rukhmabai case that went on for three years triggered a debate in both England and India. Dadaji Bhikaji vs. Rukhmabai, 1885 with Bhikaji seeking “restitution of conjugal rights” came up for hearing and the judgement was passed by Justice Robert Hill Pinhey. Pinhey stated that English precedents on restitution did not apply here as the English law was meant to be applied to consenting mature adults. He found fault with the English law cases and found no precedent in Hindu law. He declared that Rukhmabai had been wed in her “helpless infancy” and that he could not compel a young lady. Pinhey retired after this last case and in 1886 the case came up for retrial. Rukhmabai’s counsels included J.D. Inverarity Jr. and Telang. There were outcries from various sections of society while it was praised by others. Some Hindus claimed that the law did not respect the sanctity of Hindu customs when in fact Pinhey did. Strong criticism of Pinhey’s decision came from the Native Opinion, an Anglo-Marathi weekly run by Vishwanath Narayan Mandlik (1833–89) who supported Dadaji. A Pune weekly run by Balgangadhar Tilak, the Mahratta, wrote that Justice Pinhey did not understand the spirit of Hindu laws and that he sought reform by “violent means”. In the meantime, a series of articles in the Times of India written under the pen-name of a Hindu Lady had through the course of the case (and before it) caused public reactions and it was revealed that the author was none other than Rukhmabai. One of the witnesses in the case, K.R. Kirtikar (1847-1919), formerly a student of Sakharam Arjun (and a fellow founding Indian member of the Bombay Natural History Society), claimed that the identity did not matter in the case. Kirtikar however was in support of Dadaji. The public debate revolved around multiple points of contention - Hindu versus English Law, reform from the inside versus outside, whether ancient customs deserved respect or not and so on. An appeal against the first case was made on 18 March 1886 and it was upheld by Chief Justice Sir Charles Sargent and Justice. The case was handled by Justice Farran on 4 March 1887 made using interpretations of Hindu laws went in the other direction and Rukhmabai was ordered to go to live with her husband or face six months of imprisonment. Rukhmabai bravely wrote that she would rather have the maximum penalty than obey the verdict. This caused further upheaval and debate. Balgangadhar Tilak wrote in the Kesari that Rukhmabai’s defiance was the result of an English education and declared that Hinduism was in danger. Max Müller wrote that the legal route was not the solution to the problem shown by Rukhmabai’s case and stated that it was Rukhmabai’s education that had made her the best judge of her own choices.

After the series of court cases which resulted in the affirmation of the marriage, she wrote to Queen Victoria who overruled the court and dissolved the marriage. In July 1888, a settlement was reached with Dadaji and he relinquished his claim on Rukhmabai for a payment of two thousand rupees. The case greatly influenced reformers like Behramji Malabari (1853-1912) who wrote extensively on the topic. It was also followed with great interest in Britain which included broader feminist discussions in women’s magazines there. The publicity of this case helped influence the passage of the Age of Consent Act, 1891 which outlawed child marriages across the British Empire, despite opposition from conservative Indians. 

Rukhmabai then set sail to study in England to study medicine. Dr. Edith Pechey at the Cama Hospital encouraged Rukhmabai, helping to raise funds for her education. Rukhmabai went to England in 1889 to study at the London School of Medicine for Women. Rukhmabai was supported by suffrage activist Eva McLaren and Walter McLaren, and the Countess of Dufferin’s Fund for Supplying Medical Aid to the Women of India. Adelaide Manning and several others helped establish a fund, the Rukhmabai Defence Committee. Contributors included Shivajirao Holkar who donated 500 Rupees, “demonstrating courage to intervene against traditions”. Rukhmabai then wore white sari of widows in the Hindu tradition. In 1918 Rukhmabai rejected an offer to join the Women’s Medical Service and joined a state hospital for women in Rajkot. She served as the chief medical officer for a total of thirty-five years before retiring to Bombay in 1929 or 1930. She passed away on September 25, 1955.

Apart from practicing medicine, she continued to work for social causes and was a founding member of Bombay Natural History Society along with her step-father, a 133-year-old pan-India wildlife research organization. As part of her continuous work for reform, she published a pamphlet “Purdah-the need for its abolition.” Even in the present day, women are fighting for the right to consent amid a shocking spike in the crimes against women. Rukhmabai’s fight serves as an inspiration to all the women struggling for their rights. 

Source: Wikipedia and Google search.

