A Constructive Survey of Upanishadic Philosophy c4.s3.21

c4.s3.21

(ii) Now about the position of women in society in the Upanishadic times. In the Upanishads, we meet with three chief different types of women : Kātyāyanī, the woman of the world, who is only once mentioned in the Bṛihadāraṇyaka ; Maitreyī, the type of a spiritual woman, a fit consort to the philosopher Yājñavalkya ; and Gārgī, the Upanishadic suffragette, who, fully equipped in the art of intellectual warfare, dares to wrangle with Yājñavalkya even at the court of King Janaka where a number of great philosophers are assembled, and declares that she would send two missiles against her adversary, Yājñavalkya, and that if he succeeds in shielding himself against those missiles, he may certainly be declared to be the greatest of the philosophers that had assembled. Bold and sturdy, she presses Yājñavalkya to a *regressus ad infinitum*, and had not Yājñavalkya checked her impudence by an appeal to the *argumentum ad caput*, she would have succeeded in nonplussing Yājñavalkya. But, even though she was to all appearances vanquished, she appears again a second time with two more moderate questions, and elicits from Yājñavalkya his doctrine of dynamic immanence (S. 16).