Swami Vivekananda on Women

"The soul has neither sex, nor caste nor imperfection."
"The best thermometer to the progress of a nation is its treatment of its women."
" There is no chance for the welfare of the world unless the condition of women is improved."
"Woman has suffered for aeons, and that has given her infinite patience and infinite preserverance."
"The idea of perfect womanhood is perfect independence."
"In the West its ideal is wife, in India in the mother".

"In India the mother is the center of the family and our highest ideal. She is to us the representative of God, as God is the mother of the universe. It was a female sage who first found the unity of God, and laid down this doctrine in one of the first hy mns of the Vedas. Our God is both personal and absolute, the absolute is male, the personal, female. And thus it comes that we now say: ’The first manifestation of God is the hand that rocks the cradle’." (CW V.4 p.170)

- Swami Vivekananda