ARGUING FOR EQUALITY
Double Moral Standard (By Mrs. Muthulakshmi Reddy, M.L.C.)
“Of all the laws, rules and regulations which down the centuries have helped to place women in a position of inferiority none has been so very powerful in creating in the minds of men and people a sentiment of scorn and contempt for women as the degrading idea of the double standard of morals.”
It is from this there has sprung that worst attack on women’s dignity, that safety-valve theory that a certain number of women should exist, should sacrifice their self-respect, their honour, their comforts, their health and happiness to satisfy the lust of the other sex. At the present day the continuance of such a doctrine and of the laws which are founded on it, is a shameful anachronism unworthy of our civilization.
Both in the past and in the present, women have disproved their inferiority and how then can we at the present day tolerate or connive at a system which transforms a woman of whichever caste or class she may be, into a mere chattel, a piece of tainted merchandise.
So long as the double standard of morals continues to exist not only in law but in the spirit of moral code also will the emancipation of women have failed to achieve its full object? So, I may impress upon my country people that prostitution can never be lessened and much less eradicated by one-sided laws and one wrong act cannot be put down by another wrong measure. True it may be that we can never put down evil, but surely by our own well-directed efforts, just and equal laws and proper legislation we can minimize it to a very large extent as in the case of theft, murder and other immoral habits.
Scientific research and experience has proved beyond any doubt that continence is conducive to the physical and mental well being of an individual and all extra-marital relationship produce very serious consequences such as disease and disruption of family life and is opposed to the higher nature of man. As such, we have to look upon sexual promiscuity as an anti-social act, a sin and a crime, nay our poets and philosophers have viewed it in that light only. At the present day expert physiologists and psychologists have arrived at the following conclusion:
Firstly, in the interest of the race and the individuals, it is essential that the stability of the family in marriage should be preserved and social habits and customs should be adjusted to that end. Secondly, there is overwhelming evidence that irregular sex-relationship whether in men or women leads to physical, mental and social harm.
In the face of these experiences of expert authorities and conclusions based upon such experiences, how could we sanction the existence of any caste or class, however ancient it may be, to make a profession of prostitution? Is it not the duty of parents and teachers to teach the boys as well as the girls the virtue of chastity and the benefits of continence to the individual and the race?
Is not character-training as important and as essential as training of intelligence? For want of such training, I have known young and bright lads inviting themselves to be tainted with the most formidable diseases and then taking the diseases to their innocent wives and children in the family. Therefore parent and teacher should more and more be made to realize that we stand more for the claims of posterity and it is the sacred duty of every parent to see that their offsprings do not sustain any permanent damage both physically and mentally by the absence of self-control during their adolescence.
Coming to the Devadasi system or dedication of girls to temples as it has become an institution of vice and is defended as such in certain quarters of the safety-valve theory, I like to say a few words. The inequity of that system is too deep for me to give expression and further under that inhuman and unjust system the innocent children of a certain caste or community are trained to become proficient in all the arts of solicitation that they become captives to vice.
At an age when they cannot very well see the future before them they are actually shown the way by their superstitious and orthodox elders in the name of our religion and in the name of the holy, both by word and deed to take to an unclean and unhealthy life – in short to a life of shame, children, who would, if no such training is given, grow to be loyal wives, affectionate mothers and useful citizens. Those children after being turned into sinners and criminals are then stigmatized and treated as out-castes. A few amongst us may justify its actions by saying “what does it matter, it is confined only to one caste or community; moreover we cannot by any means eradicate vice.” I can only remind them of these lines from the immortal poet:
Whatever wrong is done
To the humblest and weakest
Neath the all-holding sun
That wrong is also done to us.
Therefore this enormous crime of allowing the girl children of a certain community to be trained to a life of vice should be put an end to. In the name of the deeply wounded rights of the community, I appeal to all good men and women, and all just and right-minded people to effectively protect the rights of those innocent and helpless children at any cost. Also I desire to point out that till that grave injustice is done away with, we can never boast of any culture or civilization; while the Government calling itself enlightened and seeking shelter under ‘non interference policy’ and ‘religious neutrality’, will never be excused of its share in this most heinous crime, even after the inequity of the practice has been exposed in all its true colours.
