Print as a Feminist Public Sphere: Indian Women’s Journals and the Making of Gendered Consciousness

Abstract

Indian women’s periodicals played an important role in shaping women’s participation in public debates, challenging established gender norms and creating alternative spaces for feminist expression. However, their historical contribution to the development of gendered consciousness and its relevance to contemporary digital feminism require further conceptual examination. This paper examines how Indian women’s periodicals functioned as a feminist public sphere and explores how their historical role contributes to understanding gendered consciousness in contemporary India. Drawing on feminist critiques of the public sphere and the concept of counterpublics, it investigates how print culture enabled women to engage with debates on education, marriage, employment and citizenship despite their limited access to formal public institutions. The study uses a qualitative, interpretive research design based on a purposively selected corpus of fifty scholarly sources published between 1986 and 2024. The sources were analysed through reflexive thematic analysis, supported by source, theoretical and investigator triangulation. Five major themes emerged: periodicals as counterpublic spaces; reform, education and domesticity; intersectional exclusions; nationalism and transnational networks; and continuities between print-based and digital feminism. The findings show that women’s periodicals widened opportunities for participation and fostered communities of female readers, while also reproducing caste, class and religious hierarchies and frequently associating women’s emancipation with reformist and nationalist agendas. Contemporary digital hashtag publics reflect both the emancipatory possibilities and structural exclusions inherited from print-based feminist spaces. The paper argues that gendered consciousness in India is best understood as a historically cumulative, contested and multidimensional process rather than a linear progression towards emancipation. It establishes a conceptual connection between the history of women’s print culture and contemporary digital feminist scholarship, highlighting the continuing significance of historical media spaces in understanding the formation and transformation of feminist public engagement in India.