If women become devotees, do they need to stick to their traditional roles? Can’t they have their own careers?

When Srila Prabhupada says that women should always be protected by others – their fathers, their husbands or their sons, does that mean that women have no identity or career of their own? Does that mean women can’t have jobs and have their own sense of self-worth independent of men? Isn’t this likely to lead to suppression of women and domination by men?

Transcript

This is an AI-generated transcript and may contain some errors.
Question? When Srila Prabhupada says that women should always be protected by others, be it their parents or their husbands, does that mean that women have no identity, career of their own? Does that mean that women can’t do their job and have their own sense of self-worth independent of men? Isn’t this likely to lead to suppression of women and domination by men? Answer? Whenever we talk about any role for anyone, that role is within a system with a set of values.
And if we look at the role divorced from its system and its underlying values, then the role may seem oppressive or outdated. So, as I have mentioned in my other question answers on women, there are two other questions, answers on this. If you search in the question answer on the contents page, you can find it.
I will summarize those points here. That women have two aspects to their personality. One is the maternal aspect and the other is the sexual aspect.
So, our modern society highlights and emphasizes the sexual aspect. And the traditional Vedic society and not just Vedic society, in general all traditional societies largely highlight the maternal aspect. So, when the maternal aspect of women is highlighted, then their role as mothers is primary.
So, for women to play the traditional role of mothers, there has to be a social system, social arrangement and a value system that recognizes and cherishes their contributions as a mother. When that recognition of the service of a woman as a mother is not there, then as it is happening largely in society today, if a woman doesn’t have a job and a career, if a woman is asked, what do you do? Often if she says that, oh, I am a housewife or a homemaker, oh, that means you don’t do anything, you don’t do. So, that is the common cultural reaction today in the contemporary society.
And what this reflects is a drastic and tragic devaluation of the role of a mother. That means if a woman is doing her service as a mother, then she is doing nothing. Actually, in the traditional society, the children are the career of the mother.
And taking care of children in a proper way, not just physically and emotionally, but also socially and ethically is so important that it is a full-time service and sometimes more than a full-time service. But when this service is not given its due value, when it is devalued and minimized, then naturally everybody in life wants a sense of self-worth and a sense of success. So, if women are not given that sense of self-worth and success in their service of making their children their career, then they will look for that sense of self-worth elsewhere.
And that will mean they will want to pursue their own career as men are doing and hope that they will get recognition that way. Now, when women come out of the home and come out in the world to compete in the big and bad world, the world very rarely cares about the women for their maternal aspect. The women are employed for their utilitarian aspect.
Okay, what skills do you have? What jobs can you do? But, in general, when a woman comes out of her home, to a large extent, society sees only her sexual aspect. And this has its damaging consequences. Both on the woman herself, where she starts, because of the repeated way the society is seeing her, starts viewing herself more as a person with sexuality than a person with maternity.
A person who can be a mother. So, actually this leads to children being neglected and then we have children getting addicted and children getting lost. It’s a whole social disaster that is happening.
But this doesn’t mean in and of itself that for women to practice devotional service they cannot. They have to stick themselves to a traditional role. Actually Prabhupada was very pragmatic, practical in seeing how Krishna Consciousness can be applied in modern society.
And that’s why he encouraged all devotees, be they male or female, to serve Krishna according to their propensities. But as far as women in India, who had grown up in a traditional culture, and who were not excessively enamored by the distorted values of the modern culture, which evaluates success in terms of a career out in the world for women and not a career in the home for women. Those women who were not influenced excessively by this distorted value system, Prabhupada encouraged them to continue on the traditional and indispensable role of being mothers.
But for women devotees to be able to continue this role, to get the encouragement and the inspiration, we need to have a social system that values and cherishes them for playing that role. So the social circle that women devotees are in need to be created in such a way, oriented in such a way, that women who devote their time and energies to take care of the children are recognized and are valued for that. So for a woman in today’s society to take up the role of a mother in a traditional sense, and not going for a career as is the trend, it requires turning the back on the whole way in which the modern culture is going.
And they will only do that when they get a sense of self-worth and success in the traditional role. Now let’s take a radical example to illustrate this point. In ISKCON we have a number of young boys who choose to become brahmacharis.
Now if a young boy becomes a brahmachari, that is probably as radical a rejection of the modern value system as one can ever get. So the boy is rejecting his career, is rejecting having financial strength, is rejecting the glamour that comes from having a successful career, is rejecting the freedom of having one’s own house and one’s own space. Now why would anyone do something like this? For people who don’t understand anything about Krishna conscious philosophy or culture, it just seems that those boys who are doing like this are crazy.
And you just think that probably you are frustrated or you are misled or maybe you are brainwashed or whatever. But if we interact with these brahmacharis, we will probably see that they are intelligent people. And they have taken a conscious, voluntary and mature decision.
But what inspired them to take that decision? It was because they found a social circle in which their contributions as a brahmachari would be valued. So ISKCON has been successful in creating a culture where renunciation is valued. And that is why young people are inspired to turn their back to modern materialistic values and accept the traditional role of a brahmachari.
So similarly, if we want young dynamic women to turn their back to mainstream materialistic values and accept the traditional role of a homemaker, then we need to create a similar social culture that recognizes and values their contributions as mothers. Now of course, brahmacharis often play a social and visible role within a devotee community. And women may not have that social and visible role to the same extent.
But within their particular circle, they need that recognition. And to some extent, Sri Prabhupada provided that by valuing children and by valuing the mothers of the children. There are many examples of this.
But to the extent we are not able to do this, to that extent, if we demand that women don’t have their own career, then ISKCON society will be seen as oppressive. And there is a possibility, as you rightly pointed out, that there may be domination by men and oppression of women. So, this may happen when we try to create or impose roles on individuals without fostering the values and systems in which those roles actually existed.
So the men in our movement have to become more spiritually oriented and recognize that their role is not to dominate and exploit or oppress women. But their role is to actually lead the whole family in a spiritual direction. And so when men play that role, similarly women play that role of taking care of children and giving them devotional samskaras and giving them emotional closeness and imbibing in them the cultural and ethical values that have for generations been held sacred in our society, then gradually we can have a re-flowering of Varanashram.
So, rather than expecting one particular limb of society, one particular segment of society, that is women, to just stick to traditional roles, we have to create a whole cultural system in which the traditional roles will be valued and organically all the members of the society will gravitate towards their traditional roles, because they will see that this is the best way that we fit in society and this is the best way that we can contribute. So, when we are able to do that, then there will be no sense of oppression or no sense of a loss of self-identity and the whole mistaken idea that women have to seek their self-identity by going out and having careers like men, by becoming copycats of men, will no longer seem appealing or even relevant for women who take up devotional service. So, to summarize, we have to see the roles in their cultural context and in the values that were held sacred by the cultural context.
And rather than demanding that specific people stick to specific roles, we need to foster those values and gradually build the cultural systems and then naturally everybody will move towards their particular traditional roles. Until that transition has not yet happened, everybody has to use their own individual discretion and God-given intelligence along with the guidance of senior devotees about how best one can practice devotional service in one’s own situation.