Did Ambedkar blame women for their own subjection?
He did the opposite: he located the cause in a system and in the people who ran it, not in the women it acted upon. His analysis of caste treated women as the point where the system pressed hardest — the ones burned as widows, married off as girls, forbidden to remarry — and he named these as mechanisms of control imposed on them, not failings of theirs. The woman, in his account, is where the machinery bears down, never the reason it exists.
This is worth stating plainly for anyone used to hearing a woman's freedom discussed as a problem of her conduct — where she goes, when, dressed how. Ambedkar's whole method points the other way. He asked what arrangement produces the harm and who benefits from it, and put the responsibility there. To ask what the widow did to deserve the pyre is, on his logic, to have the question exactly backwards: the pyre existed to serve the caste, and the question is who lit it and why.
His remedy followed from the diagnosis. He did not exhort women to behave differently; he tried to change the law and the structure that constrained them, through the Hindu Code Bill and through his attack on the customs that policed them. The burden of reform, for him, lay on the system and its beneficiaries, not on the people the system was designed to keep down.