The Harim and the Purdah: Studies of Oriental Women

by Elizabeth Cooper

The realm of the Eastern woman is primarily the realm of the home. She has the true spirit of the bee; she considers the collective good of the household before her own. Her great vocation is to be a wife and mother. She attends personally to her household duties, and domestic service is to her not a disgrace. Her children are to her a veritable life-work. She looks after them personally, superintends their every act, and watches closely their development. Even the high lady of the East does not consider it demeaning to cook with her own hands that which she knows will appeal to the taste of her family. Cooking, indeed, is regarded as a fine art in the East, and recipes are handed down like heirlooms from mother to daughter along with the family jewels.

The Eastern woman is honoured by the honour of her household. It is her business to make it possible for her husband and her sons to advance, and she shines in the reflected light of their achievements. She has not been taught, neither has she any suspicion of the Western ambition to make name and fame for herself. There is a certain delight and satisfaction in living behind the veil which one can hardly appreciate from the Western point of view. That this Eastern feminine regards her success as domestic rather than social is abundantly proved to any one who lives intimately in touch with the women of these countries.

The one great cry which goes up from the heart of every Oriental woman, regardless of place or station, in any home between Algiers and Tokio, is, “Give me sons!” It is this desire for men-children, and the belief on the part of the woman that this is the primal and ultimate destiny of womanhood, that has made marriage the universal custom for all women throughout the East. Rarely indeed do you find an unmarried woman. In India marriage is assured by betrothal in early childhood; and even in those countries where education and Western influence are raising the age limit of marriages one finds no diminution in the general feeling that woman’s world is the home, with her children about her.

This devotion to the purely domestic realm has left the woman a victim to ignorance, superstition, and the many evils that follow in their train. One finds the same superstition working in the minds of the women in Cairo, in Calcutta, and in Peking. The Egyptian mother dresses her boy in rags to guard him from the baneful influence of the “evil eye,” while the woman of China pierces her son’s ears and places a ring therein, to deceive the gods and make them think he is a girl. The woman of Algiers will buy charms and magic symbols to bring her the blessing of motherhood, while the woman of Japan visits shrines and holy places, where her faith and superstition are traded upon by those who understand the weakness of their womenkind. She has so long been accustomed to rely upon her superstitions, her emotions, and to use her intuition in the place of a brain, that the present beginnings in education have been hampered. That, however, she will prove herself capable in the realm of mental training is proven by the fact that, especially in Egypt and in Japan, modern schools for girls are becoming really popular movements in the development of these countries. Every advance in the education of men adds to the possibility of intellectual emancipation for women.

During long ages Eastern women have been denied the right to think for themselves and have been compelled to feel their way emotionally, and their power to feel thus has become abnormally developed at the expense of their power to judge or reason. The woman of the Orient is a woman swayed by emotions, by the heart instead of by the intellect.

There is a logical line of connection to be traced among the modern women of the East. Her phases of development have been the inevitable outcome of influences to which she has been taught to submit as a duty. Her religious sense—the strong spiritual craving that is deep within the heart of all women—has been utilized as a means of influencing her to yield implicit obedience to her mankind, whether he be father, brother, or husband. She has made him, in a certain sense, her god, and in yielding all to him she has ceased to think in the terms of her own individuality, accepting the common opinion that the Eastern woman lives for her home and the amusement and the material comfort of her husband. A mental deficiency bill was passed upon her centuries ago, and the laws command her husband to keep her under restraint. Her menfolks expect her to be deficient, and have carefully guarded her from opportunities of becoming otherwise. Her husband has not associated her with any of his outside life, and she has found little or nothing in his conversation to stimulate or to broaden her mind. Considering her as a being who only understands her children and the petty gossip of the women’s quarters, he has deprived her of the mental possibilities which have reached the men of the East. He has not only tried to teach her not to think for herself, but the Eastern masculine has endeavoured to make her understand that she cannot think. Nor is this tendency entirely abolished by modern education. The young girl fresh from her school in Cairo or Calcutta, where she has caught glimpses of a new world, and where her brain has been slightly awakened, marries and goes into the traditional home, where her faith in herself is gradually diminished by living constantly in the atmosphere of ignorance and superstition which still rules so largely in her woman’s world. Finally, she gives up trying, resigning herself to the standard of the man-made world in which she finds herself, and her husband becomes her keeper in every sense of the word.

