Page:Sketches of some distinguished Indian women.djvu/23

Rh classes, and creeds throughout India in a common object, and obtained once and for all a public and national recognition of the right of women to help and cure.

The great difficulty in the way of all those who are anxious to raise the condition of women in India, is the rigid seclusion in which they live.

In ancient India women seem to have occupied a far more honourable position in society than that accorded them in modern times, and they enjoyed a very considerable degree of liberty. The practice of immuring them in one particular portion of the house, and of not allowing them to see any men except their nearest relations, seems to have been introduced at the period of the Mahometan invasion, and was no doubt adopted partly as the means of shielding them from the conquerors, partly in imitation of the custom of those conquerors themselves. At the present time, however, it is the universal custom, at least among the upper classes, in nearly all parts of India, and is regarded as the absolute condition of respectability among married women of all ages.

Centuries of seclusion and of oppression have taken from them, for the most part, the very desire for liberty or of independence of any sort. They have been taught from their earliest days that a woman's hope of happiness in this world, or the next, lies in her implicit obedience to the will of her