Nalini Iyer writes about how monumental Good Girls Marry Doctors is to South Asian American women’s history. Nalini Iyer is a professor of English at Seattle University with an emphasis on Postcolonial studies and South Asia.
“In 1993, Aunt Lute Books published an anthology of South Asian American women’s writing, Our Feet Walk the Sky. This anthology is recognized as a pioneering one that helped articulate South Asian American women’s diverse experiences as first and second- generation immigrants, and for bringing that body of writing into dialogue with both Asian American women’s writing and South Asian women’s writing. In publishing Good Girls Marry Doctors, Aunt Lute makes yet another major contribution to South Asian American women’s writing, and this time the emphasis is on daughterhood. What does it mean to be born and raised within the South Asian American community? What are the cultural and familial expectations of daughters? South Asian American women are expected to be high achievers in academics and in professional lives and yet to conform to familial and heteronormative expectations of marriage and motherhood. Twenty-six women writers take up the challenge of describing what it means to conform or break the boundaries of social expectations—what happens when daughters disobey.”
You can read the rest here.