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FRAGMENTS OF A PRISONER'S DIARY
redress of a wrong done to them throughout the ages. In addition to this perennial cause for the revolt of women, affecting them as an entire social group, there are now causes. These are also vative; they generate in the dissolution of the joint filmily and the general conomic distress of ihe middle-class.
The historically caused and socially necessary rivoll of yomun, therefore, is not a nuisance created by some middle-class wonen corrupted 1. Western Pleas. Though they are naturally occupied immcdiatciy wiil their owo particular problems, these women, however, give cxpression to the long-standing grickana of the dumb masses of their sex. The problems confronting the middle-class women particularly cannot be solved without a radical reconstruction of society. Because, the problems originate in the decay of the established social order which, for ages, trented the vast bulk of women as bcasts of burden. Thus, objectively, the educated women rebelling against the ideals of Indian womanhood, are demanding a social revolution. No wonder th:1t they are rebuked by the orthodox nationalists. But while condemning the “false idcals” of the modern woman, the defenders of the Indian ideal only cxpose thc rcal nature of the latter.
The reactionaries say that the emancipation demanded by the misguided modern women would mean the disruption of home life, and
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