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THE IDEAL OF INDIAN WOMANHOOD
mostly live on unearned income or are engaged in well paid professions. Apart from the intrinsic injustice and immorality of this old-fashioned attitude, it is idle to defend a relation that does not exist in reality, to hold up an ideal which cannot be reached, to advise women to remain content under male protection which, to the great majority of them, is no longer available. The reality of the situation is obscured by a fiction, and this is done purposely. The unrealisable ideal of paternalista is held up with the purpose of placing the modern women in the wrong, for maintaining that there is no legitimate ground for their discontent which is ascribed to their being lured by false ideals borrowed from the West ".
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The desire of women to stand economically on their own feet, however, is a native growth. The legitimate ground for the desire always existed, the vast bulk of women having never been really dependent on men economically. Always as now, they have shared with men extra-domestic labour; but they were never allowed any proprietory right over the produce of their labour which legally bclonged to men-the lords and masters of the family. When women are compelled to perform labour of economic value, they are legitimately entitled to share the ownership with men. The demand for the economic independence of woman is not a new-fangled idea; it is a demand for the
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