The Brass Notebook: A Memoir of Feminism and Freedom

The lyrical and globe-spanning memoir by the influential feminist economist, with introductory pieces from two American icons

“Your heart and world will be opened by reading The Brass Notebook, the intimate and political life of Devaki Jain, a young woman who dares to become independent even as her country of India does.” —from the introduction by Gloria Steinem

When she was barely thirty, the Indian feminist economist Devaki Jain befriended Doris Lessing, Nobel winner and author of The Golden Notebook, who encouraged Jain to “write your story now.” Over half a century later, Jain has crafted what Desmond Tutu has called “a riveting account of the life story of a courageous woman who has all her life challenged what convention expects of her.”

Across an extraordinary life intertwined with those of Iris Murdoch, Gloria Steinem, Julius Nyerere, Henry Kissinger, and Nelson Mandela, Jain navigated a world determined to contain her ambitions. While still a young woman, she traveled alone across the subcontinent to meet Gandhi’s disciple Vinoba Bhave, hitchhiked around Europe in a sari, and fell in love with a Yugoslav at a Quaker camp in Saarbrücken. She attended Oxford University, supporting herself by washing dishes in a local café. Later, over the course of an influential career as an economist, Jain seized on the cause of feminism, championing the poor women who labored in the informal economy long before mainstream economics attended to questions of inequality.

With a foreword by a leading economist and an introduction by the best known American feminist, whose own life and career were inspired by time spent with Jain, The Brass Notebook perfectly merges the political with the personal—a book full of life, ideas, politics, and history.