Child Wives in India

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Jul 21, 1909

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 36, No. 28.

Child Wives in India

IN India a girl must be married before she reaches the age of twelve, or she and often her whole family is ostracized and suffers the loss of caste. Caste enforces rules and regulates marriages. A man may be infirm, insane, loathsome, diseased, cruel, and utterly reprobate, yet he can receive into his power through marriage and deal with her as he will a little girl of any age under twelve if the caste relations between them are according to the laws of that system.

Accepting these sacrifices to be duty and suffering under caste compulsion themselves, the parents place and often even drive their helpless little daughters into the most cruel unions.

The census of 1891 gives these returns of early marriages in British India:

Females under four years of age, 258,760; females from five to nine years of age, 2,201,404; females from ten to fourteen years of age, 6,016,759, and these to men of all ages.

In 1901 two women traveled through India investigating these dreadful conditions. With hearts rent with what they had discovered they returned to the United States and spread their knowledge wherever opportunity permitted.

Thus they succeeded in enlisting practical sympathy, which has been embodied in the Indo-American Woman's Restoration League. The purpose of this organization is to aid in bringing about the enactment of a special law to protect the little girls of India until they are sixteen from child marriage. Great Britain in its treaty with India agreed never to interfere with the customs of the Hindu people. No change in laws can therefore be made until India petitions that such laws be passed. The Indo-American Woman's Restoration League is working to organize the sentiment of the most thoughtful and advanced men of the Indian race thus to petition Great Britain.

Race pride and the conviction that child marriages are causing the deterioration of the Indian race may cause a change. The status of women in India is so low that such a change must be made for other reasons than pity for helpless childhood. The movement is one that must be kept distinct from missionary work, for the Hindu would not cooperate in any effort which savored of interference with his religion.—National Congress of Mothers' Magazine.