• Around the time the British were promoting women education in India, how did they treat women back home? Article has answers under these heads - The Two-Tier System of Female “Education”, The Priestly Mechanism of Oppression, The Law That Made Women Illiteracy’s Prisoner and more.

1. The Civilizational Crimes Nobody Names

Let us be precise about what happened to British women in the eighteenth century. It was not neglect. It was not oversight. It was not the gentle inertia of tradition. It was a calculated, theologically-engineered system of intellectual imprisonment — designed, sustained, and Scripture-stamped by the Christian Church over the course of eighteen centuries, bearing its fullest and most brutal fruit in Georgian England.

To call it anything less is to participate in the cover-up.

A civilisation is measured not by its cathedrals but by how it treats its women. On that measure, 18th-century Britain — the self-proclaimed pinnacle of Christian progress — stands condemned by its own record. What the Vedas affirmed three thousand years earlier:

“When women are honored, the divinities are content; but when they are not honored, all undertakings fail.”— The Vedas

The Church of England spent eighteen centuries systematically disproving

2. The Two-Tier System of Female “Education”

In eighteenth-century Britain, education for women existed on two levels: the ornamental and the non-existent.

For daughters of the gentry, there were accomplishments — a little French, some needlework, the pianoforte, enough Scripture to remain docile. These were not designed to develop the mind. They were designed to raise the marriage price. A woman of wit, of genuine intellectual ambition, of the sort who might read philosophy or argue theology - she was a social and spiritual liability. The governing wisdom of the age, inherited directly from the Cromwellian pulpit and recycled through Anglican sermons, was this:

“She that knoweth how to compound a pudding is more desirable than she who skillfully compoundeth a poem.”— Anglican pulpit, 17th–18th century

One shudders. And one is meant to shudder.

For the great mass of British women - the labouring poor - there was nothing. Girls as young as six were harnessed in chains to coal carts in the mines of Lancashire. Women in the iron districts of the Midlands hammered bolts in open sheds, half-clad in summer heat, earning four to five shillings a week while men doing identical work collected fourteen. Working sixteen-hour days, nursing infants at the pit-mouth, carrying loads that broke the spine - these women had no access to schooling, no legal standing to own earnings, no right to the most elementary learning. The idea of education was as remote as the moon.

This was not Christian civilisation. This was Christian slavery, dressed in ecclesiastical robes and justified by chapter and verse.

1 The Locked Schoolroom - Anglican Clergy and the Systematic Denial of Women’s Education, 18th Century Britain. @Author.

3. The Priestly Mechanism of Oppression

The oppression of women’s minds was not incidental to the Church’s theology - it was structural to it. The mechanism was elegant in its cruelty.

Literacy, in the Christian framework, was classified as a priestly capacity. To read was to be eligible for holy orders. Holy orders were, by doctrinal decree, the exclusive preserve of men.

Therefore: a woman who could read was, by logical extension, claiming a right the Church refused to concede. To educate a woman was to risk ordaining her. The Church would sooner ordain a stone.

The Pauline foundation of this edifice deserves naming. St. Paul’s teaching - that Adam was created first and therefore superior, that woman was an “afterthought of her Creator,” a secondary being fashioned as an appendage to man - provided the theological warrant for everything that followed. For eighteen centuries, this single act of intellectual vandalism echoed through Canon Law, Common Law, and every pulpit in Christendom. It is impossible to overstate the damage done.

A specific Canon commanded:

“Let not a woman however learned or holy presume to teach a man in a public assembly.” - Canon Law, enforced through the 18th century.”

This was not metaphor. This was law. And it was enforced - in 17th-century New England witch trials; in 18th-century England with social ruin and ecclesiastical censure. Matilda Joslyn Gage, the American suffragist historian, traced a straight, unbroken line from this Canon to every obstacle placed before women seeking to enter medicine, law, the pulpit, or the classroom.

4. The Law That Made Women Illiteracy’s Prisoner

The legal instrument that locked the schoolroom door was called Benefit of Clergy - a canonical provision, absorbed wholesale into English Common Law, that offered literate men a dramatic reduction in punishment for criminal offences. A literate man convicted of larceny received branding and months of imprisonment. An illiterate woman convicted of the identical crime was burned alive or hanged.

This provision persisted, without shame or challenge, to the end of the eighteenth century. It encoded a simple and devastating message: literacy is a male privilege. Its legal consequences are male privileges. Therefore, if you are a woman who learns to read, you are claiming something the Church and State together refuse you.

