WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
a subject of inhibitions, restrictions, and customs arising from her sex and her great office as mother. In England, as Tennyson wrote, she is "cramped under worse than South Sea isle taboo." Is woman more "cramped" in our Indian Empire? The answer must be that, in some respects, women enjoy a better social and family standing in India than they do amongst ourselves.
"Seclusion," which is so repugnant to the Western woman's mind, is very different from the isolation of women in England. It is a seclusion in an atmosphere of love, conjugal and parental. The lot of the English single woman is frequently one of loveless seclusion. Numberless are the unmarried women of our own country who live in unavowed revolt against the deprivation of love. For every Hindu woman there is a husband, and, in most marriages, a strong and abiding love.
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