Jnanadanandini Devi Tagore

#60/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Jnanadanandini Tagore was a social reformer who pioneered various cultural innovations and influenced the earliest phase of women’s empowerment in 19th century Bengal. She was married to Satyendranath Tagore, a scion of the Jorasanko Tagore Family, and the elder brother of Rabindranath Tagore.

Jnanadanandini was born to parents Abhaycharan Mukhopadhyay and Nistarini Devi of Narendrapur village in Jessore, Bengal Presidency in 1850. Abhaycharan, a Kulin Brahmin, had become an out-caste by marrying into a Pirali family and was disinherited by his father. In accordance to the prevalent custom, Jnanadanandini was married at the young age of seven or eight to Debendranath Tagore’s second son, Satyendranath in 1857. In contrast to her idyllic life in Jessore, she found herself confined behind the strict purdah of the Tagore household at Jorasanko. At the time of her marriage, Jnanadanandini was illiterate and too young to understand the significance of marriage; on the contrary, her husband believed in romance and personal choice. After marriage, he, therefore, started to educate and westernise his child-wife. In 1862, while pursuing his probationary training for the Indian Civil Service (ICS), when Satyendranath went to England to compete for ICS, he even asked his father, Devendranath Tagore, to send her to London so that he could educate and modernise her suitably and turn her into his able companion. He also wrote that until she was educated and old enough to take him as her husband, he would not enter into a husband-wife relationship with her. His father considered his request to be grotesque and did not naturally send his daughter-in-law to England. Around this time, Jnanadanandini’s brother-in-law Hemendranath Tagore took charge of her education. She was also tutored briefly by the famous Brahmo educationist Ayodhyanath Pakrashi. However, when Satyendranath returned to Kolkata as an ICS in 1864 as the first Indian member of the Civil Service, he took her to the place of his work in Ahmedabad in western India, and thus violated the social norm of keeping one’s wife at the parental home. On her way to Ahmedabad, they stayed as houseguests at a Parsi house in Bombay for three months.

While in Bombay, Jnanadanandini socialized in the European circles and partly adapted to English customs. It was in Bombay that she saw Parsi women in the house wearing saris along with bodices, petticoats, blouses and shoes. But, the shift in social role required her to dress appropriately, for which the traditional Bengali style of wearing the sari became too unwieldy. During a tour of Gujarat with her husband, Jnanadanandini improvised upon the sari worn by Parsi women. She created her own style of draping the aanchal/pallu over the left shoulder – as opposed to the Parsi style – so that the right hand remained free for courtesies. In order to make this style popular, she later wrote an article in the women’s monthly, Bamabodhini Patrika and advertised that she would give a set of this dress free to anyone who would like to have it. She thus offered Bengali women a dress which was both polite and fashionable. One of her first pupils in Calcutta was Mrs. Soudamini Gupta, the wife of Behari Lal Gupta, ICS. The style soon became popular among the Brahmo women of Calcutta developing the eponym Brahmika Sari. 

She also became the first lady to wear an Oriental dress — a Mughal style kurta and voluminous pants — when she was out with her husband. The dress was said to be devised by none other than Satyendranath himself for her who had it made by a French tailor in Kolkata. While in Calcutta, Jnanadanandini, breaking the customs of the upper-caste household, accompanied her husband to a Christmas party thrown by the Viceroy, Lord Lawrence in 1866. Prasanna Coomar Tagore of Pathuriaghata, who was also among the invitees was deeply outraged by Jnanadanandini’s boldness and left the viceregal palace in shock. Her father-in-law, Debendranath Tagore, did not take kindly to her independent spirit either. It is speculated that this caused much discord in the Tagore household.

Jnanadanandini played a key role in the opening of the “zenana” (an area where women were kept in seclusion) in the elite households of the 19th century in Bengal? The woman was touted to be much ahead of her times, and also introduced the concept of “nuclear family” within the walls of Jorasanko, Tagore’s ancestral house. She left Jorasanko in 1868 to live by herself in a mansion on Park Street, adjacent to Debendranath’s residence. In spite of this proximity, the two of them never interacted. However, around this time she developed a fondness for her younger brother-in-law, Rabindranath Tagore, who became a frequent visitor in her Park Street house. Jnanadanandini returned to Bombay with her husband in 1869. The same year she lost her first child within a few days of birth. Her son, Surendranath was born in 1872 while the couple was living in Poona and the following year, her daughter Indira Devi was born in Bijapur. In yet another undaunted act of courage, Jnanadanandini appointed a Muslim woman as wet nurse for her children. Leaving newborns to the care of a wet nurse or a governess — always belonging to some Hindu castes — was common practice in affluent Indian families of the day. However, Jnanadanandini resented leaving her children in the custody of servants — often against the wishes of her own husband — making evident the emotional contours of a nuclear family that were already beginning to evolve in her mind. Her third son Kabindranath was born in 1876 during the family’s brief sojourn in Hyderabad, Sindh.

