Discuss the role of women in the freedom struggle especially during the Gandhian phase.

Women had joined the Swadeshi and Home Rule agitations — Annie Besant became Congress president in 1917 — but it was the Gandhian phase that turned their participation into a mass phenomenon by redefining protest around courage, sacrifice and non-violence.

Mass entry in the Gandhian movements

• Non-Cooperation (1920–22): women joined hartals, spun khadi, donated jewellery to the Tilak Swaraj Fund and picketed liquor and foreign-cloth shops.
• Civil Disobedience (1930–34): Sarojini Naidu led the Dharasana salt raid after Gandhi's arrest; Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay sold contraband salt; thousands of women courted arrest, from Peshawar to Tamil Nadu, while Rani Gaidinliu raised revolt in the Northeast.
• Quit India (1942): Aruna Asaf Ali hoisted the tricolour at Gowalia Tank; Usha Mehta ran the underground Congress Radio; Matangini Hazra and Kanaklata Barua were shot leading processions; Sucheta Kripalani organised the underground network.

Beyond the Gandhian mainstream

• Revolutionaries Pritilata Waddedar and Kalpana Dutt (Chittagong) and Bina Das chose armed action, while Captain Lakshmi Sahgal commanded the INA's all-women Rani Jhansi Regiment.

Why the Gandhian phase mattered

• Satyagraha's moral, non-violent idiom and tasks such as spinning, picketing and prabhat pheris made public action socially acceptable for women across classes and regions.
• Participation built durable organisation — the All India Women's Conference (1927) — and grounded the later demand for equal franchise and constitutional equality.

Women thus moved from the margins to the frontline of the freedom struggle; the Gandhian movements were both the vehicle of that entry and a school for women's citizenship in free India.