UPSC Mains 2016 GS1 Q4: Women in the Freedom Struggle, Gandhian Phase

Women moved from largely private roles to active public leadership during Gandhi’s mass movements, expanding the freedom struggle’s own social base.

Gandhi actively encouraged women’s participation in the Non-Cooperation and Civil Disobedience movements, seeing it as central to mass mobilisation.

Women organised picketing of liquor and foreign-cloth shops, and took up khadi spinning as a visible, public form of protest.

Women joined the 1930 Salt March and its aftermath in large numbers, including breaking salt laws and courting arrest themselves.

Sarojini Naidu became a prominent Congress leader, later serving as Congress President, showing women reaching the movement’s top leadership tier.

Women also organised independently through bodies like the All India Women’s Conference, raising both nationalist and social-reform demands together.

Thousands of women were imprisoned during civil disobedience campaigns, a direct, personal form of participation, not just symbolic support.

This mass participation helped secure women’s political voice going into independence, feeding directly into later constitutional guarantees of equality.

Trace the shift from private to public role under Gandhi’s encouragement. Give concrete forms of participation — picketing, khadi, the Salt March, imprisonment — plus a named leader like Sarojini Naidu, then link this to independence-era gains.