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Women in Seclusion

by Ruthie Alekseeva  
1/04/2024 / Womens Interest

A Zenana Woman

Meera’s heart beats with excitement.

It’s finally happening, she thinks.

She glances around at the dimly lit courtyard she stands in.

I haven’t left this courtyard since the day of my birth, she thinks. I’m not allowed because I am a woman. If I leave, I might use my womanly wiles to seduce men. That’s what the holy Vedas say, well at least that’s what I’m told. I can’t read the Vedas myself because I am a woman and also, because I am a woman, I am illiterate.

A man steps into the entranceway of the dingy courtyard, interrupting her thoughts. It’s Harpreet, her husband.

“It’s time,” he says.

Meera beams. She places her hand on the wooden walls, ornamented with intricate geometric patterns and floral motifs, enclosing her courtyard, which have held her captive for 30 long years.

What will I see outside of these four walls? she thinks. Perhaps, I’ll see a rock dove flying in the sky or touch the green leaves of a Tulsi plant or even pluck the pink and yellow petals off a lotus flower.

“Come on,” Harpreet says, hurrying her. “Everything is ready for your journey to Kashmir.”

Meera follows her husband out of the courtyard reserved for female members of the family, seeing the male quarters of her own home for the very first time. Looking around, she notices it has natural lighting and the furniture looks softer.

Now, at the entrance of her home, Harpreet swings open the door.

Meera creases her brow. It’s not what she expected she would see.

Where’s the blue sky? she thinks. Where’s the puffy white clouds, and the green leaves of the Tulsi plant?

Instead, a tunnel made of brilliant red sarees, sewn together, leads from the front door to what, from her husband’s description, must be a palanquin, a box carried with poles, on the shoulders of several men, for transport purposes.

“The palanquin will carry you to the train station,” Harpreet says.

“Thank you, husband,” she says, “and then will I see the sky that I’ve heard you talk of so many times?”

Harpreet turns front on, facing his wife. He presses his lips together, then says,

“You know what the code of Manu says,

‘Women are as impure as falsehood itself,’

And

‘It is the nature of women to seduce men in this world. For that reason, the wise are never unguarded in the company of females.’

So, not only is the palanquin draped in veils but also a cloth tunnel will shield you as you walk from the palanquin to the train and then your train carriage will also have a large curtain enveloping it.”

Meera’s face falls. She longs to protest, but instead, she bows her body and says,

“Thank you, Lord.”

A Cruel Custom

This account comes straight out of a book called The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood. The book has such a name because India once had a custom called Zenana. The custom came from Islamic influence and involved situating men’s rooms at the front of the house, usually stylishly decorated, but the dimly-lit women’s rooms, the harem, sat at the back. This arrangement was for keeping women in seclusion. Some say Zenanas protected women from sexual harassment and assault but the Vedas, the “holy” scriptures of the Hindu faith, make many statements which imply or state out right that all women have a giant struggle with sensuality and an overwhelming desire to seduce every man they see. So, other historians say rather than protecting women from men, Zenanas really had the aim of protecting men from women.

Zenana ladies rarely left the Zenana, and if they did leave, cloth tunnels, veiled palanquins and even train carriages required veiling with large tents, so men wouldn’t see them. Even in their own homes, the only men Zenana women could mix with were their fathers, brothers, nephews and husbands. The seclusion of women in Zenanas was so strict in some parts of India, that even in emergency situations, such as seeing your son in danger and leaving the Zenana to rescue him, carried severe penalties. Common sense alone should inform us that such a custom was, indeed, a wrong of Indian womanhood but, for further illustration of the cruelty of such a custom, let’s spell out exactly how heinous this tradition was.

Devastating Consequences

Mrs Marcus B. Fuller, the author of The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood, says the intellect of Zenana women remained childlike because they had little education and not even the opportunity of developing informal intelligence, such as the intelligence of street smarts, because they spent their whole lives secluded from the rest of the world. Because they often couldn’t read and had no comprehension of the outside world, unscrupulous male members of their family sometimes misled them about events going on outside their confines. Seclusion affected not only their own health but their children’s mental and physical heath as well, having less access to fresh air, rays of sunlight and the health benefits of exercise. It also placed their eternity in jeopardy because Christian missionaries found it difficult to meet with them. The author of a book called High-Caste Hindu Woman states, Zenana women “become weaker and weaker from generation to generation, their physical statures dwarfed, their spirits crushed under the weight of social prejudices and superstitions and their minds starved from absolute lack of literary food and of opportunity to observe the world.”

Imprisoned in their own homes, Zenana women became shy and “slavery-loving creatures” who felt “glad to lean upon anyone and be altogether dependent.” Mothers, at least back then, usually bear most of the responsibility for raising children.  Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati, the author of High-Caste Hindu Woman, believes the reason India became a conquest of imperial Britain is because the passive temperament of India’s women moulded “their sons, as a race, to desire to depend upon some other nation and not upon themselves.” She believed that if the women remained in this ignorant state, their offspring, both male and female, would have little hope of ever rising higher.

