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If, however, her husband lives, she must be prepared to welcome other women to share her conjugal rights, as he may desire; not, to be sure, as legitimate wives, but as concubines. The same rule prevails in this respect in China, Korea, and Japan,1 while in India and throughout the Mohammedan world there may be several legal wives. In Africa the universal rule is as many wives as a man can purchase, and the more he possesses the greater his social dignity. (The position of a concubine is often one of bitter bondage not only to the husband, but also to the first or legal wife. If the hour of divorce comes, as it often does at the whim of the husband, nothing is easier than the destruction of all her legal rights by a cruel and arbitrary decree. There is one universal rule in this matter throughout the non-Christian world. It is as quickly and irreversibly done in Japan as elsewhere.3 A single passionate declaration will accomplish it in Korea, in China, in India, in every harem of Islam, and wherever an African savage chooses to speak the word. (The power of life and death seems to be almost universally in the hands of the husband, unless the authority of some civilized government can call him to account. "Either to be killed or to be married is the universal female fate" in China. In Japan, even a father must be obeyed to the extent of self-immolation, if required.5 In times of dire distress and famine, alike in China and in Africa, wives and daughters may be sold without restraint in the open market. In such strange ways as these is woman robbed of her birthright and deprived of her heritage.)

Her indignities and burdens.

(There is still a final group of indignities and burdens, both physical and moral, which pertain to woman's lot in her non-Christian environment. The mere list of physical injuries inflicted upon her is painful. In almost all Eastern lands she is beaten without legal restraint and maltreated sometimes with brutal cruelty. She is often neglected when sick, as in many an Indian zenana. She is married everywhere at a tender age,-in India as early as seven years, -and the marriage is often consummated at eleven or twelve. There

1 Fielde, "A Corner of Cathay," p. 28; Griffis, "The Mikado's Empire,"

P. 556.

2 Smith, "Chinese Characteristics,” p. 202.

3 Bacon, "Japanese Girls and Women," p. 76.

4 Fielde, "A Corner of Cathay," p. 25.

5 Griffis, "The Mikado's Empire," p. 555.

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6 Douglas, Society in China," p. 212; Smith, "Chinese Characteristics," p. 204; The Church Missionary Intelligencer, May, 1895, p. 378.

7 Wilkins, "Modern Hinduism," p. 345.

rulers in this respect. at seven or eight.

seems to be no law in Mohammedan lands restricting the wishes of her Among the Kabyles she is often a married child Nor is there any constraint of custom as to the age of the bridegroom, who may be far advanced in years and yet married to a child. Amid the dismal barbarism of Chinese Turkestan even

young children are sometimes drugged and forcibly married.) In one of the islands of the New Hebrides a woman's marriage is attended by the painful ordeal of having her "two upper front teeth knocked out by the medicine-man, aided by half a dozen old women, who hold the girl's arms and legs while the cruel operation is being performed."4 Among the African tribes she is always liable to the charge of witchcraft, exposing her to torture or death, as among the Matabele and the Bule and the tribes of the East Equatorial region. In Uganda a wife was recently killed upon the supposition that she made her husband sick." On some of the South Pacific Islands, as in Aneityum and Efate, she is liable to be buried alive in the same grave with her husband or sacrificed in his honor by methods of extraordinary cruelty. Among all savage and ignorant races she is likely to be the victim of brutal quackery and barbarous surgical torture in her times of peril and distress. When widowhood becomes her lot she is everywhere the victim of suspicion and often of cruel neglect. Not infrequently her unprotected condition exposes her to violence. In China even the bright days of her childhood are shadowed by the lingering torture of bound, or rather crushed, feet, in accordance with that abominable custom. If afterwards in maturer life she is obliged to work, the burdens of her toil are immensely enhanced by the physical disability of her maimed person.8

(The rough-and-tumble toil of life in mountain and field and garden

seems to be her lot everywhere in heathen lands. Her daily lesson is drudgery, and throughout the East and in Africa every form of hard work is her appointed lot. She is "a hewer of wood and a carrier of water." In the fields and vineyards and olive orchards, on the tea plantations and at the wine-presses, carrying heavy loads upon her back and heavy jars upon her head, sometimes yoked to plows, usually walking while men ride, frequently with her babe strapped on her back1 Work and Workers, May, 1895, p. 201.

2 Wilkins, "Modern Hinduism,"

P. 346.

3 Lansdell, "Chinese Central Asia," vol. i., p. 409.

The Independent, February 15, 1894, p. 16.