Blackstone himself, the great codifier of English law, acknowledged that the Canon Law distinction between brothers and sisters in matters of inheritance “reflects shame upon England.” Shame is the word. It is also, one notes, a word the Church uttered seldom about its own arrangements - but directed at women constantly, for the sin of existing.

5. The Suppression Was Active, Not Passive

It must be said: the Church did not simply permit women’s ignorance. It cultivated it. The printing press - that great democratiser of knowledge - was anathematised by the Church as an “invention of the devil.” The Bible itself was formally prohibited to the laity across centuries of Catholic and, in modified form, Protestant governance. The Reformation brought new names to the pulpit but no new justice to women. Anglican, Calvinist, Puritan - all sustained, with varying degrees of ferocity, the same foundational position: women were inferior, sinful, subordinate, and better ignorant.

The Cromwellian period in Britain, which one might expect to have brought reforming energy, instead brought “new reprobation” upon women’s learning and accomplishments.

The post-Reformation Church of England required women who had given birth to perform a ritual of churching - a public expiation of the supposed pollution of motherhood — until well into the 18th century. This was the institution instructing women in their place. This was an institution that the Georgian State trusted to shape the moral and intellectual formation of its citizens.

6. What Was Lost — and What Must Be Recovered

The tragedy is sharpened when we recall what women were, before this machinery was assembled. In ancient civilisations - including, as every Dharmic scholar knows, the civilisation of Bharatavarsha — women studied the Vedas, held the Brahminical thread, taught philosophy, governed, legislated, and were revered as the custodians of wisdom. In pre-Christian Britain itself, among the Angles and the Germanic tribes that preceded the Church’s arrival, wounds inflicted upon women were punished with double the penalty of the same injury to men - evidence of a prior culture of honour. The Church dismantled all of it.

By the 18th century, what remained for British women was a locked schoolroom, a harnessed body in the coal pit, a catechism in place of a curriculum, and a theology that assured her that this arrangement was the will of God.

It was not. It never was.

The oppressor always invokes God. The task of every civilisation that calls itself humane is to distinguish between the voice of the divine and the voice of the institution that claims to speak for it. On that test, the 18th-century Church of England - and the British State that deferred to it - failed catastrophically, and British women paid the price in their bodies, their minds, and their freedom for generations.

2 Two Worlds. One Woman. Two Fates. Women’s Education in Dharmic India and Anglican Britain Contrasted. @author.

3 Vidya Is Her Birthright-The Sacred Equality of Women’s Learning in the Dharmic Tradition. @author.  

The three pictures in article are by author and © @thebritishhindu

Author Pt. Satish K Sharma, FRAS,  is a Dharmic Theologian and Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He writes and speaks on the intersection of civilisational history, theology, and the rights of women.

Also read

1. Names of Women who contributed to Indian Knowledge Systems

2. Five Elemental Women

3. Why Ahilyabai Holkar was a great woman (18^th century)

4. Jijabai, mother of Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj (17^th century)

5. Tarabai, Maratha Queen (17^th century)

6. Rani Abakka, the forgotten warrior queen of Karnataka (16^th century)

7. Women Sants of Maharashtra (1270 A.D. onwards)

8. Yashomati, the first Queen of Kashmir

9. Remembering Lal Deed, the Kashmiri Yogini

10. How the British created the Dowry system in Punjab

11. Worship of God as Mother in Indian Tradition

Editor Notes

I was reading about how the British championed the cause of women’s education in India in the 18^th century. So, I wanted to know how they treated women in their own country. Pandit Satish Sharmaji has provided a fascinating insight. Bahut Dhanyavad and Aabhar.

“The British Parliament granted franchise to its women in 1918.” Pg. 192

“Down to 1850 A.D. in England, a woman could not take a walk, much less a journey, alone, nor could she ask a fellow worker to visit her, unless the worker was a girl. When two ladies spoke at a meeting convened for the purpose of supporting a women’s cause in Parliament, a Member of Parliament said, “Two ladies have disgraced themselves for speaking in public”. When the House of Commons was built in 1844, it was great difficulty that a Ladies Gallery was sanctioned.” The Position of Women in Hindu Civilization by A.S. Altekar Pg. 178 To read more click here

It would be interesting to know why, how and when the condition of British Women changed!