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THE IDEAL OF INDIAN WOMANHOOD
pendently functioning members of society, women will become full partners of men. There will be real companionship. Placed on a more secure economic foundation, the family will be an institution, happier and hcalthier than ever.
The Indian critics of the Western woinen are ignorant of the fact that it is thanks to the extension of her activitics outside the traditional sphere of the home, that the institution of family, undermined by capitalism, has been kept intact. The ignorant critics denounce divorce, but know nothing about the co-operation between man and woman in the modern countries of the West. The prevailing mass unemployment would have destroyed by starvation thousands and thousands of families but for the women's activity outside home. Masses of women act as brcad-winner, when men are forced to remain idle. That kind of co-operation demands unstinted admission of equality of men and women as members of socicty. That is rcal partnership, which rejects the traditional notion of the division of labour, of distinct fields of activity appropriated respectively for the sexes. Real partnership is possible only when the relation between husband and wife ceases to be that of the protector and the protected.
Nor is it only in the West that masses of women are compelled to share the economic responsibility of keeping up the family, to function
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