WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
born, and the daily life of men, of these matters woman is visibly the cause."
"She who controlling her thoughts, speech, and acts, violates not her duty to her lord, dwells with him after death in heaven, and in this world is called by the virtuous a faithful wife."
The enforcement of such reverence for husbands is quite foreign and contradictory to the conception of marriage among cultured women in the Western nations. It appears to cut at the very basis of sex-equality, and to undermine all our advanced principles of liberty for women, "freedom for wives to live their own lives," and the higher status of women generally. Dr. Coomaraswamy, anticipating this criticism, states shrewdly: "Let us at once acknowledge, with all competent observers, that the power of women over men is far greater in India than in any industrial state in the West."
This power of the Hindu women is exerted not, as in Europe, by the young and attractive, but by mothers, grandmothers and widows. Manu declares: "The mother exceedeth a thousand fathers in the right to reverence, and in the function of teacher." "I cannot emphasize too strongly," says the writer of the pamphlet, "the fact of this influence of mothers in India, not merely over children and in household matters, but over grown-up men, to whom their word
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