There are about one hundred and forty million women in India. At the age of fifteen, more often several years earlier, they are either wives or widows. Since child marriage is so common in India, there are many widows of very tender years. There are said to be twenty-three million widows in India; at least two million of these became widows in early childhood. Of these, eighty thousand are still under nine years of age, and six hundred thousand have not yet reached the age of twenty. The sorrows produced by religious belief concerning widowhood and by social customs cause many very young girls to end their lives by self-destruction. Pundita Ramabai, in her _High-Caste Hindu Woman_, says of the widow: "She must never take part in the family feasts; is known by the name of harlot; if she escapes from her home, no respectable person will take her in; suicide, or a life of infamy is inevitable." Happily, the self-immolation of widows in India has now well-nigh passed away. The English government has done much to break this awful custom, which was thought to be the only means of destroying the force of a widow's eternal misery and of bringing to her any future blessedness. This horrible death, known as _suttee_, was made unlawful in 1830. But "cold _suttee_," as some have called the living death which widows suffer from social customs, is still maintained. From all that has been said, it is not strange that fathers may sometimes be found who will be willing, for so many rupees, to sell their daughters to a course of infamy, or that men may sometimes lend their wives for a money consideration, or that the suicides of females have been so numerous in India. There are above five million fewer women in India than men. This marked discrepancy may be accounted for by the infanticide which prevails in some parts and among some classes of the Hindoos, notwithstanding all that the government can do to prevent it. Female infants are sometimes strangled, sometimes exposed to wild beasts, or generally neglected. The dark, unsanitary conditions of the women's quarters, and the extraordinarily harsh and unintelligent treatment of women at the time of childbirth, also play their part in the death rate of females.