‘Academy’, as many of us know, is a word that comes from the French word ‘academie’, evolving from Latin ‘academia’ the ultimate ancestor of both being Greek ‘akademeia’.
This paper attempts to document the changing attitude of sections of bhadralok in colonial Bengal towards middle-class women’s paid work. From the 1920s onwards, a number of journal editors and contributors, overcoming their earlier inhibitions, began to propagate middle-class women’s/widows’ economic independence. However, the nature and limits of the proposed economic