In 1877, a heavily pregnant Jnanadanandini Devi set sail for England with her three children, while her husband lived in India. Such a separation was incredible for the contemporary society, but she never yielded to tradition. At a time when an Indian woman crossing the seas was unheard of — let alone without a male companion — her fortitude created a social sensation. She was received in London by her husband’s uncle Gnanendramohan Tagore who, in spite of being the first Asian barrister and a Christian convert, shared in the shock. After briefly residing at Gnanendramohan Tagore’s house in Kensington Gardens, Jnanadanandini moved into a house on Medina Villas in the seaside town of Brighton, Sussex. Satyendranath joined her in England with the onset of his furlough in October 1878, along with his younger brother Rabindranath Tagore. Her initial year in England was marked by grief with the birth of a stillborn child, and the demise of her youngest son Kabindranath. She arranged for Kabindranath to be buried beside Dwarakanath Tagore’s grave at Kensal Green Cemetery in London. However, she and her children soon developed an intimate friendship with Rabindranath. Her daughter Indira would eventually become Rabindranath’s lifelong confidante. Upon the completion of Satyendranath’s furlough, he took up a post in Surat while Jnanadanandini returned to Calcutta with her children.

In Calcutta, Jnanadanandini took up residence in a bungalow on Lower Circular Road. Yet, from the memoirs of her daughter Indira and niece Sarala, we learn that Jnanadanandini never relinquished her attachment with Jorasanko. She took an active role in Rabindranath’s marriage and even mentored the young bride, Mrinalini. With time, her relationship with Rabindranath permeated into the domain of his creativity. Jnanadanandini started assisting him with the performance of his plays, often encouraging other women of the household to participate. Thus came: Valmiki-Pratibha, Kaalmrigaya, Raja O Rani, Mayar Khela and Bisarjan. From Indira Devi’s recollection we also learn that in spite of her high standing, Jnanadanandini did not socialize with the Calcutta glitterati of her time. That Calcutta society was not favourably disposed towards Jnanadanandini either is evident form an article in the October 1889 issue of the popular Bengali journal Bangabasi, which slandered her for acting in the play Raja O Rani. Ironically, the Tagore house at Birjitalao where the performance took place is today occupied by a ritzy gentlemen’s club.

In 1890, Jnanadanandini moved in with Jyotirindranath Tagore who had lost his wife Kadambari Devi in 1884. In 1891, Jnanadanandini Devi introduced her nephew Abanindranath Tagore to E.B. Havell who at the time was the principal of Government College of Art. The collaboration between these two artists would eventually lead to the development of the Bengal School of Art. Jnanadanandini’s position in the Tagore family is difficult to situate. On the one hand, she is among the few women who presided over the Maghotsav celebrations at the Brahmo Samaj, while on the other she is known to have advocated marriage with the non-Brahmin Cooch-Behar royal family which brought her at loggerheads, yet again, with Debendranath Tagore. Ironically, a woman who once went to England just by herself did not allow her son Surendranath to go to England for higher studies. Despite that and her maternal anxieties notwithstanding, she never objected to Surendranath’s many radical misadventures. While she single-handedly nursed Rabindranath’s daughter Meera Devi through her difficult pregnancy in 1911, she also fell out with him over the issue of withdrawing her grandson Subirendranath from Santiniketan ashram in 1921. Yet, her relationship with Rabindranath remained untarnished all her life. In the words of her daughter Indira Devi, “my mother had ... a quality of centrality, that is the power of attracting people around her, owing to her hospitable and hearty nature”.

In 1907, Jnanadanandini and Satyendranath visited Jyotirindranath Tagore in his house at Morabadi Hill in Ranchi and started living there permanently from 1911. She died in 1941.

