In Persia hardly a beginning of the woman’s rights movement exists. The Report[114] that I have before me closes thus: “The Persian woman lives, as it were, a negative life, but does not seem to strive for a change in her condition.” Certainly not. Like the Turkish and the Arabian woman, she is bound by the Koran. Her educational opportunities are even less (there are very few European schools, governesses, and women doctors in Persia). Her field of activity is restricted to agriculture, domestic service, tailoring, and occasionally, teaching. However, she is said to be quite skillful in the management of her financial affairs. As far as I know, the Persian woman took no part in the constitutional struggle of 1908-1909.
INDIA
Total population: 300,000,000.
The Indian woman’s rights movement originated through the efforts of the English. The movement is as necessary and as difficult as the movement in China. The Indian religions teach that woman should be despised. “A cow is worth more than a thousand women.” The birth of a girl is a misfortune: “May the tree grow in the forest, but may no daughter be born to me.”[115]
Formerly it was permissible to drown newborn girls; the English government had to abolish this barbarity (as it abolished the suttee). The Indian woman lives in her apartment, the zenana; here the mother-in-law wields the scepter over the daughters-in-law, the grandchildren, and the women servants. The small girl learns to cook and to embroider; anything beyond that is iniquitous: woman has no brain. The girls that are educated in England must upon their return again don the veil and adjust themselves to native conditions. At the age of five or six the little girls are engaged, sometimes to young men of ten or twelve years, sometimes to men of forty or fifty. The marriage takes place several years later. Sometimes a man has more than one wife. The wife waits on her husband while he is eating; she eats what remains.
If the wife bears a son, she is reinstated. If she is widowed, she must fast and constantly offer apologies for existing. The widows and orphans were the first natives to become interested in the higher education of women. This was due to economic and social conditions.
India was the cradle of mankind. Even the highest civilizations still bear indelible marks of the dreadful barbarities that have just been mentioned. The Indian woman has rebelled against her miserable condition. The English women considered it possible to bring health, hope, and legal aid to the women of the zenana, through women doctors, women missionaries, and women lawyers. Hence in 1866 zenana missions were organized by English women doctors and missionaries. Native women were soon studying medicine in order to bring an end to the superstitions of the zenana. Dr. Clara Swain came to India in 1869 as the first woman medical missionary. As early as 1872-1873 the first hospital for women was founded; in 1885, through the work of Lady Dufferin, there originated the Indian National League for Giving Medical Aid to Women (Nationalverband für ärztliche Frauenhilfe in Indien).
Native women have studied law in order to represent their sex in the courts. Their chief motive was to secure an opportunity of conferring with the women in the zenana, a privilege not granted the male lawyer. The first Indian woman lawyer, Cornelia Sorabija, was admitted to the bar in Poona. Even in England the women have not yet been granted this privilege. This is easily explained. The Indian women cannot be clients of men lawyers; what men lawyers cannot take, they generously leave to the women lawyers.
India has 300,000,000 people; hence these meager beginnings of a woman’s rights movement are infinitesimal when compared with the vast work that remains undone.[116] The educated Indian woman is participating in the nationalist movement that is now being directed against English rule. Brahmanism hinders the Indian woman in making use of the educational opportunities offered by the English government. Brahmanism and its priests nourish in woman a feeling of humility and the fear that she will lose her caste through contact with Europeans and infidels. The Parsee women and the Mohammedan women do not have this fear. The Parsee women (Pundita Ramabai, for example) have played a leading part in the emancipation of their sex in India. But the Mohammedan women of India are reached by the movement only with difficulty. By the Hindoo of the old régime, woman is kept in great ignorance and superstition; her education is limited to a small stock of aphorisms and rules of etiquette; her life in the zenana is largely one of idleness. “Ennui almost causes them to lose their minds” is a statement based on the reports of missionaries.
There are modern schools for girls in all large cities (Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, etc.). The status of the native woman has been Europeanized to the greatest extent in Bengal. The best educated of the native women of all classes are the dancing girls (bayadères); unfortunately they are not “virtuous women” (honnêtes femmes), hence education among women has been in ill repute.