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THE IDEAL OF INDIAN WOMANHOOD
yet be an actuality; but it is there in embryo, and is casting its shadow in advance. The desire of modern women to be something more than wives and mothers grows out of that back-ground of the dissolution of a decayed social order. With not a few of them, the problem is actual. Simultaneously with the lapse of the practice of polygamy. marriage itself is becoming a difficult undertaking. a risky venture, for a large number of young men, particularly of the educated middle-class. Unemployment and the general economic bankruptcy naturally discourage the more prudent to assume the responsibility of maintaining a wife and raising a family. The joint family offers no protection to thesc social derelicts. For the expropriated and proletarianised lower middle-class, joint family exists only in form it has lost all social significance.
With the disappearance of the common patrimony, joint family automatically dissolves itself. The effort to maintain it, when there is nothing to be owned jointly-that is to say, after its economic foundation has been blown up-places an extra burden on this or that individual, who bears it, not voluntarily, but as a habit of conforming with tradition. This makeshift is a shadow of the real thing. In the great majority of cases, the earning capacity of individuals being limited, the burden soon becomes simply unbearable. There is nothing more to be done than to break up the
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