Among the Tagore family women, after Swarnakumari Devi, Jnanadanandini participated most actively in the rich literary ambiance of the family. Upon her return from England in 1880, Jnanadanandini began writing articles in the Bengali journal Bharati. Her flair was soon noticed by the intelligentsia. In 1881 - four years before the establishment of the Indian National Congress - Jnanadanandini published an article titled Ingrajninda O Deshanurag (Criticism of the British and Patriotism), in which she called for the establishment of a nationwide organization which would have branches in the remote district towns. She argued “every benefit that the British have bestowed upon us is a blow to our mission of national liberation”. In 1885, Jnanadanandini Devi established Balak, the first children’s literary magazine in Bengali. Rabindranath contributed a number of short stories, poems and plays to Balak. She wrote two plays for children - Takdumadum and Saat Bhai Champa - both of which were highly appreciated in the literary circles. In spite of her many literary achievements, Jnanadanandini Devi did not write her autobiography. Only a couple of years before her death, Pulinbihari Sen persuaded her to write a set of memoirs, later published as Smritikatha O Puratani.

Jnanadanandini Devi Tagore was an example of how an illiterate girl could educate herself with the help of her husband and become competent to live in the society as an equal member. In addition to Bangla and English, she learnt French, Gujarati and Marathi; and turned herself into an accomplished woman mastering English manners and etiquette. A time came soon, when other women of the upper class also followed her style.

Source: Wikipedia and Google search.

Anna Murray-Douglass

#59/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Anna Murray Douglass is best known as the first wife of black abolitionist Frederick Douglass. Her life was immensely overshadowed by her husband who was an African-American social reformer, abolitionist, and statesman gaining note for his dazzling oratory and incisive antislavery writings; and illustrates the challenges facing women who were married to famous men.

Anna Murray was born in Denton, Maryland, to Bambarra and Mary Murray. Unlike her seven older brothers and sisters, who were born in slavery, Anna Murray and her younger four siblings were born emancipated, her parents having been manumitted just a month before her birth. A resourceful young woman, by the age of 17 she had established herself as a laundress and housekeeper and later became very wealthy. Her laundry work took her to the docks, where she met Frederick Douglass, then known as Frederick Washington Bailey, a slave working as a caulker. He was six years her junior. (Because I’m focusing on his wife, I’m not going to talk in detail about Frederick’s truly amazing and influential life and work on behalf of abolition, women’s suffrage, and civil rights. However, if you aren’t familiar with his life, please check out his page on Wikipedia. He was a powerful, eloquent writer and speaker who could cut straight to the heart of a matter without hyperbole one minute and wax lyrically eloquent the next. It was truly amazing how he had educated himself while being a slave.)

Anna’s freedom made Frederick believe in the possibility of his own. When he decided to escape slavery again in 1838 (his third attempt after two failed ones), Anna encouraged and helped him by providing him with some sailor’s clothing her laundry work gave her access to. She also gave him part of her savings, which she augmented by selling one of her feather beds. After Frederick had made his way to Philadelphia and then New York, he wrote to Anna to join him. Anna did follow him, bringing enough goods with her to be able to start a household. They were married on September 15, 1838. At first they took Johnson as their name, but upon moving to New Bedford, Massachusetts, they adopted Douglass as their married name.

Over the remaining years of her life, Anna Murray-Douglass helped support the family financially, working as a laundress and learning to make shoes, as Douglass’s income from his speeches was sporadic and the family was struggling. She also took an active role in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society and later prevailed upon her husband to train their sons as typesetters for his abolitionist newspaper, North Star. After the family moved to Rochester, New York, she established a headquarters for the Underground Railroad* from her home, providing food, board and clean linen for fugitive slaves on their way to Canada.

The first years of the marriage appear to have been congenial. Anna bore four children—Rosetta, Lewis Henry, Charles Remond, and Frederick Douglass Jr.—during their residence in New Bedford. While Douglass searched for jobs on the city’s docks, Anna kept house on a small budget. When the family moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, she also took in piecework from the local shoe factories and saved everything that her husband sent to her while he toured for the American Anti-Slavery Society.

Strain began to manifest in the Douglass marriage once Frederick became involved in the abolitionist movement. He spent a good deal of time away from home giving lectures, including two years in Europe. Most of his white associates expressed disdain for his wife, at their most generous referring to Anna as a poor intellectual match for her husband, and treated her like a servant in her own home. They, like historians, had focused on Anna’s illiteracy and stoicism to bolster their arguments. Anna, however, had little time for intellectual pursuits while running a household and raising a family with little help from her husband.

