Excerpt from The Awakening of Asian Womanhood The makers of history have no time to be writers of it - till afterwards. The author of this book is so busily engaged in one depart ment of history-making in India that it has taken the publishers two years to get the materials for it from her. Her duties as Joint Secretary of the Women's Indian Association call her to places as far apart as Karachi and Mandalay in the disinterested and loving service of her sisters to which she has devoted her life. At the same time she has had to fulfil over extended periods the duties of Editor pro tem of Stri Dharma, the monthly organ of The Women's Indian Association and the non-sectarian feminist movement in India. The contents of this book have, therefore, come into existence, not as cold reminiscent history, but as living and immediate despatches in the form of newspaper and magazine articles written during the campaign in India for thebringing of the direct power of women into all departments of public life. This campaign began with the demand for the legislative franchise by the all-india Women's Deputation to the Viceroy and the Secretary of State in 1917, and has been amazingly, though not yet completely, successful. Behind this demand for the vote as a symbol of free citizenship lay the principle of freedom for women to vote or not to vote, to co-operate or to non-co-operate, as they chose. This is the centre-point of all Mrs. Cousins' self-renouncing work. It applies to all purely national movements, and yet, as work for woman as woman, knows no frontiers. For this reason, Mrs. Cousins has laboured for the sacred cause of purifying the world through the free power of womanhood with equal zeal in Ireland and England (in both of which places she suffered imprisonment for the cause), in India and in Burma. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.