XVII.

5.—“... aspirations crushed ...”

“I have found life a series of hopes unfulfilled and wishes ungratified.”—(Dying words of a talented woman.)

6.—“... purblind pride ...”

“Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,

And fills up all the mighty void of sense.”

—Pope.

7.—“Her every wish made subject ...”

For a somewhat modern exemplification may be taken the instance of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in Paris with her husband, in 1852. She writes of Georges Sand:—“She received us in a room with a bed in it, the only room she has to occupy, I suppose, during her short stay in Paris.... Ah, but I didn’t see her smoke; I was unfortunate. I could only go with Robert three times to her house, and once she was out. He was really very good and kind to let me go at all after he found the sort of society rampant around her. He didn’t like it extremely, but, being the prince of husbands, he was lenient to my desires, and yielded the point.”—(“Life of Robert Browning,” by Mrs. Sutherland Orr, 1891.)

8.—“... her God.”

Conf. Milton (“Paradise Lost,” Book IV., 299):—

“He for God only, she for God in him.”

See Note XXXV., 5. Compare also the Code of Manu, v. 154, as quoted by Letourneau:—“Although the conduct of her husband may be blameworthy, and he may give himself up to other amours, and be devoid of good qualities, a virtuous woman ought constantly to revere him as a God.”—(“Evolution of Marriage,” Chap. XIII.)

Id.... Here may fittingly be appended some masculine concepts of feminine duty in other races.

The Status of Woman, according to the Chinese Classics:—

In a periodical published in Shanghai, Dr. Faber, a well-known scholar, writes (1891) a paper on the status of women in China. He refers especially to the theoretical position assigned to women by the Chinese Classics. These lay down the different dogmas on the subject:

“1.—Women are as different in nature from man as earth is from heaven.

“2.—Dualism, not only in body form, but in the very essence of nature, is indicated and proclaimed by Chinese moralists of all times and creed. The male belongs to yang, the female to yin.

“3.—Death and all other evils have their origin in the yin, or female principle; life and prosperity come from its subjection to the yang or male principle; and it is therefore regarded as a law of nature that women should be kept under the control of men, and not be allowed any will of their own.

“4.—Women, indeed, are human beings, (!) but they are of a lower state than men, and can never attain to full equality with them.

“5.—The aim of female education, therefore, is perfect submission, not cultivation and development of mind.

“6.—Women cannot have any happiness of their own; they have to live and work for men.

“7.—Only as the mother of a son, as the continuator of the direct line of a family, can a woman escape from her degradation and become to a certain degree her husband’s equal; but then only in household affairs, especially the female department, and in the ancestral hall.

“8.—In the other world, woman’s condition remains exactly the same, for the same laws of existence apply. She is not the equal of her husband; she belongs to him, and is dependent for her happiness on the sacrifice offered by her descendants.

“These are the doctrines taught by Confucius, Mencius, and the ancient sages, whose memory has been revered in China for thousands of years.”

And now, what wonder that Chinese civilisation and progress is, and remains, fossilised, inert, dead?

Japan.

“There is one supreme maxim upon which the conduct of a well-bred woman is made to turn, and this is ‘obedience.’ Life, the Japanese girl is taught, divides itself into three stages of obedience. In youth she is to obey her father; in marriage her husband; in widowhood her eldest son. Hence her preparation for life is always preparation for service. The marriage of the Japanese girl usually takes place when she is about seventeen. It is contrary to all custom that she should have any voice in it. Once married, she passes from her father’s household into the household of her husband, and her period of self-abnegation begins. Her own family is to be as nothing to her. Her duty is to charm the existence of her husband, and to please his relations. Custom demands that she shall always smile upon him, and that she shall carefully hide from him any signs of bad humour, jealousy, or physical pain.”—Tinseau (quoted in Review of Reviews, Vol. IV., p. 282.)

Note well the last two words of the above quotation; they have a bearing on much that will have to be said presently. Meanwhile, we read from another writer: “The expression, res angusta domi, might have been invented for Japan, so narrow of necessity is the wife’s home life. The husband mixes with the world, the wife does not; the husband has been somewhat inspired, and his thoughts widened by his intercourse with foreigners, the wife has not met them. The husband has more or less acquaintance with western learning; the wife has none. Affection between the two, within the limits which unequal intellectuality ruthlessly prescribes, there well may be, but the love which comes of a perfect intimacy, of mutual knowledge and common aspiration, there can rarely be. The very vocabulary of romantic love does not exist in Japanese; a fortiori, there is little of the fact.” Yet, under the influence of western civilisation, these things are changing rapidly, and Mr. Norman, the commissioner of the Pall Mall Gazette, further relates that “The generation that is now growing up will be very different. Not only will the men of it be more western, but the women also. As girls they will have been to schools like our schools at home, and they will have learned English, and history, and geography, and science, and foreign music; perhaps, even, something of politics and political economy. They will know something of ‘society,’ as we now use the term, and will both seek it and make it. The old home life will become unbearable to the woman, and she will demand the right of choosing her husband just as much as he chooses her. Then the rest will be easy.”

