"On 18.05.2015 at 8:00 a.m. I was going for work. These people started saying that we were told not to go to the factory, because bad things are happening at the factory. These people became angry and started abusing me and they threatened to kill me. I request you to lodge my report and take legal action."
"These people can beat me at any time."
 Pinki, married mother of four-year-old, factory worker, Peepli Khera, India

"They have everything: Clothes to wear. Enough to eat. Why would they need to work? They still have husbands. It's not just insulting to them, it's insulting to the whole village."
Dharmender, son of village chief Roshan, Peepli Khera, northeast of Delhi

For one of her university classes in history our granddaughter read a book about a little-known British woman born in the early 18th century who set out on her own to travel in the mysterious east, sometimes as an agent of the East India Company. She left no letters, and few writings to provide a fuller picture of her background and her experiences, unfortunately, but many others did. These doughty women looking for adventure, curious about the world around them faced hardships and dangers modern women can hardly imagine.

By coincidence my husband recently presented me with a book about women adventurers: The Blessings of a Good Thick Skirt -- Women Travellers and their World by Mary Russell, and it's an intriguing read, beginning in the year 383 when a Roman woman by the name of Egeria travelled on her own to Jerusalem and left a stunningly complete description of all that she saw around her, giving later historians the opportunity to piece together what life was like in the Holy Land at that time, with a focus, of course, since she was a Christian pilgrim, on Christianity.

The book lingers on the well established pilgrim routes through the Middle East by the eighth century, and the growing numbers of women who decided to test their piety by exposing themselves to privation, danger and the fascination of witnessing an entirely alien landscape and the people inhabiting it.

"By the eighteenth century, a steady wave of women travellers was regularly leaving England's shores, some to accompany their husbands on diplomatic missions and some to participate with them in that great cultural institution -- the Grand Tour", wrote the author.

Hester Stanhope, the daughter of an aristocratic family, her grandfather Pitt the Elder, first Earl of Chatham, her uncle was William Pitt, Prime Minister at the time, for whom she spent many years acting as his official hostess. When he died in 1806 she left Britain to travel to the Middle East, and settled in Syria, where she spent the rest of her days, to the consternation and condemnation of the British, for no self-respecting British lady would comport herself in such a manner.

"In Victorian times, bemused and bewildered, women found themselves plucked from the blood and sweat of childbirth and placed high upon the pedestal of perfection -- the Angel of the Drawing-Room presiding over her own prison. Marriage, however, was not the destiny of every woman, nor was every woman prepared to be held within this domestic cage, and no book about women travellers would be complete without reference to the hand of women who in those days set out with courage and conviction to present their foreign god [through mission work] to the unsuspecting peoples of Africa and China." 

Missionary work was the only approved reason for women to travel abroad; natural curiosity and a bid to know the world, its various cultures and the people practising them was definitely not the those with refined sensibilities. Except that, in many instances, it was precisely that. Women began to break down the barriers of professions and set out not only to travel, but to take up work in professions that society frowned upon and sought to deny them; this, before the age of strident feminism. At the same time when early flight became a reality women flirted with that as well, many obtaining their flight licenses and setting out solo to fly great distances, just as they also manned seacraft for the same purpose; to prove their mettle to themselves.

Fast forward through the centuries to the modern era in rural India, where tribal Nat people living in their villages are accustomed, though living in poverty, to a woman remaining at home, while the husband goes out to work. In the past five years the market for flash-frozen buffalo meat was popularized in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and China, and India became the world's largest meat exporter. The women in the little village travelled to an adjoining village, Meerat, to find employment; they began to earn, through their hard physical labour, up to five times what their husbands brought home.

For some women it meant a relief from being beaten by their husbands and their mothers-in-law, because respect came with their earnings. But the village chief was offended, and considered the working women to have dishonoured tribal custom. They were warned repeatedly to stop working, but the handful of women who worked at the factories simply ignored the warnings. Until they were ostracized, a penalty worse than death in these societies, and subjected to beatings.

The story appeared in The New York Times: "See, in our community, a woman is a woman and a man is a man" explained the chief.