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Hinduism - What Is Stridharma?

 

Term for "women's religious duty" (dharma), which refers to a system of societal roles, regulations, and responsibilities that apply to all women.

Women's suitable roles in dharma literature were often thought to be daughters, wives, and mothers, and that their lives would be largely determined by their connections with men—whether fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons.

Their position seems to have had prestige but little authority, according to the dharma literature.

A well-known passage from the Manu Smrti warns that a woman must never be independent, but must always be under the protection of a man; this is followed by another well-known passage warning that the treatment of women was a marker of the family's honor, and that a household in which the women were mistreated would perish.

Women had much more influence in actual life than in this theoretical paradigm, but this power usually arrived later in life, when a woman's sons had started their own families and she had thus become the matriarch of an extended family.

~Kiran Atma


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