India - the Mother

(Mother first met Sri Aurobindo in 1914 when she came to see him in Pondicherry, where he had taken refuge from the British. In 1915 she returned to France, then journeyed to Japan, where she would stay for four years.)

July 7, 1916

(Extracts from a speech to women in Japan, in the middle of World War I.)

If there is one field in which women have shown remarkable gifts, it is that of powers of organization. Those powers of administration had long been acknowledged in Brahminical India, the India prior to the Muslim conquest.... But in the West, Semitic thought together with Roman legislation had too deep an influence on customs to give women much opportunity to show their powers of organization....

It is certain that exclusively male politics has proved itself incapable: it has too often sunk into the search for narrow personal interest and into arbitrary and violent action. A politics of women would doubtless bring about a tendency to disinterestedness and to more humanitarian solutions.... To reduce woman's role to exclusively internal and familial occupations, and man's role to exclusively external and social occupations, thus separating what should be united, would be to perpetuate the present sorry state of things both equally suffer from.

The present hour is serious. A stern, painful lesson is being taught to nations. On the ruins now piling up, new, more beautiful and harmonious constructions can be erected.

Words of Long Ago: Woman and the War