Increasing, Not Decreasing, Sin

Some say Zenanas were created to make women modest but the author of The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood says Zenana women felt proud of their seclusion because it meant their husband could afford a big enough house to have separate areas for men and women in it. It also meant their husband earned enough for his wives to remain at home, unlike wives of poorer men, who couldn’t comply with the custom of Zenana because their husband required their help in providing for the family. Not only did Zenana women fall into prideful thinking, they often abounded in jealous, envious, hate-filled speech and behaviour, and some Zenana women would even commit the sin of violence, disfiguring the features of their husband’s favorite wife or killing her children.

Charles Chiniquy, a Canadian Roman Catholic priest of the 1800s, authored a book called, Fifty Years in the Church of Rome. Later in life, he converted to Protestant Christianity. He writes in his book, one motive he had for converting from Roman Catholicism was his observation that monasteries and nunneries, though populated with monks and nuns who had made vows of celibacy, abounded in sexual misconduct. He believed such bad behaviour occurred because the walls of the monasteries and nunneries hid the inhabitants from outside view. No one knew what was going on inside. This enabled them to live as they pleased and how did they live? With frequent gluttonous, drunken feasts and in sexual debauchery. That’s despite the long, wide, high-necked clothing both monks and nuns wore, with nuns even wearing a veil over their heads. Even Indian women of the 1800s wore long, wide, high-necked clothing with veils but just like the clothing and seclusion behind the walls of Roman Catholic monasteries and nunneries didn’t stop sexual sin in Canada, it didn’t stop sexual sin from occurring behind the walls of the Zenanas in India. Polygamy existed, and child marriage existed. What other sexual sins may have existed behind those Zenana walls despite the long clothing and segregation of the sexes?  

A Better Solution

Charles Chiniquy writes that priests of his day who lived in regular society sinned less than priests who lived in monasteries. He believed the reason for this was that living under the eyes of the public provided them with accountability. Try walking into a bar and swilling ten alcoholic drinks in a row while wearing a white clerical collar and long black robes. Try walking into a brothel or a casino or any other building renowned for licentious living in the same attire and perhaps your steps might falter when you feel the smirking stares and the pointed fingers of secular or religious lay people milling around in the street.

“Yes,” Charles writes, “those great social organisations called the city, the township, the country, the parish and the household, where everyone is called to work in the light of day, is a divine organisation and makes society as strong, pure and holy as it can be.” The authors of The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood and High-Caste Hindu Woman agree with Charles Chiniquy’s solution for reducing not only sexual sin but sins of all varieties, stating that when women and children have a presence in society, coarse men sometimes clean up their conversation and when men have a presence, the cattiness some women display in female-only spaces sometimes disappears. So, it seems all three authors believed that the mingling of the sexes, rather than their segregation and seclusion, improves the morality of individuals and of societies as a whole.

The Return of Zenanas

Purity Culture taught strategies such as courtship and chaperoning to keep men and women at a distance as a way of reducing the chances that Christians would fall into sexual sin, but rather than reducing sexual sin, I feel that it may have encouraged sexual temptations of a different kind.  I say this because courtship rules, rather than improving how well you know someone before you marry them, sometimes prevented a real knowing of the other person and thus made it difficult for affection and love strong enough to induce marriage from forming. This caused the delay of marriage which created a vacuum for engaging in such temptations as viewing porn.

Purity culture also taught that women should dress “modestly.” This, they said, would prevent women from sexual harassment and assault, but really it became obvious that modesty dressing wasn’t to protect women from men but to protect men from women because modesty dressing was based on the premise that all women have a gigantic struggle with vanity and that all women desperately want to tear their clothes off in front of all men to display their stunning beauty and drink in men’s admiration. Mrs Marcus B. Fuller and Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati supply verses from the Hindu Vedas in their books which show that this is the same attitude toward females that the writers of the Hindu scriptures had toward women, and they state disgust that anyone could have such “distrust and such low estimate of women’s nature and character in general,” stating “it is at the root of the custom of seclusion of women in India” and “all male relatives are commanded by law to deprive women of the household of their freedom” because of this disposition women apparently have.

As Mrs Marcus B. Fuller and Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati are women, it’s clear to them, that most women, even non-Christian women don’t enjoy playing the object of men’s lustful behaviour. That’s why we see secular feminists marching down our streets demanding that men treat them better because, although unregenerate, they long for men to love them rather than behaving like perverts towards them, but Charles Chiniquy, a man, supplies ample evidence that even men have a knowledge of this manner among women. In his book, Charles Chiniquy states that the Roman Catholic church of his day taught that if its adherents didn’t confess every single one of the sins they’ve ever committed to their priests during the practice known as auricular confession, when they died, they would be lost for all eternity because they haven’t received forgiveness from a priest for those sins. This included confessing sexual sins followers had practiced, and if adherents didn’t confess these sins of their own accord, priests were instructed that they must initiate conversations about these misdemeanours by asking confessants questions about their sex lives. So, male priests in the secrecy of a confessional box would ask young girls and women, even married women, questions of a sexual nature and Charles records that these questions often caused women great distress.