The Great Pasteur has said: “When I see a child it inspires me with two feelings; tenderness for what he is now, respect for what he may become hereafter.”
Revolt, 17 November 1929
The Position of Indian Women (By Miss T. S. Kunjitham)
Today the women in India have come to a realization of the bondage in which they have hitherto lain and as a consequence are striving for their emancipation. Centuries of ignorance and passive obedience born of inertia, to the galling yoke of custom have contributed to the lame endurance of this thralldom. But as a result of the newly risen democratic wave with all its enlightening influences which have penetrated even into India, they have come to realise the degraded position in which they have so long lain dormant. With the realization has come the burning desire to be free from the humiliating conditions.
In India religion and religious practices hallow and sanctify all the customs no matter however so barbarous, and all the conventions howsoever revolting, and all actions howsoever questionable and shadowy. And this all-compelling plea smothers up every cry for reforms. As a result of the great war, women in the cilvilised countries of the West have come to realize themselves and have won their emancipation. They who did such heroic service to the nation during the recent great crisis and proved themselves indispensable at such a time had a claim to make their voices heard during times of peace as well. But India is still mediaeval in her outlook as far as the position of her womanhood is concerned and is far lagging behind as she invariably does in all her movement of progress.
Indian women of today are in a deplorable state. To express it in strong language, ‘our women are slaves’. The Western women have liberty though not properly used; whereas we have none. But when freedom misused is moral poison, when denied is death. Is not the poison preferable, being one step removed from death and not necessarily leading to it? Many of our women are shut up indoors because of the pardha system, and as a result of this and other accursed and hoary system of caste, women have for the most part remained disunited and illiterate, immersed in ignorance and superstition, which in their turn lead to other evils of poverty, disease, dirt and drink. The degrading conditions of the masses of peasantry who are the child-bearers as well as the bread-winners are simply lamentable.
According to the social customs in India, girls are brought up to regard marriage as their one goal in life from which there seems to be no escape. They are married very young and they prove nothing more than the willing and cheerful sham of the family who should properly be respected house-makers. They are morally and spiritually in subjection. “Kitchen is their kingdom” and they are quite contended with their lot i.e. being the executor of their lords’ commands. But women’s capacity for self denial should outgrow barriers of family, creed, community and reach unto the furthest limits of the nation and humanity.
Indian women have been kept in subjection mainly because of the sanctifying customs. Mahatma Gandhi in his letter to Indian Women says, “As with men, so with women, their salvation is in their own hands. They must resist with all their power the evil customs that keep them under its heels”. Only when the women of this country shake off these customs can the motherland hope to progress.
The evils of early marriage, the necessity for widow remarriage, the cutting off marriage expenses, bride and bridegroom price and the necessity for monogamy and equal marriage laws for men as well as women, the evils of concubinage and prostitution are not yet fully realized by our women. It is a common consolation among Indians that this system of early marriage and arranged marriage conduce more towards domestic happiness than the method in the West of allowing the mates to choose their own mates for themselves, when they come to an age of discretion. But I say, is there any other country in the world where a woman is so humiliated? “A cooly woman who carries a basket on her head earns from six to eight annas a day; a Hindu lady who carries souls for nine months each time for the service of the State gets only what the husband’s caprice allows and when he dies, the widow’s humiliation is her pension”. This is the fruit of the mighty Shastras. There is perhaps no Brahmin house in India without a widow and there is no widow but cherishes a sorrow in her heart. Very often the cry of the mother of the widowed child is, “I hate to think of my child as a shaven widow but the priests are priests; they are the representatives of God”. Their desire is for their children to be free but custom which is nothing but sham – a cloak to our religion claiming undue respect and importance – blinds their eyes. Why should our children suffer for the sake of other people? Why cannot the widow remarry when every human being has a right to enjoy in this world? Custom is a mill-stone round India’s womanhood, cast it off and be free.”
