Chinese women

“ For untiring industry, cheerfulness of temper, fidelity to their husbands, and care of their offspring, the poor women are every way exemplary. Any one who visits China will find proofs of this wherever he turns his eyes, and a traveller has only to lay his hand upon the head of a little child to earn applause from a whole crowd of bystanders.
Constancy, habit of respect, and the social feeling are easily recognisable in the character of the Chinese women. Chinese stories are full of examples of love that knows no bounds. ”

“ Oh the lot of a woman in China is a cruel one, civilised into a man's toy and slave. I had a thousand times rather be a negress, one of those business-like trading women of Tarquah, or one of the capable, independent housewives of Keta. But to be a Chinese woman! God forbid!
It seems very difficult to make a Chinaman understand that a woman has any rights, even a foreign woman, apart from a man. I remember being particularly struck with this once at Pao Ting Fu, the capital of Chihli, a walled town about three hours by rail from Peking. ”

“ It has not been correct in former times to know a Chinese
lady socially; and to these ladies, with their society, their calls, their
dinners, and their games of cards, we within the courtyards are
people from another world. They think that Chinese women are and
always have been the closely prisoned slaves of their husbands, idle
and ignorant and soulless, with no thoughts above their petty
household cares and the strange heathen gods they worship. ”

“ Women of the upper classes are treated with much respect. The home of a Chinese man is often in reality ruled by his mother, or by his wife as she approaches old age, a state held in veneration. Chinese women frequently prove of excellent business capacity, and those of high rank—as the recent history of China has conspicuously proved—exercise considerable influence on public affairs. ”

“ XII WOMEN OF CHINA AND COREA
China, once the country of perpetual calm, has in recent years become the land of magnificent disturbances. Not an unimportant factor in the changes that have lately taken place in the Flowery Kingdom has been woman. The influence of the women of the nations is generally centripetal. Of the peoples of the earth the Chinese would doubtless be named as altogether the most conservative, and in this conservatism the Chinese women play a most important part. ”

“ Chinese women know as little of tennis, of golf, of riding to hounds—even of dancing in its fast and furious Western sense—as we know of fish-eye soup and of birds’-nest stew. And they care less.
The majority of Chinese women whose feet are bound endure temporary pain, but they suffer no permanent deprivation. To take voluntary and unnecessary exercise—to take it as a pleasure—could never occur to a well-balanced Chinese mind. The Nirvâna of which the Brahmins dream is the idleness which the most favoured-by-fortune of the Chinese women realise. ”

“ Females of the lower classes endure as much labor and fatigue as the men. A wife sometimes drags the plough in rice fields with an infant tied upon her back, while her husband performs the less arduous task of holding the plough.
No Chinese female is allowed to leave the celestial [Pg 152] empire, nor is any foreign woman permitted to pass the frontiers. A European woman, who once endeavored to enter Pekin in disguise, was discovered, and came very near losing her life. In two or three instances Chinese women have escaped secretly, and been exhibited as great curiosities in Europe and America ”

“ The Dowager Empress—of whom we have read so much of late, and who rules China with an iron rod, has feet like any other woman; but millions of her countrywomen have been robbed of nature's endowment through a foolish and wicked custom which has prevailed in China from time immemorial. The feet are bound when the child is born, and they are never allowed to grow as God designed, as the flower expands into beauty from the bud. Chinese women realise that it is foolish, that it is a deformity, but it is the "custom," and custom prevails. ”

“ But I looked one day at over seventy women of the richer classes assembled to listen to a young and enthusiastic Chinese with modern views on the position of women and their equality with men. He was passionate, he was eloquent, he was desperately in earnest, but it was very evident he spoke to deaf ears. I do not think that any one of those women grasped, or cared for that matter, what he was saying. In the heart of China woman is very far from being the equal of man. ”

“ Personally, she said, she would have been very glad to have her come, but she was eager that her work should accomplish two things which it could accomplish only if it were purely Chinese: first, that it should convince the Chinese women themselves that they are able to do things of which they have never dreamed; and, second, that it should show the people of other nations that the only reason why Chinese women have for centuries lived such narrow lives is that they have not had opportunity to develop their native powers. ”

“ Women in China are treated as beasts of burden. It is a land where the women wear socks and trousers and the men wear stockings and robes; where a man shakes his own hand, not yours. White, not black is a sign of mourning. Where the compass points south, not north. Books are read backward, not forward. The woman cries when being married and men laugh when they talk of their mother's death.
The Chinese are unquestionably the oldest nation in the world.
They speak the language and observe the same social and political customs that they did several thousand years before the Christian era. ”

“ But while we have been gazing on a good deal of the darker side of the lives of the women and girls of China, we must not forget that shadows cannot exist without light, so there must be a bright side in life for many Chinese women, and some of the papers read have shown us that no small number of Chinese ladies, independently of European influences, extend noble-minded and practical charity to those amongst their humbler neighbours who may stand in need of such assistance. ”

“ Chinese women make a practice of purchasing for themselves from the poorer classes such of the female children as are of good health and well formed, whom they bring up with great care, with the view of selling them, when grown up, to the wealthy Chinese, and even sometimes to—European residents. ”

