Submission is a lesson that is very early taught to Turkish children. This insures an obedient, tractable spirit, and is the cause of all that is best in the Turkish character.
There are almost thirty million Turkish women, the masses of whom move upon a very low level of culture. This cannot, however, be said of all, for many of the upper classes and of the court are well educated, though the branches or subjects they are taught are not varied. Foreign governesses are often employed to teach the girls French, German, and English, which they can, in many cases, speak fluently. Language and literature furnish a large part of their education. A change is gradually coming over the Turkish people in this matter of the development of its women, and this, notwithstanding, the fear in many minds that a better educated woman will be a less manageable woman; a creature dissatisfied with her lot. A recent writer of acute observation of Turkish affairs has said of efforts on the part of American philanthropists to instil the spirit of the American public school into the minds of the Turks: "The general opinion seemed to be that the female sex had no intellectual capacity. The first efforts of the Americans to make the women sharers in intellectual progress and refinement were met with opposition, and often with derisive laughter. They created a new public sentiment in favor of the education of women. This is shown by the interest taken in the schools established by Americans for the education of girls. Pashas, civil and military officers of high rank, the ecclesiastics and wealthy men of all the different nationalities attend the examinations, and express their hearty approval of the efforts made by the Americans for improving the conditions of the women of Turkey."
The tendency of these influences is to win for women a greater respect from fathers, husbands, brothers; greater freedom in choice of their life partners; to defer the marriageable age from twelve years to fifteen or twenty; to secure for mothers greater respect from their children; and to elevate womanhood in every relation of life.
Turkish women who are still living under the patriarchal system--and in no small part of the empire does this ancient system prevail--develop under a different environment from that prevailing in the other parts of the realm. Under a patriarchate the mother yields to the grandmother and the great-grandmother. The wife holds not only a subservient place in the family, which often contains as many as forty persons, but she is often, literally, a slave to the mother-in-law, and her children are trained by almost everybody else but herself. The patriarchal system is gradually yielding, however; and more and more, even in the conservative regions of the world, newly married people are forsaking father and mother and cleaving to one another, setting up their own homes and developing the parental character, and training their young in their own sweet way.
Under strict Moslem influence, motherhood has a place of honor; at least in theory. For Mohammedanism gives to the woman who bears children and trains them faithfully a rank in heaven with the martyrs. Unfortunately, however, the light esteem in which women are held in Moslem lands makes against woman's power, even in her noblest opportunity,--that of moulding the children into character that is noblest and best. Much work has been done by foreign philanthropists in an effort to raise the standard of home training among the Turks. Stanley Lane-Poole, in his Studies in a Mosque, a book not written from the viewpoint of the modern missionary, but that of a candid and diligent student of historic conditions, says: "It is quite certain that there is no hope for the Turks, so long as Turkish women remain what they are, and home training is the imitation of vice." This is surely a dark picture. But the time may yet come when the Turkish woman will assume a position more like that of her Western sisters and become an elevating influence in the land whose present territory includes much of the most renowned soil the sun ever shone upon, not only that which saw the birth of the religion of the Jew, the Christian, and the Mohammedan, but also much that is rich in classic and mediæval memories--the country of which Byron wrote:
"The land of the cedar and pine,
Where the flowers ever blossom, the beams ever shine;
Where the light wings of Zephyr, oppressed with perfume,
Wax faint in the gardens of Gul in her bloom.
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