India at present is awakening to a sense of all these evils and that is seen by the efforts of social reformers. A decisive step was recently taken with the passing of the Sarda Bill, which is sure to prove a beneficial and useful measure, which will help India in advancing the social and economic well-being of all the communities. This is a clear dawn of social liberty, whose parallel is to be found only with the other great reform carried out a century ago, when the suttee system was abolished. Let us hope the other great problems will meet with equal or with even greater success when Mother India will be one of the foremost nations in the world.
If we lay much emphasis on the passing of laws regulating our social customs even more should we lay emphasis on making the ignorant public realize the evils of such customs. They should feel for themselves where they are and what they ought to do if they were to see the improvement of India. Many of the social problems of the country can never be solved till women bring them home to their men. Women alone can understand women’s rights, women’s difficulties and women’s capacities; they must demand for themselves and what they think they should have. Man indeed cuts a sorry figure in the domain of women. It does not need the appeal of the invincible logic of a woman to make her sex realize its duty to its country. After all what is India? ‘A plastic clay in the hands of her gifted women’. The sooner they realize this fact, the nearer the redemption for our country. Why should women waste their life in trifles when the mother needs them for greater things? Is not the woman the ‘Shakti’ of the house? In her hands lies the power of the world. If she does not show the right path to men, who else can? It is up to us to lead men right by our willing co-operation. We all know for a fact how much Mahatma Gandhi owes his success in life to the hearty co-operation of Mrs. Gandhi in all his endeavours. Again had it not been the willing co-operation of their wives, Motilal Nehru and the late C .R. Das would not have made the big sacrifices which they made in the interests of the country.
The truest test of a nation’s civilization lies in the position occupied by her womanhood and the esteem in which she is held. Where she is honoured and free, that nation is progressive and enlightened but where she is looked down upon and consigned to oblivion, the country fails to satisfy the demands of civilization. And in this test India has failed; for the position of her womanhood is that of a chattel or at the most, an unintellectual ornament. And India’s regeneration largely lies in the position and prestige she is willing to accord to her womanhood.
Revolt, 6 October 1929
Woes of Indian Womanhood (By K. M. Balan, B.A.)
“Woman has so long been subject to the disabilities and restrictions with which her progress has been embarrassed that she has become enervated, her mind to some extent paralysed; and like those still more degraded by personal bondage she hugs her chains”.
Ever since the infancy of mankind, Eve has been in bondage and subjection to man. She was the first to have been fettered yet she is the last to be freed. As in all other human institutions in the earlier times, the principle of ‘might is right’ is at the basis of her subjection. Slavery of men in the ancient Rome, the serfdom of the peasants in the mediaeval Europe and the subjection of the Roman Catholics in Great Britain appearing as they did long after the commencement of the subjugation of woman have now disappeared from the face of the earth. But woman still continues to be a slave. Ardent apostles of freedom and Liberty were rather late in their advocacy of her cause. It was only during the last century that the Feminist movement was started in England, Europe and the United States of America for the assertion of women’s rights. In those countries “every step in improvement had been so invariably accompanied by a step made in raising the social position of women that historians and philosophers have been led to adopt their elevation or debasement as on the whole the surest test and the most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age”. Womanhood itself awoke to its position of degradation and an increasing number of women began to record their most emphatic protests against their social conditions.
In England many more of them, not content with domestic freedom alone, petitioned the Parliament for their admission into the Parliamentary suffrage. Claims to be educated as solidly and in the same branches of knowledge as men and to be admitted into professions and occupations closed against them were urged with ever-increasing intensity in the United States. Periodical conventions were continued to be held by an organized party to agitate for the rights of women. France, Italy, Switzerland and Russia soon followed suit. The revolt of all these agitations has been astounding. Not only have the women in England been enfranchised but also they have the unique privilege of having a few of their representative Lady Members enlivening and illumining the erstwhile masculine House of Commons with their charming and elegant presence. To crown all there is that august and Honourable Miss Bondfield adorning the British Cabinet for the first time in its annals.
