Gender and Empowerment: A Feminist Study of Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream and Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

Abstract

This paper presents a comparative feminist reading of two landmark texts: Sultana’s Dream (1905) by Begum Rokeya (Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain) and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969) by Maya Angelou. By situating Rokeya’s feminist utopia and Angelou’s autobiographical narrative of race, gender and self-actualisation within a broader discourse of gender and empowerment, the study demonstrates how both authors challenge patriarchal norms and envision women’s agency in distinct historical, social and cultural contexts. Rokeya imagines a radical inversion of gender roles in a colonial Bengal context; Angelou chronicles the lived struggles and triumphs of a Black woman in mid-twentieth-century America. Through textual analysis, feminist theoretical frameworks and intersectional lenses, this study traces how empowerment is constructed, resisted and realised in each text. The paper identifies convergences and divergences in the authors’ feminist vision, culminating in a research gap concerning the cross-cultural dynamics of empowerment and the role of utopian fiction compared with autobiography in feminist literary studies. The findings illuminate how women’s empowerment is not only about individual transformation but also about structural and imaginative re-visioning of gendered worlds.