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This article examines women's magazines published in colonial India from the 1890s to the 1940s. Focusing on texts in the Tamil language, the author argues that these magazines developed a paradigm of emotion in which a discourse of love, affection, and pleasure prompted radical critiques of women's oppression. This study calls attention to Tamil women's print culture, an area that historians have neglected. As the author suggests, this culture of print is part of a broader history of middle-class identity as it developed under the conditions of colonial modernity. That is, in redefining emotion, women's writing also redefined the female subject. The texts developed new notions of subjective interiority that displaced such conventional identity markers as kinship or caste. These shifts both resonated with developments in metropolitan contexts and reflected their specifically colonial conditions of production.

This paper identifies family planning as a key arena of women's movement activity during the 1950s and early 1960s. Focusing on the All India Women's Conference (AIWC) and the Family Planning Association of India (FPAI), I argue that organised women helped to make family planning a component of national planning for development. While they joined other policymakers to promote the idea that controlling population was necessary for the new nation's economic progress, the AIWC and FPAI also made a distinct case for family planning as a part of national development that was conducted by women, for women. In doing so, they created a new terrain of public activity for middleclass family planners, who claimed to mediate between ordinary women and national development goals. However, the women targeted for family planning services did not always acquiesce to this nation-building logic, and sometimes offered alternative interpretations of their reproduction. The result was often a tense negotiation between the family planners who claimed to speak for women, and the women who refused their claims.

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