Life
She was born in Ridgway, Pennsylvania, to James and Harriet Mayo, and was educated privately.
She started work as a researcher and historian by helping Oswald Garrison Villard of the New York Evening Post (his father owned the newspaper) prepare his book John Brown 1800-1859: A Biography Fifty Years After, a biography of John Brown, which was published in 1910. Villard was a founder of the American Anti-Imperialist League and an officer of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He influenced Mayo to become a social reformer.
Mayo became notorious for her polemical book Mother India (1927), in which she attacked Hindu society and religion, and the culture of India. Critics of Mayo accuse her works of being racist, pro-imperialist and Indophobic tracts that “expressed all the dominant prejudices of colonial society.”
The book created a sensation on three continents. Written against the demands for self-rule and Indian independence from the British Raj, Mayo alluded to the treatment of India's women, the Dalits, the animals, the dirt and the character of its nationalistic politicians. Mayo singled out the "rampant" and fatally weakening sexuality of its males to be at the core of all problems, leading to masturbation, rape, homosexuality, prostitution and venereal diseases and, most importantly, to too early sexual intercourse and premature maternity. Mayo's claims and perceptions of Indian society had become one of the most negative influences on the American people's view of India in history. The book prompted the publication of over fifty critical books and pamphlets and an eponymous film. It was burned in India and New York, along with an effigy of its author. It was criticized by Mahatma Gandhi, who wrote in response:
This book is cleverly and powerfully written. The carefully chosen quotations give it the false appearance of a truthful book. But the impression it leaves on my mind, is that it is the report of a drain inspector sent out with the one purpose of opening and examining the drains of the country to be reported upon, or to give a graphic description of the stench exuded by the opened drains. If Miss. Mayo had confessed that she had come to India merely to open out and examine the drains of India, there would perhaps be little to complain about her compilation. But she declared her abominable and patently wrong conclusion with a certain amount of triumph: 'the drains are India'.After its publication Dalip Singh Saund (later a congressman) wrote My Mother India to counter Mayo's assertions.
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