But before attaining to such political eminence, the English women had fought for and secured social liberty. Divorce, Freedom of marriage, the ability to own property, all these and many more they had secured previous to their political rights and privileges. Hence the Indian women also must turn their attention to their social problems and first attain the freedom in the imperium in imperio in which they are being tyrannized over by men.
Marriage is the destination appointed by the society and the Hindu Law gives to woman, the prospect she is brought up to and the object which it is intended, should be sought by her. “The Shastras enjoin men to marry for the purpose of procreating a son necessary for the continuation of the line of paternal ancestors.” So the sine quo non of marriage is the procreation of children and only so far is woman honoured as she is helpful to it. Woman is a mere chattel, to be bought and to be sold. Besides, she is not to be trusted and set free in the world, because Manu says that “the woman’s evil propensities should be curbed by well employing her in the household duties”. In fact the Hindu woman never enjoys freedom in her life. From the parental dominion she is transferred on her marriage ipso facto to the marital dominion of her husband. The most unkindest cut of all is the fact that she is absolutely ignored in the matter of the choice of her lifelong companion which is made by the parents. Hence oftener than not she becomes eternally tied down to an ill-suited partner with whom her life is a continuous quarrel and an unbearable burden.
The Hindus proclaim it loudly that the Hindu marriage is a sacrament. “According to the Hindu Shastras it is more a religious than a secular institution.” It is not a contract in the real sense of the term. At best it is a unilateral one in which the rights are all on the one side without the corresponding obligations. The husband is ever to command and the wife is to obey. “She has not to reason why, she has but to do and die. The wife lives, moves and has her being in her lord.” Even St. Paul is said to have commanded: “Wives, obey your husbands”. St. Thiruvalluvar idealises the wife who “prayeth not a God but prayeth unto her lord” and says that “Rain she commandeth and it rains”. Such is the tradition in which the Hindu woman is brought up. As John Stuart Mill says: “All women are brought up from the very early years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men : not self-will and Government by self control but submission and yielding to the control of others”. Thus being brought up in the chilly and enslaving atmosphere of subjection the wife has to put up with her husband with whom has she been arbitrarily connected whether he is good or bad, kind or cruel. She has to abide by her lot uncomplainingly.
Generally speaking, despite all this obedience on her path, she is as Gandhiji says the ‘queen in her home’. But at the same time it is also a fact, which even the sublime words of the Saint of Sabarmathi cannot hide, that there are an appreciable number of wives who find it extremely impossible to lead anything like an amicable and blissful conjugal life with their husbands. Man is supported and strengthened in the exercise of his sway and authority over woman both by theory or law and by custom and practice. It is all right when the husband is good or the couple are agreeable to each other. But when a husband is by nature a malicious or vicious one this sanction is a terrible weapon in his hand which he wields to the greatest detriment of his wife especially when from the beginning no love has been lost between them. “There is never any want of women who complain of ill-usage by their husbands. There would be infinitely more if complaints were not the greatest of provocations to a repetition and increase of the ill-usage.” However brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to – though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him – he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being, made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.
This is not in the least an exaggeration. It is true that such a kind of tyranny is not universal. But at the same time it must be recognized also that such cases are sufficiently numerous to warrant us to change the law. “If married life were all that it might be expected to be, looking to the laws alone, society would be a hell upon earth.” If there are ideal husbands, there are also fiends with human countenance and devils with man’s cloak who daily and hourly kill the souls of their poor and miserable wives and from whose fatal clutches it is the duty of some daring Hercules of India to redeem them.
Only one of the myriads of such instance of cruelty is the story narrated by a correspondent in Young India of the heart-rending treatment his sister is receiving at the hands of her debaucherous and dissipated husband. The poor girl is said to be whipped and tied to a post to compel her to witness his debaucheries.” “Millions may live in peace” but does that fact imply thousands are not groaning and grumbling under the galling yoke of their inhuman husbands?
