WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
"Woman is a great whirlpool of suspicion; a dwelling place of vices; full of deceits; a hindrance in the way of heaven; the gate of hell."
This likening of woman to the "gate of hell" recalls some of the denunciations of the Christian Fathers of a much later date.
Being born a girl is almost a misdemeanour. The penalty overshadows and darkens the whole life until, perchance, redemption comes with the birth of a son. We begin to understand why infanticide was formerly so common in India, and why it still survives in some parts of the country. One writer says that Hindu women often threw their female children into the river, to preserve them from the hard fate awaiting them in life.
Barrenness is a grievous trial to a Hindu woman, imposing very serious social disabilities, including divorce. Numberless are the invocations, the spells, the incantations, and the mystical devices resorted to by women of the East as a cure for sterility. So great is the dread of infecundity that, throughout the Orient, women, whether married or single, adopt the most extravagant methods to ensure child-bearing.
Mr. E. S. Hartland, in his excellent and thorough investigation of "Primitive Paternity," has gathered together a number of the practices of Indian women. In Bombay a sterile woman will cut off a piece of the
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