The Position of Women in Hindu Civilisation, from Prehistoric Times to the Present Day c12.s1.13

c12.s1.13

The reader has already noted the main religious disabilities of women. In the modern feminist movement in India, we hardly notice any effort made to get them redressed. This is natural. When men themselves have given up Vedic sacrifices, women naturally feel no inclination to agitate for the right to perform them. The Aryasamaj, which has revived these sacrifices, has extended the right to perform them to women as well. In the modern materialistic world, the average woman feels no grievance for being deprived of the right to become a nun. She looks with a contemptuous smile on a dogma, which would declare that she is ineligible for spiritual salvation because of her sex. *Upanayana* has become a meaningless formality even in the case of boys; women naturally feel that they have nothing to gain by becoming re-eligible for it. It is true that the religious disenfranchisement that resulted from the ineligibility for *upanayana* produced a disastrous consequence upon the general status of women in society; but women have realised that improvement in this direction in modern days depends mainly upon the spread of education and the acquisition of economic rights and independence. They therefore naturally feel no inclination for initiating an agitation for the restoration of their old religious rights and privileges.