Daily Inspiration Quote by Mahatma Gandhi

Gandhi’s line flatters women by putting them on a pedestal, then quietly nails them to it. “Worshipped” borrows religious heat to make his admiration feel reverent rather than political, but the object of that reverence is telling: not women as citizens, thinkers, or agents, but as “the spirit of service and sacrifice.” It’s praise with an agenda. By defining womanhood through giving, he turns a social expectation into a moral ideal, and moral ideals are harder to argue with than customs.

The phrasing fits Gandhi’s broader rhetorical genius: he recasts everyday discipline as sacred practice. In a movement built on self-denial and collective endurance, women become the exemplary proof that suffering can be virtuous. That’s strategically potent. If the nation can be taught to admire sacrifice instead of seeing it as exploitation, endurance becomes a political resource.

The subtext, though, is uneasy. “Service and sacrifice” can read as acknowledgment of women’s unrecognized labor under patriarchy, but it can also sanitize that inequality by calling it spiritually superior. Worship doesn’t redistribute power; it rearranges the story around power. The line offers women honor while implicitly asking them to keep paying the costs.

In Gandhi’s historical context, he did advocate for women’s participation and tried to widen public roles for them within nationalist struggle. Still, this is a leader’s compliment that doubles as instruction: the ideal woman is the one who suffers well. Reverence becomes recruitment.