By the late 1840s Anna lost much of her emotional support system. Her daughter, Rosetta, was away at school in Albany, New York; and her friend and household helper, Harriet Bailey, had married and moved to Springfield, Massachusetts. Meanwhile, her husband toured England, where rumors spread about the attention lavished on him by the English ladies. After his return in 1847 Douglass moved the family to Rochester, New York, taking Anna away from the small but active black community of which she had been a part in Lynn. Shortly thereafter she suffered the indignity of having the British reformer Julia Griffiths move into the Douglass home, which caused a storm of controversy alleging Frederick’s infidelity with Griffiths. The departure of Griffiths was followed by the arrival of Ottilie Assing, who installed herself in the Douglass home for several months out of the year over the next twenty years. For much of her life Anna lived isolated from supportive African American companionship while hosting a string of white abolitionists who could barely conceal their disdain for her. Only the extended stays of Rosetta and her children and the companionship of Louisa Sprague, Rosetta’s sister-in-law who lived in the Douglass home as a housekeeper, relieved Anna’s loneliness.

Nevertheless, Anna understood her husband’s role in fighting slavery and her role as his helpmate. She took pride in her husband’s appearance and accomplishments and in keeping a well-ordered home. She continued to take an active part in operation of the household, even after Douglass had become wealthy enough to hire servants. After Anna’s death her work was informally recognized by black women, who continued to refer to the home at Cedar Hill, Uniontown, D.C., as her home, and by Rosetta, who wrote a memoir of Anna’s life and named her eldest daughter Annie. 

Rosetta’s memoir, “My Mother as I Recall Her”, deserves particular attention as one of the only surviving documents about Anna Murray Douglass. Rosetta celebrated Anna’s work, placing her mother squarely within the nineteenth-century “cult of domesticity”. Rosetta used Anna as a symbol of the equality of black women within that sphere during an era in which black women were portrayed as either the sexually promiscuous “Jezebel” or the maternal caretaker “Mammy” of white families. On the other hand, not only did Anna actively support the end of slavery by aiding her husband’s flight to freedom and allowing him to pursue antislavery work but also she maintained an impeccable home and preserved her own dignity and that of her marriage in the face of white assault. In Rosetta’s narrative Anna emerges as a model of middle-class womanhood.

Frederick Douglass, for his part, recognized the role that Anna played in his life. During his first visit to England he maintained a cordial distance from his enthusiastic female admirers, and he defended his wife when anyone suggested that she was not a fit mate for him. After his return home in 1847 Anna conceived their last child, Annie, and Douglass risked his own arrest to reenter the United States to comfort Anna in the wake of that child’s death ten years later. When Anna died in 1882, he fell into a depression that he described as being the darkest moment of his life. Nevertheless, he seemed less than concerned for Anna’s feelings in bringing into their home two white women with whom he was rumored to be sexually involved. He also married a younger white woman within a year of Anna’s death, much to the chagrin of his family and both the black and white communities.

For much of her life, Anna suffered from various ailments, particularly headaches that made her ill. In her later years she suffered from a stroke that confined her to a wheelchair and her bedroom. In August 1882 she died shortly after having a second stroke. One year after Anna’s death, Frederick remarried. His second wife was Helen Pitts. Their marriage was quite a scandal. Helen was white and twenty years younger than Frederick. His children felt the marriage disrespected their mother. Frederick and Helen’s friends were shocked because they felt the marriage was too sudden and because they were worried about the race and age differences. Helen’s family cut off contact with her altogether, and their local society was appalled that a black man and white woman were married at all. But, to give her her due, without Helen’s emotional support and energy, he might not have escaped the depression that haunted him after Anna’s death.

Anna was initially buried at Graceland Cemetery in Washington, D.C. But the cemetery closed in 1894, and on February 22, 1895, she was moved to Mount Hope Cemetery in Rochester, New York. Frederick Douglass was buried next to her after his death on February 20, 1895. They were later joined by Helen there.

Her entire life, Anna Murray was overshadowed by the enormous personality of Frederick Douglass. Yet, it is doubtful that Frederick Douglass could have been as successful in his work as he was without the assistance of this feisty woman in his life, his first wife and biggest support for 44 years. She played more of a supporting role in his life than an egalitarian one. Yet, in many ways her role was essential to his success. Without Anna’s financial and homemaking support, he might never have escaped from slavery and he probably would not have been able to pursue his career as a writer and orator. Even though his name is the name history remembers, it’s in part because of Anna that he was able to persevere. Yet, it’s ironical that the most talked about fact about their relationship is the white woman he married after she died.

* The Underground Railroad was a network of secret routes and safe houses established in the United States during the early-to-mid 19th century, and used by African-American slaves to escape into free states and Canada with the aid of abolitionists and allies who were sympathetic to their cause. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.

