Calvert says, in his Wealth and Welfare of the Punjab, p. 207:
If there were in Western countries a movement aiming at the exclusion of female labour from all except purely domestic tasks, that movement would endanger the whole economic fabric, and, if successful, would involve those countries in ruin...The fact that there are [Indian] tribes...which do not allow their womenfolk even to work in the fields is alone sufficient to explain their poverty.
The same point is recognized by the Hindu writer, Visvesvaraya, in his Reconstructing India, p, 246:
The time has come when Indians must seriously consider whether the passive life, to which they condemn women with a view of preserving the so-called proprieties and decencies of life, is worth the appalling price the country is forced to pay in the shape of loss of work and intelligent effort from half the population of the country.