Charles states he knew “thousands and even millions” of Roman Catholic girls who refused to confess their sexual sins to male priests or answer their sexually charged questions because of their “keen sense of modesty and womanly dignity.” He said they often died in great anguish, believing that because they hadn’t confessed these sins and received forgiveness for them they were on the verge of getting cast into Hell, but they preferred Hell than confessing their sins because “the laws of decency are stronger in their hearts than the laws of their perfidious church.” He reports seeing women weep, tremble and faint in the confessional box at the thought of answering the questions the Roman Catholic priests asked of them because of the “sacred barriers of self-respect which God has built around their hearts, intelligences and souls.” He said it took most women years before priests could persuade them into confessing their sexual sins, and that “all the priests of Rome are aware of this natural disposition of their female penitents. There is not a single one, no not a single one, of their moral theologians, who does not warn the confessors against the stern and general determination of the girls and married women never to speak.” He also says, “It’s one of the greatest difficulties which the confessors have to contend with in the confessional box,” and that Charles has “unanswerable evidence of the fact that instinctively, without consulting each other, and with a unanimity which is most marvellous, the Roman Catholic women, guided by the honest instincts which God has given them, shrink from the snares put before them in the confessional box.”

Changing Attitudes

And that’s my real-life experience also, that many women, even non-Christian women, have a God-given, stern and determined, instinct to resist men’s objectification of their bodies. Dishonesty about this feminine disposition is slander. It’s also my real-life experience that extreme modesty dressing creates a kind of Zenana for women who either choose or, more often than not, get coerced into modesty dressing because they no longer feel comfortable shopping, swimming or exercising with men and women who don’t comply with modesty dressing because modesty dressing invokes either the ire or laughter of those men and women. To avoid this anger and mocking, some women either stop swimming and exercising altogether or they resort to shopping, swimming and exercising on their own.

Not only do these females receive anger and mocking from men and women who don’t believe in modesty dressing, sometimes these women still receive anger from men and women who do believe in modesty dressing because even if you’re outfit does meet the Purity Culture rules, these men and women can still find something wrong with it. This can lead to self-imposed segregation like leaving church early or not even coming at all. This prevents people with extreme modesty standards from having the opportunity of walking up to you and, with great anger in their voices, telling you that, the whole service, the men in the church have thought about you naked and that it’s all your fault, even though your outfit does meet the modesty rules given by Purity Culture.

It’s not only Christians who have super strict modesty rules. I’ve walked past filthy drug-addicted-looking men in the street who have called me rude names or expressed anger for wearing what they considered an immodest outfit. So, when I joined a gym, I decided I would exercise in the female-only section, but every time, except once, there were no other females in there. Becoming extraordinarily lonely and bored, instead of exercising in the female-only area, I used the treadmills and weights in the general exercise area instead. Shopping, swimming and exercising on your own or leaving church early or not even coming at all? That creates great loneliness, boredom and physical health effects for women who place themselves under either self-imposed, or more often than not, coerced extreme modesty dressing, seclusion and segregation. Some of those reactions are also sins, such as slander; anger; mocking; allowing the one body God has knitted especially for you to fall into disrepair; imposing unachievable modesty standards on others; making women so uncomfortable at church they stop coming, so they have less chance of hearing the life-saving message of the gospel; and omitting fellowship with other believers. We must therefore change this attitude regarding women that Purity Culture has promoted amongst Christians for so long.  

We must start thinking that if Purity Culture has the same attitude toward females that Hindu and Islamic texts have toward women, what kind of females have the teachers of Purity Culture mixed with to receive such notions of women? Have they spent time in brothels, nightclubs, porn sites or in borstals? If so, rather than lobbing all women into the same basket and secluding all women behind extreme modesty dressing and overly strict rules that segregate males and females from each other, so strong marriage-love never develops, they, themselves, should seclude themselves from such women and start mingling with the majority of women who have a natural and God-given predisposition towards disgust and reticence when on the receiving end of the lustful speech and behaviour displayed by perverted men. We must also ask, if Purity Culture has the same attitude towards females that Hindu and Islamic texts have towards women, which so inaccurately reflect the mentality and behaviour of most women, even many non-Christian women, should Purity Culture receive promotion amongst Christian churches any longer?

References:

1. The Wrongs of Indian Womanhood by Mrs Marcus B. Fuller https://indianculture.gov.in/flipbook/25412
2. High-Caste Hindu Woman by Pandita Ramabai Sarasvati
3. Fifty Years in the Church of Rome by Charles Chiniquy
4. Manu’s Code of Law https://archive.org/details/manus-code-of-law-a-critical-edition-and-translation-of-the-manava-dharmasastra-pdfdrive

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