The Eastern woman naturally tends in this way to lose her self-reliance, which she is not allowed to exercise. She often decides few matters for herself, even the small details of her daily life being settled by her husband. The effect is insidious, but none the less relaxing, since the faculty of responsibility, like every other faculty, is strengthened only by exercise, and passes away with disuse.

Can the woman of the East be awakened to an advanced development without harm to herself? Within her is found an enormous amount of suppressed capacity for good and evil. This suppression, which has been her cue for generations, possesses great dynamic power. Force becomes dangerous when confined; it should be directed, and unless properly guided and controlled, when it does burst forth, as it is bound to do with these women who are becoming educated and learning their power, it is likely to riot widely, with havoc for its effect. The Eastern woman who has traded upon her emotional nature for her livelihood, who has used these same emotions to keep her husband in a land where divorce is easy and where polygamy is practised by many, may be guided by her feelings rather than her intellect, using her new-found freedom to bring her lasting unhappiness instead of the joy which she now believes is lying just outside her doors. In India advance has come too rapidly at times, and the woman in her desire to slavishly imitate her sisters from the West has shocked the conservative traditions of her nation, and thereby greatly retarded her cause. The Egyptian woman when in England or France becomes almost ludicrous in her attempts to be like the European woman, forgetting that she lacks the foundation of the years of freedom and equality with men which bring judgment and confidence to the woman of the Western world.

The woman of the Orient is awakening and is setting herself the task to consider what is best to be done. How can she remedy the deficiency of the social life of her land? The case is not a hopeless one by any means, even though her capacities and wonderful possibilities have lain dormant for so long. Many of these women now see the things that are wrong; they see the iniquity of a system in which they are not allowed to choose their own mate; they see the crying wrongs of their antiquated marriage and divorce laws, made for another period than the twentieth century—laws which do not fit the present conditions, however successful they may have been in other times. These women are learning to respect themselves and their position, learning to appreciate and value the weight of their majorities, and some are having the courage to speak out. These bolder ones are being punished for their intrepidity; but it does not check them. The cause for which they are working is gradually becoming more and more possible with the advent of education and Western influences, which are causing the present-day educated men of the Orient to require a certain amount of education in their wives and daughters. As this new order comes to the land of the Nile and the Ganges, the old-time woman who passed her days lounging on the divans, eating sweets, drinking coffee, and gossiping with servants and friends as ignorant as herself, will pass away. The new woman of the East will never be a suffragette; she will never attend mass meetings nor carry banners marked “Votes for Women”; indeed, it would be as incongruous to think of these sheltered women doing such a thing as to imagine the long row of mummies at the Museum of Cairo suddenly starting a procession down the aisles of the museum. These women, however, are setting up a high standard for themselves, eager to accept all the Western world has to offer them by way of education and growth, while they feel that they have the capacity to attain the objects of their new ambitions.

In all this change, will the Oriental woman remain the same as regards the deepest things in her nature? Will she keep her innate sense of modesty, her womanliness, her love of home and children, her feminine qualities which seem to us of the Western world almost a weakness, but which comprise her appealing charm? We cannot but feel that although the woman of the East may change radically in the outward expression of her life, inwardly she will remain the same. Indeed, it would be a great mistake if the Eastern woman became satisfied with any mere superficial imitation of her Western sisters. She would lose her birthright. She would lose the consummate opportunity of being an Oriental in an Oriental world, and bringing out of her treasure things new and old for the benefit of the women of every race. Her message to the world of the West in the devotion and the keeping of the home, in the love and pride of children, in her self-effacement for the good of the family, is a high message and in no period has it been more insistently needed. It is this contribution which the woman of the Orient will bring in return for the education and enlightenment from the Occident.