“It is not that putting family before self was not enjoined upon men. Sacrificing personal aspirations or even simple needs to family interests has remained a much-lauded ideal for individuals, men as well as women, in Hindu society from early ages till now and is just one facet of the overarching exaltation of self-sacrifice as perhaps the highest social virtue held up to a Hindu.

“But while the Hindu ethic leaves open for a man many arenas of worldly action — the home, the marketplace, the court, the battlefield — in which to prove his moral worth, for a woman it is solely the home where her virtue, understood as self-sacrifice, must shine.------Vancouver Sun