Buddhism

                    Nor did Buddhism, inspite of its universalism, place women on an equal level with men.   Its highest morality demanded entire abstinence from them.  Dorner quotes Chullavagga⁽⁶⁾ to illustrate the position of women in Buddhism in these words:

            “Inscrutable as the way of a fish in water is the nature of women, those thieves of many devices, with whom truth is hard to find.”⁽⁷⁾  

Hinduism 

            The position of women in Hinduism as described by the same writer reads:

            “In Brahmanism, again, marriage is made much of : every one ought to marry.  Still, according to the Laws of Manu, the husband is the head of the wife; she must do nothing to displease him, even if he gives himself to other loves; and, should he die, she must never utter the name of another man.  If she marry again, she is excluded from the heaven where her first husband dwells.  Unfaithfulness on the wife’s part is punished with the utmost rigour.   ‘A women is never independent.’   She cannot inherit, and after her husband’s death she is subject to their eldest son.  The husband may even chastise her with the bamboo rod.⁽⁸⁾

          Mrs. Ray Strachey writing about the ‘Women: Her Status and its influence on History’ paints a similar picture of women’s condition under Hinduism.

            She says:

              “The Rig-Veda, which includes the collected legends of Manu, the ancestor of mankind, assigns to women a low and miserable place, and from that date onwards they have had no ‘status’ at all.   For it came to be thought that they were spiritually negligible, all but soulless, unable to survive after the death without the virtue of man.  With their faith to kill their hopes, and with all the imprisoning customs which gradually sprang from it, it was impossible that eastern women should produce any great outstanding figure.

              “When creating them, Manu allotted to women a love of their bed, of their seat and of ornaments, impure desires, wrath, dishonesty and bad conduct… women are as impure as falsehood itself, that is the fixed rule… It is the nature of women to reduce men in this world, and for that reason the wise are never unguarded in the company of females…a woman is never fit for independence.

            “This, with much more to the same effect in the teachings of the Hindu scriptures, and on that discouraging basis Hindu women have had to build their lives.

            “The custom of child marriage, of widow hatred, of ‘sati’ and of the ‘purdah’ seem almost natural in a society in which women’s only importance lay in the bearing of sons.  Perhaps the exposure of the female infants was, after all, a kindness in a world where women were believed to be ‘a great whirlpool of suspicion, a dwelling place of vices, full of deceits, a hinderance in the way of haven, and the gate of hell.”⁽⁹⁾

            The same writer describes the position of women in China in these words.

            “Further east, in China, things were no better, and the custom of crippling the feet of little girls, which was intended to keep them helpless and ladylike, reveals the attitude of the Chinese.  It applied, of course, only to the high born and wealthy, but it was a true symbol of the condition of all the women in the Celestial Empire.”⁽¹⁰⁾  

Christendom

          The attitude of the Christian world towards women was until recently determined by the teachings of the Bible: ‘Unto the women he said, …and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee’ (Ge. 3:16) ‘Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord.  For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the Church, and  he is the saviour of the body.   Therefore, as the Church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.’ (Eph. 5: 22-24).  The woman was condemned by the Church Fathers as the most potent source of sin and temptation.  It was Eve who allegedly tempted Adam, according to the creation story of Genesis, to eat the forbidden fruit and thus laid the burden of Original Sin upon man.  Thus some Greek orthodox monasteries to this day do not only prohibit any women from entering the premises but even female domestic animals.⁽¹¹⁾  Women’s rights to inheritance, obtaining divorce, acquiring property, succession and remarriage were beyond the laws of the West until recently.  

England

  In regard to the status of women in England, which could be true of  other countries in the West, Mrs. Ray Strachey says:

  “….. this favourite was denied every civil right, was shut out from education and from all but the lowest forms of wage earning, and surrendered her whole property on marriage.”⁽¹²⁾