Page:Between the twilights being studies of Indian women by one of themselves (IA betweentwilights00soraiala).pdf/168

148 and certainly much more apparent usefulness. As doctor, teacher, nurse, and in humbler walks of life, which of us who know modern India have known and not blessed the Hindu widow? For the first time, too, since the Vedic era, do we find in India unmarried girls over ten years of age. This is the nearest approach to spinsterhood in the East, and the spinster—she is very rare—is almost always a self-respecting woman earning her own living.

I have said that the impetus of the age is towards individualism. How can we keep the Hindu woman out of the great current?

The time when the nation could be served by a grovelling womankind—if ever such time there was—is past.

A woman’s place in the National life will now best be filled by the realization of herself; she must grow to her full stature, taking as her due her share of God’s light and air, of the gifts of the Earth-Mother.

She need lose none of those qualities which made her loved in mythology, in the times of the Vedas, in history. Indian women have it within their power to prove to the world that