Description
Sultana's Dream is a witty, skillful and appealing tale that posits a world in which women have taken over the public sphere and men are confined to the private hidden world of seclusion. "A gem of a book...it speaks to us of the complexity of trying to understand women of other cultures and times in their own terms."--Geraldine Forbes, Committee.
Collection
Publication
The Feminist Press (1988), 90 pages
User reviews
LibraryThing member Citizenjoyce
This book, and the fact that it's title story was written over 100 years ago, put a lie to the "You've come a long way baby - the fight is over you won" rhetoric. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain spent her life fighting the custom of purdah. Purdah is at one point broadly defined in the book as the practice
The first part of the book is a reprint of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 1905 story, Sultana's Dream, about a reverse purdah in which men are kept indoors and women interact in a scientifically advanced and peaceful world. The rest of the book is non fiction commentary on the subject of the oppression of women for political purposes masquerading as religion.
There's a brief biography of Rokeya who was a Bengali woman who became famous for writing humorous and caustic articles attacking the concept of purdah. She also founded girls' schools in Bhagalpurl and Calcutta. There are excerpts from her 1928 book The Secluded Ones ( original title Avarodhbasini) which gives personal experiences of purdah. One of the most shocking is of a woman who is falls on railroad tracks and is allowed to be run over because there are no women strong enough to move her and the men acquiesce to her maid's pleas not to assault her virtue by touching her.
The afterword is an essay, "Caging the Lion: A Fable for Our Time" by Hanna Papanek written in 1981 and pertinent now. "Many religions want to use women, once again to show that men are right-minded...There is something wrong in the world and one way to fix it is to put women 'in their place'...Purdah, for example, is by no means universal in Muslim populations, and, where it does exist, it varies widely in form and severity...Similarly, in other (Judeo-Christian) religions, ideas about abortion and contraception have varied over time...but are presented as if they have always existed in precisely their present form...Social and religious movements construct what might be called 'synthetic traditions' to embody the goals and needs of the present, clothed in ancient garb to make them more powerful."
Papanek states that the imposition of purdah waxes and wanes according to political needs. When Eastern cultures were mobilized to to reject colonial rule women were encouraged to join nationalistic movements, to appear in public in order to portray the culture as modern and able to self govern. Then once independence was achieved they were again encouraged to be humble and modest and stay in the background. (I was reminded here of the way Mormons tout the fact that Utah women had the vote before women in the rest of the country as Utah was seeking statehood.) Of particular interest is her assertion that the reason many women so willingly and completely submit to these laws is that such submission is the only access to power that they have.
Parts of this book were written from 1905 to 1981, we face the same problems now, with the same need to shine a light on the use of oppression of women as a mode of advancing or claiming political power.
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of setting women aside from society either through the use of distinctive clothing - veils to burqas- to the actual physical separation of women and men in living quarters to make sure women never come into contact with men who are not their "sacred relations". From the introduction in 1981: "Once again, women are being used as the targets of fears and resentments generated by rapid social social change. Repressive regimes and powerful social movements in many parts of the world are once again trying to restrict the human rights of women as part of their attempts to bring to their societies the imagined stability of a mythic past."The first part of the book is a reprint of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's 1905 story, Sultana's Dream, about a reverse purdah in which men are kept indoors and women interact in a scientifically advanced and peaceful world. The rest of the book is non fiction commentary on the subject of the oppression of women for political purposes masquerading as religion.
There's a brief biography of Rokeya who was a Bengali woman who became famous for writing humorous and caustic articles attacking the concept of purdah. She also founded girls' schools in Bhagalpurl and Calcutta. There are excerpts from her 1928 book The Secluded Ones ( original title Avarodhbasini) which gives personal experiences of purdah. One of the most shocking is of a woman who is falls on railroad tracks and is allowed to be run over because there are no women strong enough to move her and the men acquiesce to her maid's pleas not to assault her virtue by touching her.
The afterword is an essay, "Caging the Lion: A Fable for Our Time" by Hanna Papanek written in 1981 and pertinent now. "Many religions want to use women, once again to show that men are right-minded...There is something wrong in the world and one way to fix it is to put women 'in their place'...Purdah, for example, is by no means universal in Muslim populations, and, where it does exist, it varies widely in form and severity...Similarly, in other (Judeo-Christian) religions, ideas about abortion and contraception have varied over time...but are presented as if they have always existed in precisely their present form...Social and religious movements construct what might be called 'synthetic traditions' to embody the goals and needs of the present, clothed in ancient garb to make them more powerful."
Papanek states that the imposition of purdah waxes and wanes according to political needs. When Eastern cultures were mobilized to to reject colonial rule women were encouraged to join nationalistic movements, to appear in public in order to portray the culture as modern and able to self govern. Then once independence was achieved they were again encouraged to be humble and modest and stay in the background. (I was reminded here of the way Mormons tout the fact that Utah women had the vote before women in the rest of the country as Utah was seeking statehood.) Of particular interest is her assertion that the reason many women so willingly and completely submit to these laws is that such submission is the only access to power that they have.
Parts of this book were written from 1905 to 1981, we face the same problems now, with the same need to shine a light on the use of oppression of women as a mode of advancing or claiming political power.
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LibraryThing member steadfastreader
This is a fascinating collection of work written by three near east feminists. It's short and concise.
Highly recommended.
Highly recommended.
