"Our women have a very great part to play in the progress of our country, as the mental and physical contact of women with life is much more lasting and comprehensive than that of men. Not for nothing was it said that 'the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world'. In the apron strings of woman is hidden the revolutionary energy which can establish paradise on this earth.''
Women have generally been looked down upon with disdainful contempt. All sorts of strictures have been inflicted upon them, reducing their status to a mere play thing or a slave of man's whims, a mere chattel to be dumb driven. They have been confined to the hearth and home. The orthodox male-oriented society in India has still not been able to adjust itself to the fresh wave of women's liberation. But today the times have changed, the Indian woman has cast off her age-old shakles of serfdom and male domination. She has come to her own and started scaling the ladders of social advance with proud dignity.
In Vedic India, woman enjoyed an enviable status She was considered to be a goddess, something like the Greek Athena, the supreme source of man's inspiration She was called 'Ardhangini'. We hear of women sages and scholars in the vedic age. But the status of women suffered a setback in the Brahmanic age. In the Muslim rule, women completely lost their glory; they were relegated into the background, cut-off from the mainstream of life. They were devitalized and made dependent of men folk. Evil and inhuman ill-practices fostered in the society to deharmonise them; chief among them being the 'Puradah' system, 'Sati' system, child marriage, denial of