The concept of freedom, though often labeled as an ideal associated with western Eurocentric discourses, is an ambivalent global phenomenon which connects individual and collective experiences. This nexus is often explored in the writings of persons who have played active political roles and have had to face practical aspects of freedom and the contested realization of rights and justice. Political writing can be regarded as a domain which has long been dominated by men; at the same time, life writing has evolved as a genre associated with women’s writing. Keeping in mind such generic and gender stereotypes, a few female accounts of political power and freedom can be found which examine issues of freedom from positions that are more constrained.
The paper examines personal and political dimensions of freedom as recreated in the autobiographical writings of Canadian suffragist, novelist and politician Nellie McClung, Clearing in the West (1935) and The Stream Runs Fast (1945) and the Indian writer Nayantara Sahgal’s memoir Prison and Chocolate Cake (1954), with passing references to the biography Sahgal wrote about the life of her cousin, Indira Gandhi, Her Road to Power (1982). These women share an early confrontation with political issues and activism and became high profile figures involved in negotiations of power and freedom. In submitting to postcolonial scrutiny their body of (auto)biographical texts I aim to compare the different and changing views on freedom they articulate, tracing patterns of representing responsibility as they are interlaced with concepts of gender, textuality and power.