A congress of women was held in Calcutta in 1906 with a woman as chairman; this congress discussed the condition of Indian women. At the medical congress of 1909, in Bombay, Hindoo women doctors spoke effectively. The women doctors have formed the Association of Medical Women in India. In Madras there is published the Indian Ladies’ Magazine.[117]
CHINA[118]
Total population: 426,000,000.
The Chinese woman of the lower classes has the same status as the Mohammedan woman,—ostensible freedom of movement, and hard work. The women of the property owning classes, however, must remain in the house; here, entertaining one another, they live and eat, apart from the men. As woman is not considered in the Chinese worship of ancestors, her birth is as unwished for as that of the Indian woman. Among the poor the birth of a daughter is an economic misfortune. Who will provide for her? Hence in the three most densely populated provinces the murder of girl babies is quite common. In many cases mothers kill their little girls to deliver them from the misery of later life. The father, husband, and the mother-in-law are the masters of the Chinese woman. She can possess property only when she is a widow (see the much more liberal provisions of the Koran).
The earnings of the Chinese wife belong to her husband. But in case of a dispute in this matter, no court would decide in the husband’s favor, for he is supposed to be “the bread winner” of the family. Polygamy is customary; but the Chinese may have only one legitimate wife (while the Mohammedan may have four). The concubine has the status of a hetaera; she travels with the man, keeps his accounts, etc. The Chinese woman of the property owning class lives, in contrast to the Hindoo woman, a life filled with domestic duties. She makes all the clothes for the family; even the most wealthy women embroider. Frequently the wife succeeds in becoming the adviser of the husband. A widow is not despised; she can remarry. The women of the lower classes engage in agriculture, domestic service, the retail business, all kinds of agencies and commission businesses, factory work (to a small extent), medical science (practiced in a purely experimental way), and midwifery; they carry burdens and assist in the loading and unloading of ships. Women’s wages are one half or three fourths of those of the men.
The lives of the Chinese women, especially among the lower classes, are so wretched that mothers believe they are doing a good deed when they strangle their little girls, or place them on the doorstep where they will be gathered up by the wagon that collects the corpses of children. Many married women commit suicide. “The suffering of the women in this dark land is indescribable,” says an American woman missionary. Those Chinese women that believe in the transmigration of souls hope “in the next world to be anything but a woman.”
Foreign women doctors, like the women missionaries, are bringing a little cheer into these sad places. Most of these women are English or American. The beginning of a real woman’s rights movement is the work of the Anti-Foot-Binding societies, which are opposing the binding of women’s feet. This reform is securing supporters among men and women.
For seventeen years there has existed a school for Chinese women. This was founded by Kang You Wei, the first Chinese to demand that both sexes should have the same rights. The women that have devoted themselves during these seventeen years to the emancipation of their sex must often face martyrdom. Tsin King, the founder of a semimonthly magazine for women, and of a modern school for girls, met death on the scaffold in 1907 during a political persecution directed against all progressive elements.
Another woman’s rights advocate, Miss Sin Peng Sie, donated 200,000 taëls (a taël is equivalent to 72.9 cents) for the erection of a Gymnasium for girls in her native city, 100,000 taëls to endow a pedagogical magazine, and 50,000 taëls for the support of minor schools for girls. Still another woman’s rights advocate, Wu Fang Lan, resisted every attempt to bind her feet in the traditional manner. There exists a woman’s league, through whose efforts the government, in 1908, prohibited the binding of the feet of little girls.