This volume, a companion to Images of Women in Maharashtrian Literature and Religion (SUNY Press, 1996), approaches more closely the realities of women's lives. Using historical documents from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and photographs, interviews, and conversations from the twentieth, the book constructs images of the conditions of women's lives in the modern state and traditional region of Maharashtra over the past three hundred years.

The authors search for the ideas, understandings, and judgments that have shaped those conditions, for the conscious and unconscious images that have made women's lives what they have been. The contributors examine ways femininity and the power, status, and potential of women have been viewed; actual women emphasizing ideas about women. Understanding ideas of this kind is a necessary first step toward understanding, and perhaps eventually affecting, the actualities of women's lives.