Prem Mathur

#58/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

Long ago there were not that many pilots in India, the reason being women were not encouraged to get in to that field, which was considered as male's domain. But, nowadays numerous Indian women work as pilots both in the private and public airline companies. Initially women were working in the cabin, taking care of the passenger's needs. Today they made a big jump from the cabin to the cockpit. It all started with one Prem Mathur whose continued efforts and passion made her become the first Indian woman commercial pilot in 1951, exactly 4 years after India's freedom from the British. Indeed a great feat in those years of conservatism and restricted movements for Indian women. Above in the Indian sky, woman in the cockpit was unthinkable in the 1940s and 1950s. Certainly in the area of commercial flying Prem Mathur was a trailblazer.

After receiving the pilot's flying license in 1947 from Allahabad Flying Club, her ambition was to join a commercial airliner as a pilot. Incidentally, she was first Indian woman to have received a commercial pilot's license in India. In the initial stages, the results were not encouraging, she kept receiving a barrage of regret letters from the commercial airline companies. The commercial airliners, it is said, did not want to take risk by employing women pilots. Their excuse was the passengers won't be comfortable sitting in the airliner with women in the cockpit. This kind of misconception was very much there and it was rooted in the fact that women won't as quickly respond to emergency situation as men would do. Simply speaking, women pilots were not good enough to handle a real emergency situation that might develop while flying as it was different from handling emergency situation in a simulated environment on the ground.

As for Prem, that was not the end of the world. Now she became even more serious about joining a commercial airliner at any cost and her positive approach coupled with sincere efforts, at last, paid off. Deccan Airways of Hyderabad at the interview asked her all kinds of questions about sophisticated electronic and mechanical control and being knowledgeable as she was, initially she was hired as a co-pilot in 1951; after having won the air race in 1949 conducted by the Aero Club. 

However, the company was reluctant to giver her full command of the cockpit even after fulfillment of the required hours of flying by her. While with Deccan, she had the opportunity to fly distinguished personalities like Lal Bahadur Shastry, Indira Gandhi, Lady Mountbatten etc. A disappointed Prem left the job and later became a pilot of well-known industrialist G. D. Birla's private aircraft and was stationed in Delhi. After a short stint with Mr. Birla, she joined the joined Indian Airlines as a pilot in 1953, the National Domestic Airline came into operation with the amalgamation of many private airlines. On 2nd October 1953, Capt. Prem Mathur started flying as Co-pilot with Indian Airlines and India became the first country in the world to employ a woman as a pilot in their IATA Airline Ltd. Till retirement she had a distinguished carrier with the Indian Airlines.

As a courageous woman, she chased her dream and accomplished her passion.

Source: Google search.

Dr. T. S. Kanaka

#57/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

When Thanjavur Santhanakrishnan Kanaka, more popularly known as T.S. Kanaka, opted for a career in neurosurgery way back in the 1960s, little did she realise that she was embarking on a challenging journey. It was a struggle back then as she broke the male bastion several times over, first as a student and later as a surgeon. “Getting a master's degree in general surgery was not easy for me,” Dr. Kanaka recalls with a sparkle in her eyes. “Women were never admitted to master's programme in general surgery. Two other women had been admitted to the M.S. general surgery simply because they had won the Johnson Medal (the highest recognition for a student at Madras Medical College). While one went on to become an anatomy professor, the other never practised. When I applied for the MS programme, I was told I would never be accepted.”

Kanaka was one of eight children born to Santhanakrishna and Padmavathi in Madras on March 31, 1932. Her father was the Deputy Director of Public Instruction and Principal of Madras Teachers College. Despite an urge to pursue spiritual studies in her early years, she went on to study medicine. Born in an era when women were not even allowed to pursue their studies, the young doctor was taking the bold steps towards getting a master’s degree in surgery. No words can explain her struggle to make her mark in this highly male dominated profession.She once explained in an interview, “I was born along with four sisters and three brothers of which only one sister is alive, apart from me. All of them were highly educated. Given that we belonged to 40s and 50s, it’s a huge thing. My youngest sibling was Amarnath who died at a very young age. He, being the last one, was the dearest to the family. So, I have named this house after him. I didn’t want to get married because I wanted to involve myself completely into my profession. My mother understood my situation and accepted it. But my father, like any other father, wanted to get me married. But you see, back then the crucial decisions of the family belonged to the woman of the family. They appeared as subordinates but always the woman’s words went in the house. These days we are talking about female equality, but back then there was female superiority (she laughed) though it’s all changed now.” 

