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Based on the keynote address the author gave at the ISCHE conference in Turkey in June 2015, this article examines how female identities, in a predominantly non-white colonial setting, were variously constructed over a 145-year time period. The paper also sees some resonance with the power structures that drive female oppression in former non-white colonial domains today and begins with that discussion. The author then turns to develop a largely historical perspective concerning this issue and is interested in the changes in the interaction between females living in India and the colonial state over this extended time period. In so doing, the article illustrates the activism of females who were caught within the imperial ambit as they responded, with varying degrees of intensity, to the broader racial and class agendas, which were internal to British colonial rule. The article uses the paradigm of “femininity” to trace the self-actualisation of these females, as well as the official impositions placed on them; and how, even from this position of powerlessness, coercive agendas could still emerge as a result of their activism that the state, itself, was then forced to accommodate. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]