LibraryThing member Calavari
Sultana's Dream is actually a short story and not a whole book, which I didn't realize until it came to an abrupt end. It's about a woman's dream of an utopian society of women who took over the running of their from the men after they suffered a massive military defeat. The story of how the women
I love the idea of these old feminist utopian stories but I also get the fault in their ideas. Women are not inherently better than men, we are simply socialized to think of community and family before ourselves, to be as docile as society can get away with making us, and that giving of ourselves is a higher virtue than taking power. Not all women listen to society and we have come a long way away from this as a gender in Western society while some others are still underived more strict patriarchal societies. I appreciated the mention that good leaders who happen to be women improve things over bad leaders who happen to be men, despite internal biases, that was mentioned in Half the Sky. They dont quite put it that way, but that was my take away from their explamation. It's not so much that one gender is better than the other but that those who believe in inherent superiority of any group tend to mistreat those they believe themselves to be superior than. Hence the reversal of roles in this book but not an egalitarian nor a merit based society.
Of course, merit based anything is so biased that I hesitate to believe anyone sees it clearly. There have been studies that those with the most merit are actually those who look and think most like the person making the decision. Perhaps this is how we'be ended up with so many diversity campaigns, we must make a special effort to assess merit in those we are less like because different points of view consistently improve things for the rest of us, even if it's only that they sharpen our argument.
Getting back to the book, though. This is a fun little story about a feminist utopia, a place where women rule over men in the same fashion women were ruled when it was written in 1905.
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came to power is my favorite part of the story but it also goes into how they live and what it was like before the women took over.I love the idea of these old feminist utopian stories but I also get the fault in their ideas. Women are not inherently better than men, we are simply socialized to think of community and family before ourselves, to be as docile as society can get away with making us, and that giving of ourselves is a higher virtue than taking power. Not all women listen to society and we have come a long way away from this as a gender in Western society while some others are still underived more strict patriarchal societies. I appreciated the mention that good leaders who happen to be women improve things over bad leaders who happen to be men, despite internal biases, that was mentioned in Half the Sky. They dont quite put it that way, but that was my take away from their explamation. It's not so much that one gender is better than the other but that those who believe in inherent superiority of any group tend to mistreat those they believe themselves to be superior than. Hence the reversal of roles in this book but not an egalitarian nor a merit based society.
Of course, merit based anything is so biased that I hesitate to believe anyone sees it clearly. There have been studies that those with the most merit are actually those who look and think most like the person making the decision. Perhaps this is how we'be ended up with so many diversity campaigns, we must make a special effort to assess merit in those we are less like because different points of view consistently improve things for the rest of us, even if it's only that they sharpen our argument.
Getting back to the book, though. This is a fun little story about a feminist utopia, a place where women rule over men in the same fashion women were ruled when it was written in 1905.
Show Less
LibraryThing member lydia1879
Short and packs a punch.
Written by a Bengali Muslim woman, this satirical short story imagines a world where women are allowed to live to their fullest intellectual and economic potential. A sultan's wife travels to LadyLand, where the women run the world, for lack of a better term.
It was written
This story was written, it was published, but more astonishingly, it survived. Science fiction is a testament not only to who we are, but who we can be. It allows us to shed our supposed rigid social barriers and imagine who we could be if we didn't have those constraints. Here is a woman of colour imagining a future in which other women of colour exist, contribute, are listened to, are an integral piece of society.
I... honestly really don't like when people say sexist / racist / homophobic comments or views were just 'products of their time'. Sure they were. But we had allies and we've had people who were at the forefront of all of that prejudice since the beginning and we will always have people like that.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is one such example.
Imagine reading this the year it was published. Feeling validated, feeling seen, feeling as if you could've come from LadyLand, as if you were suddenly made of star stuff, infinite in all your opportunities.
This story isn't just important 'for its time', it's important because it survived.
Written by a Bengali Muslim woman, this satirical short story imagines a world where women are allowed to live to their fullest intellectual and economic potential. A sultan's wife travels to LadyLand, where the women run the world, for lack of a better term.
It was written
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in 1905. This story was written, it was published, but more astonishingly, it survived. Science fiction is a testament not only to who we are, but who we can be. It allows us to shed our supposed rigid social barriers and imagine who we could be if we didn't have those constraints. Here is a woman of colour imagining a future in which other women of colour exist, contribute, are listened to, are an integral piece of society.
I... honestly really don't like when people say sexist / racist / homophobic comments or views were just 'products of their time'. Sure they were. But we had allies and we've had people who were at the forefront of all of that prejudice since the beginning and we will always have people like that.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain is one such example.
Imagine reading this the year it was published. Feeling validated, feeling seen, feeling as if you could've come from LadyLand, as if you were suddenly made of star stuff, infinite in all your opportunities.
This story isn't just important 'for its time', it's important because it survived.
Show Less
LibraryThing member Tikimoof
Marking this one instead of the shorter, short-story-only version.
I enjoyed the context placed on the short story - both with the stories of Begum Rokeya's life, but also selections from her condemnation of purdah, that showed just how bad it was (most of my prior context was from the height of
Most utopic fiction is anti-war, but I enjoyed the concepts of solar energy in the story. Also anti-police state.
The publication date was 1993 in the edition I read - and it read so pre-9/11 that it was sweet. Another snapshot in time.
I enjoyed the context placed on the short story - both with the stories of Begum Rokeya's life, but also selections from her condemnation of purdah, that showed just how bad it was (most of my prior context was from the height of
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Mughal power, when purdah was interpreted much more loosely for elite women). The commentary also pointed out that interpreting familial relations to be much broader in Sultana's Dream was also a condemnation of purdah, but less obvious to those not raised in it.Most utopic fiction is anti-war, but I enjoyed the concepts of solar energy in the story. Also anti-police state.
The publication date was 1993 in the edition I read - and it read so pre-9/11 that it was sweet. Another snapshot in time.
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Subjects
Original language
English