Known for her passion for academics, Dr. Kanaka embarked on research even as a medical student at MMC. She undertook several research projects during the third and fourth year of MBBS, a rare feat for an undergraduate student. But that did not make her journey any easy. She finally got her way and was admitted to the MS course as the only woman among the eight students. 

Even post her admission into the degree course, she was not given the permission to watch emergencies and her teachers where highly skeptical of giving her the knife or scalpel. The agony did not end there. Every time she wrote the exam the examiner failed her. But she not give up. She passed the MS examination on her sixth attempt by fighting every possible tooth and nail. From here young Dr. Kanaka’s journey took her to serve the Indian Army as an officer-surgical specialist. But unfortunately, due to a prolonged lingering illness she could not pursue the post for long. After her health improvement, she returned back to Madras Medical College and joined the neurosurgical wing, dreaming to become a neurosurgeon. The post of an assistant to a surgeon did not come easily either. She turned lucky when an assistant surgeon had to go on leave for training and she was posted in his place. It was under Dr. A. Venugopal that she formally became a surgeon. Later neurosurgeon Dr. B. Ramamurthy's tutorship helped her hone her skills. Under the guidance and teachings of a few esteemed surgeons who sharpen her skills and knowledge, helped her become the first few women neurosurgeons of the world.

Struggles were aplenty even after this. Her academic papers were scrutinised by fellow researchers in the United States. Today, Dr. Kanaka is among the handful of women neurosurgeons who have set an example for other women. Her favourite subject is deep brain stimulation, and she has presented several papers on it. During her several lecture tours in India, she has impressed upon scientists to develop deep brain stimulation kits locally, but says she has not succeeded. The kit is used in stereotaxic surgeries. “My job is not done until India develops its own kit for cost-effective treatment,” says Dr. Kanaka, who remained single to devote herself to medicine. 

Over the years, her zeal and thirst for the subject have inspired her to conduct comprehensive research in the field of neurosurgery. An expert in the field of brain simulation, Dr. Kanaka has dedicated her entire life to the field of medicine. With many accolades to her credit, the one striking one, is that , she is known to be an active blood donor all her life. She was formerly listed in the Limca Book of Records for the highest number of blood donations by an individual. As of 2004 she was noted to have donated blood 139 times.

By the way, she doesn’t stop there . Her hands are currently full with a pet project of designing an implantable deep brain stimulation kit that would act like a boon for cerebral palsy patients. A humanist at heart, she is also quiet active at Sri Santhanakrishna Padmavathi Health Care & Research Centre, which stands tall on a plot adjoining her home. Named after her parents, the center conducts various talks on health thereby creating awareness on medical problems.

Currently, Dr Kanaka, under her parents’ name, also runs a trust and a healthcare wellness cum research centre near her house at Chromepet in Chennai. When she retired, she wanted to build an old age home with her retirement money. She went for help to HelpAge India. The person said, “You were literally living in your office at the hospital for 40 years now; you cannot run a home. Think of something else.” She kept thinking throughout her train journey back home and that was what served as her Bodhi tree. She established a ‘wellness centre’. She has a clinic where she listens to the problems of the elderly. They have simple problems like memory defects, insomnia, drowsiness, giddiness, fatigue, tremors, unsteady gait, falls, pain, urinary incontinence etc, which seem very unnoticeable problems to the youngsters in their family and the young doctors. They need someone they could talk to about their problems. She’s doing that. Now that she’s in their age she can understand their problems.

Undoubtedly, she is an aspiration for every person and holds a special place in the heart of womanhood. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.

Maryam Mirzakhani

#56/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

In 2014, Maryam Mirzakhani, then 37-years-old, a mathematician working at Stanford University, became the first woman, and only woman till date, as well as the first Iranian to win the Fields Medal since its inception in 1936. The Fields Medal is awarded to mathematicians under 40 who have made outstanding contributions to mathematics that hold future promise. She was one of four winners of the Fields medal, which is considered the mathematics equivalent of the Nobel prize. She was named for her work on complex geometry and dynamic systems. Her death, on July 14, 2017, due to breast cancer when she was only 40, saddened the entire mathematics community.

