Depressing Position of Women

Social conditions were equally depressing. The most distressing was the position of women. Attempts to kill female infants at birth were not unusual. Child marriage was another bane of society. The practice of polygamy prevailed and in Bengal, under Kulinism, even old men took very young girls as wives. Several women hardly had a married life worth the name, yet (at least among the higher castes) when their husbands died they were expected to commit sati which Raja

Rammohan Roy described as a “murder according to every shastra”. If they escaped this social coercion, they were condemned to a life of misery and humiliation.