Philosophy
Religions often give women a “purpose” built around obedience, motherhood, and modesty, then celebrate that endurance as virtue.
Gender Across Traditions: Contradictions
The Manusmriti is explicit: “A woman must never be independent. In childhood subject to father, in youth to husband, in old age to sons.” Stri dharma is pativrata (devotion to husband), motherhood, and household management. The ideal is Sita from the Ramayana. Her husband, Rama, abandons her while pregnant because rumours question her chastity. He demands she prove her purity by walking through fire. She does. Through it all, Sita remains devoted, obedient, and uncomplaining. This is held up as the model of women’s dharma endurance, sacrifice, unwavering devotion, regardless of treatment. But in the same tradition, we have Shakti theology. The divine feminine is the creative power that animates the universe. Goddesses like Kali and Durga are warriors who destroy demons and restore cosmic order. Let’s think about this contradiction: A culture celebrates Durga’s warrior power and simultaneously tells actual women their purpose is submission, silence and service! Goddess worship coexists with brutal everyday patriarchy!
In Islam, women’s purposes are defined through family roles, yet the tradition preserves Khadija, a successful businesswoman who employed Muhammad and Aisha, a scholar whose knowledge shaped Islamic jurisprudence. The hijab debate reveals this tension. For some women, modest dress is oppression. For others, it’s liberation from objectification, a claim to public space on their own terms. Whose purpose does it serve? God’s command? Patriarchal control? Women’s choice? These are not mutually exclusive.
Christianity gives us “Wives, submit to your husbands” and women “saved through childbearing,” but also Mary Magdalene as “apostle to the apostles” and medieval women mystics such as Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen and Teresa of Avila who claimed direct divine communication, bypassing male clergy.
Buddhism has traditions claiming women cannot achieve enlightenment in female bodies, yet preserves the TherigathaL poems by enlightened nuns and acknowledges female arhats!
The Question We Need to Ask
When a woman finds purpose in religious roles, the devoted wife who finds meaning in family care, the mother for whom children provide life’s deepest significance, the woman who experiences modest dress as spiritual discipline: is this authentic spirituality or internalised oppression? Can it be both simultaneously? If she says it is freely chosen, but she is socialised from birth to want this, what does “free choice” mean? Who decides?
The purpose provided by these frameworks is real. Women do find meaning, community and cosmic significance. The structure is also controlling: these purposes serve patriarchal power and limit possibilities. Both statements can be true at once. This is what makes the question of gendered purpose so much harder than simple liberation narratives suggest. One is not fighting frameworks that are simply lies; one is fighting frameworks that provide genuine goods while maintaining hierarchy, and those goods and that hierarchy are often inseparable.
Credits: TCA, LLC.