Gender, History and the Recovery of Knowledge with Information and Communication Technologies: Reconfiguring the Future of Our Past

Abstract

This paper is written from the perspective of a feminist humanities academic and analyses ways in which information and communication technologies (ICTs) may be used to recover women’s history and women’s writing, as well as to further activist feminist initiatives in realms such as basic education, while refusing to succumb to currently dominant neoliberal dispensations that sees ICTs in masculinist, instrumental, and technocratic terms. It moves from the late 18th century in Britain, looking at the ways in which a radical writer like Mary Wollstonecraft adeptly used the communication technologies available in print in her time to further women’s rights and women’s education, to 20th-century Bengali writers such as Jyotirmoyee Devi and Rokeya Hossain, who also wrote powerfully on women’s rights and women’s education. While some of Wollstonecraft’s works have been successfully digitized, those of the Bengali writers, and many more such Indian women writers, need to be digitized.