5 The Church Missionary Intelligencer, May, 1895, p. 378.

6 The Missionary, January, 1895, p. 36.

7 Smith, "Chinese Characteristics," p. 204.

8 Henry, "The Cross and the Dragon," pp. 49, 50.

she goes through the weary round of her daily task. The filthy and loathsome service of fertilizing the soil and of preparing the fuel, made from offal, is always her menial task.1 The situation is well illustrated by the story of a native African who ordered his wife to carry him on her shoulders over a deep and perilous ford of a river. She obeyed his command successfully. The husband, on being remonstrated with by a white man, asked in astonishment, "Then whose wife should carry me over if my own does not? " 2 Thus, while it is true that there are many industries in which women can and do happily engage, yet their lot, as a rule, is to be the slave and drudge of men who spend their time in idleness or sport, with no effort to lighten the burdens of life falling so heavily upon the women.3

Her indignities and burdens are not, however, physical alone. There

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are outrages upon her virtue inflicted by lust and greed. (The Laws of Manu give the old Indian estimate of woman. She is regarded with intense distrust and counted as simply a malevolent snare to men. If a widow she is ever the victim of malicious gossip. 'Scandals cluster around a widow's door," is a Chinese proverb.5 "No daughter's virtue can be praised until she is dead," is an Indian proverb. "She is married to the gods " in India, which means that she is married to no one, although the slave of all.) She is set apart and trained for the indecencies of the nautch while still a child. (If there is any difficulty attending her marriage, so inexorable is the law that no one must remain unmarried that she is given perhaps as the fortieth or fiftieth wife to some old man among the Brahmans whose special business it is to marry girls for a consideration, so that if they fail to find a husband in any other way this resource is still open. Then, again, according to the savage etiquette of African hospitality, they must serve as occasion may demand in the capacity of temporary wives to guests.

As might be expected, the natural result of woman's environment and experience where Christianity is unknown is seen in her dwarfed intellectual capacity and her moral and physical degradation. Her service to society has in it necessarily little that is helpful or elevating.

1 Houghton, "Women of the Orient," p. 305.

2 Johnston, "Reality Versus Romance in South Central Africa," p. 65.

3 Cousins, "The Story of the South Seas," p. 143.

4 Wilkins, "Modern Hinduism," pp. 326–336.

5 Smith, "Chinese Characteristics," p. 245.

6 Wilkins, "Modern Hinduism," p. 334.

7 "The Women of India," p. 78, Papers on Indian Social Reform, Madras,

1892.

• Wilkins, "Modern Hinduism," p. 347.

The result upon her personal character.

Among savage races even the instincts of her humanity seem to have given place to a grovelling and loathsome animalism. In the higher walks of heathenism she seems doomed to live in an atmosphere of suspicion, ignorance, and superstition. The Hindu zenana and the Moslem harem are, as a rule, the haunts of frivolous inanity, fleshly vulgarity, and intriguing jealousy. She knows little of the true ideal of home, and appreciates but feebly the dignity and responsibility of motherhood. False conceptions of duty, virtue, and responsibility govern her life; society is thus robbed of the helpful influence, the brightness, the fragrance, and the charm of her pure companionship, and the world is enfeebled, darkened, and saddened by its absence. Mr. Rudyard Kipling, in one of his stories of Indian life, gives the following trenchant verdict as to the real secret of India's degradation. He says by the mouth of one of his characters: "What's the matter with this country is not in the least political, but an all-round entanglement of physical, social, and moral evils and corruptions, all, more or less, due to the unnatural treatment of women. You can't gather figs from thistles, and so long as the system of infant marriage, the prohibition of the remarriage of widows, the lifelong imprisonment of wives in a worse than penal confinement, and the withholding from them of any kind of education or treatment as rational beings continues, the country cannot advance a step. Half of it is morally dead, and worse than dead, and that is just the half from which we have a right to look for the best impulses. It is right here where the trouble is, and not in any political considerations whatsoever. The foundations of their life are rotten-utterly rotten- and beastly rotten. The men talk of their rights and privileges. I have seen the women that bear these very men, and again-may God forgive the men!"]

Some modifications of

are to the credit of Eastern womanhood.

It has been said, and no doubt truthfully, that, in spite of all her disabilities, there is much of happiness as well as of dignity and influence in woman's lot in Eastern lands. This is the dark picture which certainly the case in Japan, where there are many bright modifications of the dark picture which has been presented, and where woman is naturally winsome and gentle, and, according to the standards of her country, refined and modest, with a degree of neatness, diligence, devotion, self-sacrifice, and affectionate concern for those she loves which places her on perhaps the highest plane of womanly excellence outside of the home life of Christendom. We must bear in mind in this connection that there is no zenana system in Japan, and very little physical ill

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