VII
THE WOMEN-FOLK
"Teach not thy daughter letters; let her not live on the roof."
Moorish Proverb.
Of no country in the world can it more truly be said than of the Moorish Empire that the social condition of the people may be measured by that of its women. Holding its women in absolute subjection, the Moorish nation is itself held in subjection, morally, politically, socially. The proverb heading this chapter, implying that women should not enjoy the least education or liberty, expresses the universal treatment of the weaker sex among Mohammedans. It is the subservient position of women which strikes the visitor from Europe more than all the oriental strangeness of the local customs or the local art and colour. Advocates of the restriction of the rights of women in our own land, and of the retention of disabilities unknown to men, who fail to recognize the justice and invariability of the principle of absolute equality in rights and liberty between the sexes, should investigate the state of things existing in Morocco, where the natural results of a fallacious principle have had free course.
No welcome awaits the infant daughter, and few care to bear the evil news to the father, who will[page 72] sometimes be left uninformed as to the sex of his child till the time comes to name her. It is rarely that girls are taught to read, or even to understand the rudiments of their religious system. Here and there a father who ranks in Morocco as scholarly, takes the trouble to teach his children at home, including his daughters in the class, but this is very seldom the case. Only those women succeed in obtaining even an average education in whom a thirst for knowledge is combined with opportunities in every way exceptional. In the country considerably more liberty is permitted than in the towns, and the condition of the Berber women has already been noted.
Nevertheless, in certain circumstances, women attain a power quite abnormal under such conditions, usually the result of natural astuteness, combined—at the outset, at least—with a reasonable share of good looks, for when a woman is fairly astute she is a match for a man anywhere. A Mohammedan woman's place in life depends entirely on her personal attractions. If she lacks good looks, or is thin—which in Barbary, as in other Muslim countries, amounts to much the same thing—her future is practically hopeless. The chances being less—almost nil—of getting her easily off their hands by marriage, the parents feel they must make the best they can of her by setting her to work about the house, and she becomes a general drudge. If the home is a wealthy one, she may be relieved from this lot, and steadily ply her needle at minutely fine silk embroidery, or deck and paint herself in style, but, despised by her more fortunate sisters, she is even then hardly better off.
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If, on the other hand, a daughter is the beauty of the family, every one pays court to her in some degree, for there is no telling to what she may arrive. Perhaps, in Morocco, she is even thought good enough for the Sultan—plump, clear-skinned, bright-eyed. Could she but get a place in the Royal hareem, it would be in the hands of God to make her the mother of the coming sultan. But good looks alone will not suffice to take her there. Influence—a word translatable in the Orient by a shorter one, cash—must be brought to bear. The interest of a wazeer or two must be secured, and finally an interview must take place with one of the "wise women" who are in charge of the Imperial ladies. She, too, must be convinced by the eloquence of dollars, that His Majesty could not find another so graceful a creature in all his dominions.