Stridharma

Term denoting “women’s religious duty”
(dharma), the set of social roles, rules,
and duties broadly conceived as applying to all women. In the dharma literature, it was generally assumed that
appropriate women’s roles were as
daughters, wives, and mothers, and that
their lives would be primarily defined by
their relationships with men—whether
fathers, brothers, husbands, or sons. As
described in the dharma literature, their
position seems to have had status, but
little authority. One well-known passage
from the Manu Smrti warns that a
woman must never be independent, but
always under the guardianship of a man;
this is followed by an equally famous
664
Steya
passage warning that the treatment of
women was a marker of the family’s
honor, and that a household in which
the women were badly treated would
disappear. In real life women exercised
considerably more power than in this
theoretical model, but such power usually came later in life, when a woman’s
sons had formed families of their own,
and she had thus become the matriarch
of an extended family.