CHAPTER IX
THE DISABILITIES OF INDIAN WOMEN
A distinguished Indian poetess, Mrs. Sarojini Naidu, who is in England while I write these lines, is known amongst us as an ardent pioneer of a women's movement in her own country. This cultured lady has written two volumes of poems, in the English language, entitled "The Golden Threshold" and "The Bird of Time." She is an eloquent public speaker, temperate, earnest, and thoughtful.
Mrs. Naidu says that "Indian womanhood is feeling, as it were, the ripple of the world movement, and it awakes noble echoes from the past." This writer thinks that Hindu women have lost a glorious past inheritance: "Ours is an absolutely unbroken tradition, overlaid and obscured, but still so real that it has prevented the raising of anything like the sex-barrier I find in England. We are not pioneers, but reawakeners."
Mrs. Naidu's ideal of freedom for women is not the winning of political powers through the franchise,
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