It is occasionally objected that to attribute the evils attending the lot of woman in China to the moral system which has molded and preserved that empire, is as inaccurate as it would be to hold Christianity responsible for all the moral evils found in Christian lands. Between the two cases there is, however, this fundamental difference. Every moral evil has from the beginning been antagonized by Christianity. Those evils that still flourish do so in spite of it, and against its unceasing efforts and incessant protest. Christianity acting upon the relatively lofty conception of woman, held by the Teutonic races, has gradually brought about that elevation of the sex which we now witness in full development. The theory of Confucianism, on the other hand, is both erroneous and defective. It is therefore no exaggeration to charge a large part of the evils from which Chinese women suffer to this efficient cause. It is moreover highly important to remember that neither for evils arising from wrong moral teaching nor for others, has Chinese ethics ever furnished either preventive or remedy.
We must, therefore, regard the position of women in China, as the ultimate outcome and a most characteristic fruitage of Confucianism. In our view it has been a bitter fruit, and in recapitulation we would lay emphasis upon seven deadly sins in the relation of that system to woman.
I. Viewed from a purely Chinese point of view there is no inherent objection to the education of Chinese women. In one of the huge Chinese encyclopedias, out of 1,628 books, 376 are devoted to famous women, and of these four chapters treat of female knowledge, and seven others of the literary productions of women, works which have been numerous and influential. But as compared with the inconceivable numbers of Chinese women in the past, these exceptional cases are but isolated twinkles in vast interstellar spaces of dense darkness. Yet in view of the coming regeneration of China, their value as historical precedents to antiquity loving Chinese is beyond estimation.[6]
Rare and unimportant exceptions aside, Chinese women are provided with no education. Their minds are left in a state of nature, until millions of them are led to suppose that they have no minds at all, an opinion which their fathers, husbands and brothers often do much to confirm, and upon which they then habitually act.
II. The sale of wives and daughters. This comes about so naturally, and it might almost be said so inevitably, when certain conditions prevail, that it is taken by the Chinese as a matter of course. Except in years of famine it appears in some parts of the empire to be rare, but in other parts it is the constant and the normal state of things for daughters to be as really sold as are horses and cattle.
There are sections of northern China in which it is not uncommon for a man who has contracted debts which he cannot otherwise pay, to part with a daughter as a last resort. But there are other districts where the practice cannot be exceptional, as is evident from the great number of girls who, one is told, have been procured from this region. If the Chinese themselves are questioned about the matter, the fact is always admitted, the custom is reprobated, but the universally conclusive inquiry is propounded: “What help is there for it?” In the present condition of the empire this interrogatory is unanswerable.
III. Too early and too universal marriages. A considerable part of the unhappiness caused by Chinese marriages may fairly be charged to the immaturity of the victims. To treat children as if they were adults, while at the same time treating them as children who require the same watch and ward as other children, does not appear to be a rational procedure, nor can it be claimed that it is justified by its results. That a new pair constitute a distinct entity to be dealt with independently, is a proposition which Confucianism treats with scorn, if indeed it ever entertains such a conception at all. The compulsory marriage of all girls forces all Chinese society into cast-iron grooves, and leaves no room for exceptional individual development. It throws suspicion around every isolated struggle against this galling bondage, and makes the unmarried woman seem a personified violation of the decrees of heaven and of the laws of man.
IV. Infanticide of female infants. This is a direct, if not a legitimate result of the tenet that male children are absolutely indispensable, applied in a social system where dire poverty is the rule, and where an additional mouth frequently means impending starvation. In a chapter in her “Pagoda Shadows,” on “The Extent of a Great Crime,” Miss Fielde combines a great variety of testimony taken from several different provinces, in the following paragraph. “I find that 160 Chinese women, all over fifty years of age, had borne 631 sons, and 538 daughters. Of the sons, 366, or nearly sixty per cent., had lived more than ten years; while of the daughters only 205, or thirty-eight per cent., had lived ten years. The 160 women, according to their own statements, had destroyed 158 of their daughters; but none had ever destroyed a boy. As only four women had reared more than three girls, the probability is that the number of infanticides confessed to is considerably below the truth. I have occasionally been told by a woman that she had forgotten just how many girls she had had, more than she wanted. The greatest number of infanticides owned to by any one woman is eleven.”
Infanticide will never cease in China, until the notion that the dead are dependent for their happiness upon sacrifices offered to them by the living shall have been totally overthrown.
V. Secondary wives. Concubinage is the natural result of the Confucian theory of ancestral worship. The misery which it has caused and still causes in China is beyond comprehension. Nothing can uproot it but a decay of faith in the assumption underlying all forms of worship of the dead.