Today, for the most part, women are seen as equal to men. Women have the same opportunities as men and the same chances of finding work. In today's society, women not only have one role, that role and that being to have children, but they can pursue any career they want. However, this was not always the case. According to feminist theorists, Western civilizations were patriarchal, meaning that society is dominated by males. Society is organized so that the male is above the female in all cultural aspects, including family, religion, politics, economics, art, and social and legal spheres. Patriarchal gender biases between male and female say that a male must be active, dominant, adventurous, rational and creative. In the novel A Passage to India, Forster expresses this male dominance by writing: “He took no notice of them, and with this, which would have passed without comment in feminist England, he did harm in a community where the male is expected to be lively and helpful” (Forster 52). They say that being a woman means being passive, agreeable, shy, emotional and conventional. The feminist theorists' argument for a male-centered society is certainly present in the novel A Passage to India. E. M. Forster reveals cultural, economic and educational factors within the patriarchal Indian society that limit women. In E. M. Forster's novel A Passage to India, Forster denounces derogatory stereotypes of women and portrays them as inferior to men to support the view of women in that period. In the novel A Passage to India, written by Forster, he has a bias towards the women in the novel. The society in which Forster wrote the novel in the 1920s had different views on women than today in...... middle of paper ......ique 20.3 (1990): 331-41. JSTOR. Network. March 4, 2011. .Sharpe, Jenny. "A Passage to India by E.M. Forster." Contemporary literary criticism. Ed. James P Draper, Jennifer Brostrom and Jennifer Gariepy. vol. 77. Detroit: Gale, 1993. 253-57. Rpt. of “The Unspeakable Limits of Rape: Colonial Violence and Counterinsurgency.” Genres 10 (1991): 25-46. Literary criticism online. Network. March 4, 2011. .Silver, Brenda R. "Periphrasis, Power, and Rape in 'A Passage to India'." NOVEL: A Forum on Fiction 22.1 (1988): 86-105. JSTOR. Network. 4 March 2011. .Muri, Elizabeth Macleod. "An Aristotelian reading of the female voice as revolution in E.M. Forster's A Passage To India." Language and Literature Papers 35.1 (1999): 56. Literature Resource Center. Network. March 25. 2011.