“The case of cruelty brought to light by the correspondent is an illustration not of the evil in Hinduism but of the evil in Human nature which has been known to express itself under all climes and among people professing different faiths of the world.” Very true. None denies the truth of the statement. But granting that the evil pervades all climes and all societies is there at the same time not a remedy and a panacea to it in them, unlike in our august religion? If our faith were simply to ask such women “to feel as if they had never been married” it is high time we give it up. For “a religion to be permanently influential must be intelligent”. However idealistic and noble this suggestion may be it is plainly impracticable for women of ordinary mould. Even if these women feel so, indeed they are feeling for want of a better way out of the difficulty, what about the world of trouble, the woeful misery and the untold anguish of the women who are in need of something more tangible and necessary than the cold philosophy administered by Gandhiji? If widows are pitied and their re-marriage advocated, why not do the same good to these poor, forsaken, pitiable sisters whose lot is as bad, if not worse than, the widows?
Says the Mahatma further: “The remedy lies through cultivating public opinion against unmanly conduct on the part of husbands”. This statement is hardly a tribute to the public opinion of the Hindus of which none has a better opinion than Gandhiji himself. For does this not imply that the public opinion at present is in favour of such “womanly conduct on the part of the husbands”? If so it is all the more incumbent on the part of the state to rush in with its efficatious weapons of legislation. According to the reasoning of Gandhiji, if public opinion is against thefts and murder there need be no penal laws. Therefore the presence of the abundance of penal laws argues the absence of public opinion against them. Whatever it might be, nothing is more potent than legislation and nothing less effective than public opinion in such cases. If public opinion were so effective why did the mighty champions of the Child Marriage Bill move Heaven and Earth to bring it to the Statute Book? Mahatmaji blesses the Bill and its principle by suggesting 24 years and 18 years respectively for boys and girls and now in this case he cries against the legal remedy. Perhaps it is one of the inscrutable mysteries of Gandhiji’s inconsistencies of which none is more aware than himself! (See below pp. 510-512)
If the end of marriage is a union of the two souls and if a man or a woman ought to consummate this union, how can he or she bring about this when each finds absolutely impossible to live and move with his or her partner under the same roof? Here is, however a marked partiality for man in the Hindu law, the logic of which is ununderstandable to us. The husband may discard his wife with impunity, of course he pays a few rupees for her maintenance and go on contracting any number of marriages to infinity. But the forsaken and helpless wife cannot think of any husband! “Surely if a woman is denied any lot in life but that of being the personal body-servant of a despot and is dependent for everything upon the chance of finding one who may be disposed to make a favourite of her instead of merely a drudge, it is a very cruel aggravation of her fate that she should be allowed to try this chance only once.” Therefore humanity and reason alike suggest that there should be a remedy in the form of divorce for the suffering Hindu wife.
Even law both ancient and modern, religious and secular, points to the same course. Says Narada: “When her husband is lost or dead, when he has become a religious ascetic, when he is impotent and when he has become expelled from caste – these are the five causes of legal necessity in which a woman may be justified in marrying another husband”. This Sutra comprehends and exhausts almost all the reasons that can even make the wife seek to remarry. Not only when the husband is dead but also when he is alive, due to a variety of reasons a woman may get remarried. As the Hindu Widow’s Re-marriage Act legalizes the marriage of all widows and as presumptive evidence of the husband’s legal death is furnished, the wife is entitled to consider herself a widow and get remarried under the Act. Therefore if even under the Widow Remarriage Act wives can remarry, why not plainly pass a law granting divorce to such women and legalizing their marriage with some other persons when they choose to marry? If impotency, renunciation and ex-communication of the husband are reasons sufficient to warrant a woman to get remarried, why not impossibility of conjugal relation or incompatability of nature constitute an equally good, if not a better reason for the same?
Therefore we have seen that reason, humanity, ancient law and modern law all are in favour of granting divorce to such of the Hindu wives who find it impossible to live with their husbands for sufficient and plausible reasons. It is a matter for sincere joy and congratulation that a Bill to grant divorce is in contemplation by some humane and daring Member of the Legislature, who will be as wholeheartedly supported by the country when he emerges with his timely Bill as was even Harbilas Sarda was supported in his Herculean efforts to bring his momentous Bill to the Statute Book. All honour to him and to our Mother India!
Revolt, 27 October 1929
