Women Adepts

In June, 1889, C.S. Stockholm sent a few questions to the editors of the Theosophical Journal Lucifer. One of them was about the existence of Women Adepts:

Has any woman ever attained to Adeptship proper? Will her intellectual and spiritual nature and gifts permit it, even while supposing that her physical nature might endure the hardships therefrom indispensable?

To this, H. P. Blavatsky answered:

Woman has as good a chance as any man has to reach high Adeptship. Why she does not succeed in this direction in Europe is simply due to her early education and the social prejudice which causes her to be regarded as inferior to man. This prejudice, amounting to a curse in Christian lands, was mainly derived from the Jewish Bible, and man has profited by it.

T. Subba Row, considered by H. P. Blavatsky to be her equal in occultism, wrote:

There are instances of females becoming the greatest Adepts. Whether an individual is male of female depends upon temperament as much as anything else. . . . There is one woman who still stands in the list of the Mahachohans of one of the greatest Rays--that to which H ... belongs. She is not merely a great Adept of that Ray, but had made many original discoveries. . . There is a Ray specially adapted to women; it is sometimes called "the body of love". Its Logos is rather a female than a male; it belongs to the magnetic pole of the universe. I do not think there will ever be a female Adept of the First Ray, because it belongs to entirely to the positive pole.

In The Theosophist, October, 1883, "An Inquirer" asked:

Will you kindly let me know whether females can attain to adeptship, and whether female adepts exist at all?

To this, Damodar K. Mavalankar, a chela of Mahatma K.H. wrote:

It is difficult to see any good reason why females should not become Adepts. None of us, Chelas, are aware of any physical or other defect which might entirely incapacitate them from undertaking the dreary ordeal. It may be more difficult, more dangerous for them than it is for men, still not impossible. The Hindu sacred books and traditions mention such cases, and since the laws of Nature are immutable, what was possible some thousand years ago must be possible now. . . . In Nepaul, we all know, there is a high female Adept. And in Southern India, flourished at a recent date, another great female Initiate named Ouvaiyar. Her mysterious work in Tamil on Occultism is still extant. It is styled Kural, and is said to be very enigmatically written, and consequently inexplicable. In Benares too lives a certain lady, unsuspected and unknown but to the very few to whom reference has been made in the Theosophist in the article "Swami Dayanand's Views about Yoga" (page 47, Vol. II).