Please realize that this article is not fundamentally about India, nor just about the plight of rural women there. It is about injustice, and the aspiration to

Please realize that this article is not fundamentally about India, nor just about the plight of rural women there. It is about injustice, and the aspiration to improve yourself, and the obstacles that prevent that. The kind of taboos that were enforced against these women can be found in all traditional cultures, from the rural South in the US today to many Catholic developing world countries. All of us should be grateful that we were not raised in an environment where we were told not to do untraditional things, with the warning backed up by the threat of violence.