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Ambedkar1891–1956

The Archive

What did Ambedkar actually say and do about women's equality?

He treated the standing of women as a measure of a society's progress and acted on it where he had the power to. The clearest evidence is not a slogan but a bill. As Law Minister he drafted and fought for the Hindu Code Bill, whose whole purpose was to move Hindu women from dependence towards legal equality — in marriage, in divorce, in inheritance and in the guardianship of their own children. When Parliament gutted it, he resigned the government over it.

His analysis went deeper than reform of the law. In his earliest scholarly work he argued that the control of women is not a side-effect of caste but its engine: a caste keeps itself pure only by controlling whom its women may marry, and the customs that fall hardest on women — enforced widowhood, the burning of widows, the marriage of girls — exist to manage that control. On this reading the subjection of women and the caste order are the same problem, so you cannot dismantle one while leaving the other standing.

It is worth being exact about the record rather than reaching for a famous quotation. Several lines on women attributed to him circulate without a traceable source, and this site leaves those out. What stands without them is stronger: he staked a cabinet post on women's legal equality and lost it, which is a costlier thing to point to than any sentence.

In the Journey: The bill he resigned over, 1948–1952

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