The harsh and restrained position, both of Japanese and Chinese women, is frequently attributed to Confucianism; yet the matter does not seem to be of any one creed, but rather of every religious creed. Thus Mrs. Reichardt tells us, concerning Mahommedan women and Mahommedan married life, that—

“A Mahommedan girl is brought up with the idea that she has nothing to do with love. It is ayib (shame) for her to love her husband. She dare not do it if she would. What he asks and expects of her is to tremble before him, and yield him unquestioning obedience. I have seen a husband look pleased and complacent when his wife looked afraid to lift up her eyes, even when visitors were present.”—(Nineteenth Century, June, 1891.)

Nor is Confucius alone, or the simple contagion of his teaching, rightly to be blamed for the following condition of things in our own dependency of

India.

The Bombay Guardian calls attention to an extraordinary book which is being circulated (early in 1891) broadcast, as a prize-book in the Government Girls’ School in the Bombay Presidency. The following quotations are given as specimens of the teachings set forth in the book:—

“If the husband of a virtuous woman be ugly, of good or bad disposition, diseased, fiendish, irascible, or a drunkard, old, stupid, dumb, blind, deaf, hot-tempered, poor, extremely covetous, a slanderer, cowardly, perfidious, and immoral, nevertheless she ought to worship him as God, with mind, speech, and person.

“The wife who gives an angry answer to her husband will become a village pariah dog; she will also become a jackal, and live in an uninhabited desert.

“The woman who eats sweetmeats without sharing them with her husband will become a hen-owl, living in a hollow tree.—(Conf. Note VI., 8.)

“The woman who walks alone without her husband will become a filth-eating village sow.

“The woman who speaks disrespectfully to her husband will be dumb in the next incarnation.

“The woman who hates her husband’s relations will become from birth to birth a musk-rat, living in filth.

“She who is always jealous of her husband’s concubine will be childless in the next incarnation.”

To illustrate the blessed result of a wife’s subserviency, a story is told of “the great reward that came to the wife of an ill-tempered, diseased, and wicked Brahmin, who served her husband with a slavish obedience, and even went the length of carrying him on her own shoulders to visit his mistress.”

So quotes the Woman’s Journal of Boston, Mass., and says in comment thereon:—“The British Government in India has bound itself not to interfere with the religion of the natives, but it certainly ought not to inculcate in Government schools the worst doctrines of heathenism.”

Yet, again, are these Hindoo, or Japanese, or Chinese doctrines simply the precepts of “heathenism” alone? Buckle quotes for us the following passage from the Nonconformist “Fergusson on the Epistles,” 1656, p. 242:—“There is not any husband to whom this honour of submission is not due. No personal infirmity, frowardness of nature, no, not even on the point of religion, doth deprive him of it.”

Much the same teaching is continued a century later in the noted Dr. Gregory’s “A Father’s Legacy to his Daughters”; and again, hideously true is the picture which Mill has to draw, in 1869:—“Above all, a female slave has (in Christian countries) an admitted right, and is considered under a moral obligation to refuse to her master the last familiarity. Not so the wife; however brutal a tyrant she may unfortunately be chained to, though she may know that he hates her, though it may be his daily pleasure to torture her, and though she may feel it impossible not to loathe him, he can claim from her and enforce the lowest degradation of a human being, that of being made the instrument of an animal function contrary to her inclinations.... No amount of ill-usage, without adultery superadded, will in England free a wife from her tormentor.”—(“The Subjection of Women,” pp. 57, 59.)

As to how far public feeling, if not law, has amended some of these conditions, see Note XXXVI., 6. Meanwhile, as an evidence of what is the “orthodox” opinion and sentiment at this present day, it may be noted that Cardinal Manning wrote in the Dublin Review, July, 1891:—“A woman enters for life into a sacred contract with a man before God at the altar to fulfil to him the duties of wife, mother, and head of his home. Is it lawful for her, even with his consent, to make afterwards a second contract for so many shillings a week with a millowner whereby she becomes unable to provide her husband’s food, train up her children, or do the duties of her home? It is no question of the lawfulness of gaining a few more shillings for the expenses of a family, but of the lawfulness of breaking a prior contract, the most solemn between man and woman. No arguments of expediency can be admitted. It is an obligation of conscience to which all things must give way. The duties of home must first be done” (by the woman) “then other questions may be entertained.”

Are not these English injunctions to womanly and wifely slavery as trenchant and merciless as any ascribed to so-called “heathenism”? And is it not the fuller truth that the spirit of the male teaching against woman is the same all the world over, and no mere matter of creed—which is nevertheless made the convenient vehicle for such teaching; and that, in brief, the precepts of womanly and wifely servitude are blind, brutal, and universal?