Maryam’s work straddled several branches of mathematics. She was intuitive and persistent. She would often take large sheets of paper and draw geometric patterns on them as she thought of the problem, prompting her daughter to think she was “painting again.” Manjul Bhargava of Princeton University remembers that Maryam was a “master of curved spaces.” As he explained in an email, “Everyone knows that the shortest distance between two points on a flat surface is a straight line. But if the surface is curved — for example, the surface of a ball or a doughnut — then the shortest distance [along the surface] between two points will also be along a curved path, and can thus be more complicated. Maryam proved many amazing theorems about such shortest paths — called geodesics — on curved surfaces, among many other remarkable results in geometry and beyond. Her work, and the research programmes she started, will have an impact on mathematics and physics for years to come.”

She had an uncanny intuition for geometric problems, Professor Bhargava said, which she would solve through drawings that looked like beautiful doodles “but were in fact profound geometric insights that she would then make rigorous later on.” Maryam was interested in complicated curved surfaces or hyperbolic geometry: for example, studying loops that don’t intersect; probing deeper to answer how many loops, which don’t intersect, are there of less than a given length on a curved surface. She worked with Alex Eskin to find a solution to the problem of understanding the trajectory of a billiard ball as it bounces around a table. In this, she generalised a work done by her doctoral adviser Curtis McMullen of Harvard University, also a Fields medallist.

A consequence of her work was to give an entirely new proof of a conjecture made by leading string theorist Edward Witten (a 1990 Fields medallist). The first proof of this conjecture was given by Maxim Kontsevich in 1992; it was such a difficult thing to prove that this work itself, in part, won him the Fields Medal in 1998. Maryam Mirzakhani’s proof of Witten’s conjecture was by relating it to an “elementary problem of counting the number of geodesics on individual surfaces.” She worked aggressively and went for deep and fundamental problems, never reaching for the “low-hanging fruit.” It was her strong geometric intuition and her fluency in a range of diverse techniques that made it possible for her to tackle these problems. In the words of Professor McMullen, “Maryam was a brilliant mathematician who has left us far too soon, and who will continue to inspire others to follow in her path.”

A tribute on the Stanford University website says she specialised in an area of mathematics that “read like a foreign language to those outside mathematics — moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry.” Each of these terms comes with a well-developed theory backing it and Maryam’s work was both breaking new ground and building a bridge across these areas. In an interview to Quanta magazine, her collaborator Professor Eskin said her doctoral thesis was such that you could immediately recognise that it belonged in a textbook.

An Iranian citizen, Maryam Mirzakhani was born on on May 3, 1977 in Tehran where she grew up in the post Iran-Iraq war period, “the lucky generation,” she said in a rare interview she gave to Quanta magazine. Her father Ahmad is an electrical engineer. She attended Farzanegan School there, part of the National Organization for Development of Exceptional Talents. In 1994, Maryam achieved the gold medal level in the International Mathematical Olympiad, the first female Iranian student to do so. In the 1995 International Mathematical Olympiad, she became the first Iranian student to achieve a perfect score and to win two gold medals. She obtained her B.Sc. in mathematics in 1999 from the Sharif University of Technology. She then went to the United States for graduate work, earning her Ph.D. in 2004 from Harvard University, where she worked under the supervision of the Fields Medalist Curtis T. McMullen. Maryam was a 2004 research fellow of the Clay Mathematics Institute and a professor at Princeton University. In 2008, she became a professor at Stanford University.

In 2005, Maryam married Jan Vondrák, a Czech theoretical computer scientist and applied mathematician who currently is an associate professor at Stanford University. They have a daughter named Anahita. Maryam was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2013. In 2016 the cancer spread to her bone and liver, and she died on July 14, 2017 at the age of 40 at Stanford hospital in Palo Alto, California where she lived with her family. During her lifetime, she had been celebrated with many awards and honours, like, AMS Blumenthal Award 2009; the 2013 AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize in Mathematics (which is presented every two years by the American Mathematical Society and recognizes an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the preceding six years); the Clay Research Award 2014; and of course the Fields Medal 2014. She was named one of Nature magazine's ten "people who mattered" of 2014. She was invited to be the plenary speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 2014 and was elected as the foreign associate to the French Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society in 2015; to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016; and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.

A private person, she was known to be humble and creative. Maryam originally dreamed of becoming a writer but then shifted to mathematics. When she was working, she would doodle on sheets of paper and scribble formulas on the edges of her drawings, leading her daughter to describe the work as painting. “We overlapped at Harvard University early in our careers, and became instant friends then… Her work has just been so remarkable then and ever since; it was indeed a great honour for me to receive [the Fields Medal] together with her,” said Professor Bhargava. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.