European experts solved these technical matters years ago...

European experts solved these technical matters years ago; we are the people who do not have that efficiency and capability and so, they think, we should follow and imitate them as early as possible. This is a totally wrong idea. As far as the problems under discussion are concerned, westerners are more preoccupied than we are ourselves, and the wailings and cries of their intellectual are louder.

Leaving aside the question of the education and instruction of women, western thinkers are in all matters concerning women more perturbed than we are ourselves and have less satisfaction in the contentments of family life.

Historical determinism Another section of our people think that the lack of warmth and attachment in family ties and the creeping in of destructive influences is the effect of the liberation and undue freedom of women; that freedom, according to them, is the unavoidable result of industrial life and advancement in learning and civilization. It is the force of history, and there is no alternative, they say, except to tolerate and endure this confusion and disorder.

The excellence and dignity of family life that was current in former days, they add, should be forgotten for ever. If we hold such a view, we have a very superficial and erroneous view. We agree that in the west, industrial life did affect and still does affect family ties, but what primarily interrupted the balance of orderliness in family life are two other things apart from, that. Firstly, there were primitive, oppressive and unjust laws for women in Europe.

These laws were in force till the present century. The helplessness of women can be gauged from the fact that it was in the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century that woman was legally acknowledged for the first time to be capable of owning property. Secondly, those persons, who undertook to ameliorate the condition of women and raise their status, happened to use the same method that is being adopted at present by some of our so called intellectuals.

The outlook put forward in this forty-point proposal is one of such examples. These people have, so to say, while desiring to improve her eyebrows, actually deprived the helpless woman of her eyesight. The obsolete laws of yesterday’s European together with the new amendments to them are thus more responsible for the chaos and disorder than industrial life.