The women’s questions arose in modern India as a part of the 19th century social reform movement. What were the major issues and debates concerning women in that period?

The 19th-century social reform movement, led by an English-educated intelligentsia responding both to colonial critiques and to their own re-examination of tradition, made the condition of women — the 'women's question' — its central concern.

Major issues concerning women

• Sati: Raja Rammohan Roy's campaign culminated in Regulation XVII of 1829 abolishing the practice.
• Widow remarriage: Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar secured the Hindu Widows' Remarriage Act, 1856; Vishnushastri Pandit carried the cause in western India.
• Child marriage: B.M. Malabari's agitation led to the Age of Consent Act, 1891.
• Female education: Bethune School, Calcutta (1849) and the pioneering girls' schools of Jyotiba and Savitribai Phule in Pune (1848).
• Other concerns: female infanticide (targeted by an Act of 1870), kulin polygamy, purdah and widows' rights to property and dignity.
• The reformist press — journals like the Tattvabodhini Patrika and vernacular tracts — carried these questions to a growing reading public.

Major debates of the period

• Scripture versus reason: reformers like Rammohan justified change by reinterpreting sacred texts, while others appealed to humanism and utility.
• Legislation versus reform from within: the Age of Consent controversy saw Tilak resist colonial state interference in Hindu custom even while not defending child marriage itself.
• Reformers versus revivalists: whether to remake society on modern lines or restore an idealised Vedic golden age of womanhood.
• Purpose of women's education: producing better wives and mothers versus developing autonomous individuals.
• Voice and agency: reform remained largely male-led, with women cast as symbols of tradition; by century's end Pandita Ramabai, Tarabai Shinde and Savitribai Phule asserted women's own voice.

The movement's reach was mostly upper-caste and urban and it left patriarchy substantially intact, yet it legitimised reform through law, created a generation of educated women and prepared the ground for their entry into the national movement.