“ The hands of a Chinese lady are beautiful—long, slender, and delicate, looking as helpless as a flower. In the olden time long fingernails were worn as a mark of ladyhood, and were often covered with jade or gold, telling plainly that the wearer belonged to the leisured class and did not need to toil. In fact, the whole expression of a Chinese lady is helplessness. From her exquisitely coiffured head, with its mass of pearl and jade, to her tiny feet, on which she sways instead of walks, she impresses one as a dainty piece of jewellery, too fragile for real life. ”

“ I always seem to be talking of the condition of the Chinese women, like King Charles's head, it comes into everything. After all, the condition and status of half the nation must be always cropping up when one considers the people at all. “Chinese women,” said a man, “are past-mistresses in false modesty.” And again I thought what a commentary on a nation. To Western eyes how it marks the subjection and the ignorance of the women. ”

“ It is as true that women are forced to stupendous labour wherever poverty is more the rule than the exception. The Chinese women of the coolie class labour in the fields, they break stones on the streets of Hong-Kong, they carry heavy boxes on and off the boats that anchor in the Canton river,—but they are not ciphers in their own families. I do not believe that they are ever cuffed; I doubt if they are ever cursed.
A Chinese gentleman is superlatively polite. This may not be generally known, because the upper classes in China are so reluctant to know us or to let us know them. ”

“ Her household will attend her rule."
But remember that first she must become a mother. The brightest feature in the life of Chinese women, the one thing that brings them most comfort, is their boys. It is these which most surely lift women into a position of respect. And this is true, even though, according to the teaching of China's sages, the mother must be subject to her son as well as to her husband. "The one bright spot in the lives of Chinese women," an educated Chinaman has recently said, "is their resignation, their willingness to endure, to make the best of their circumstances." ”

“ It must not, however, be assumed from all this that Chinese women take no part in affairs. A Governor's wife is always supposed to be the keeper of his official seal, and is therefore never expected to go out and pay visits. When my husband was obliged to go to Shanghai on business, it was his Chinese employés who immediately suggested that I should keep the keys of the safe, and supervise the accounts in his absence, this being what they said the wife of a Chinese man of business would undertake. ”

“ This attitude of the Chinese merchants who allied themselves with the British officials for the Protection of Women and Children gave no omen of good from the very first. Yet from that day to the present these men have had a large share in the government of the native women of Hong Kong and Singapore, rendering it very difficult ever to elevate the standard of womanhood, or to educate Chinese women in principles that should be the common inheritance of all who live in a so called free country. ”

“ There is very little intercourse between foreign and Chinese women. The latter do not seem to care about making the acquaintance of the women from over the seas. It is only of late years that the wives of foreign officials in Shanghai have had any intercourse with the families of the local officials. Such intercourse consists simply in an interchange of calls, and a luncheon given once a year by the wife of the senior Consul, and returned by the wife of the Chinese taotai or mayor. There can never be any degree of friendship between the Chinese woman and the European. ”

“ Most of the romance in a Chinese woman's life, however, is found in the books, which tell of the earlier days. The first event in the life of most women in China, though she does not at the time realize it, is a sad one. There is usually scant welcome for the girl. Certainly, amidst the masses of the people, she enters upon a rough and weary way. She is reared in seclusion and ignorance. ”

“ Notwithstanding the advantage that must come from the limiting of woman's sphere of influence, examples are not wanting in which Chinese women have exerted their native powers to a conspicuous degree in moulding the history of their times. ”

“ There is in China a vast difference between the women of the populace and the women of the upper classes; the women of the first description are almost uniformly ugly—the others are generally pretty. This is accounted for by a very simple fact. A Chinese woman is a work of art, and not a natural product! Infinite care, uninterrupted superintendence, and a special training, are necessary to make a Chinese beauty ”

“ No insignificant part of the duty of a magistrate in Weihaiwei consists in the taming of village shrews. The number of such women in China is much larger than might be supposed by many Europeans, who regard the average Chinese wife as the patient slave of a tyrannical master. The fact is that Chinese women, in spite of their compressed feet and mincing gait, rule their households quite as effectually as women do in countries further west, and in the lower classes they frequently extend the sphere of their masterful activity to their neighbours' houses as well. ”

“ But in the parts of Shansi and Chihli where I was so much light has not yet penetrated. The wife and mother has influence because any living thing with which we are closely associated—even if it be but a little dog—must needs influence us, but all the same the Chinese women are as a rule mere chattels, dependent entirely upon their menfolk. Amongst the Chinese the five happinesses are: old age, a son, riches, official position and a moustache; so slight a thing is a woman that she does not come in in this connection. ”

“ The real wife and family of the Chinese man generally remain in China, the matrimonial relations of the man in America being wholly spurious. This admixture of the brothel element with all Chinese home life in the United States makes this country very undesirable as a residence for virtuous Chinese women, and largely discourages the immigration of respectable Chinese wives, whose presence with their husbands might greatly tend to the uplifting of the entire Chinese community. ”

“ A Chinese married woman has literally no name at all, but only two surnames, her husband’s and her father’s, so that when these chance to be common ones, it is impossible by this means to discriminate one woman from another. If Chinese women are to be addressed by strangers at all, there is even more embarrassment than in the case of men. In some regions the term Elder-sister-in-law (sao-tzŭ) serves indiscriminately for any woman, but in others Aunt (la-niang) must be used, while in yet others nothing is appropriate but Grandmother (nai-nai) which elsewhere would be equivalent to Old Granny. ”