The missionaries at Fen Chou Fu, being very anxious to improve the status of the women, used to arrange to have lectures in their large hall to women only, and they raked the country-side for important people to address them on subjects that were, or rather that should be, of interest to women. They were not supposed to have anything to do with religion, but they discussed openly women's position, were told about hygiene and the care of children, and the magistrate's wife, she who had been educated in Japan, told them some home-truths about the position of women in China.
“American women,” said she on one occasion, “go out into the world and help in the world's development. We Chinese stay at home and are dragged along by the men. The time has come when we must learn better things.”
But I looked one day at over seventy women of the richer classes assembled to listen to a young and enthusiastic Chinese with modern views on the position of women and their equality with men. He was passionate, he was eloquent, he was desperately in earnest, but it was very evident he spoke to deaf ears. I do not think that any one of those women grasped, or cared for that matter, what he was saying. In the heart of China woman is very far from being the equal of man. These women were pets and toys, and they came to the mission station probably because it was the fashionable form of amusement just then, but they listened to what was being said with deaf ears and minds incapable of understanding. They were gaily clad in silks and satins, richly embroidered; their hair when it was abundant was oiled and elaborately dressed and decorated with gold and silver pins, and when it was scanty was hidden under embroidered silken bands; there was not a skirt amongst them, that was left to the lecturer, their blue and green and brilliant red trousers were rather narrow, their feet were of the very tiniest even in Shansi, and their faces, worn and suffering under their paint and powder, were vacant. Some of them had brought their babies, and only when a child cried, and they cried fairly frequently, did those faces light up. That was something they really did understand.
And yet that enthusiastic young scholar in his voluminous petticoats, with his hair cut in the modern fashion, went on lecturing to them on the rights of women, the position women ought to occupy!
But the position of women! Toys or slaves are they, toys and slaves have been their mothers and their grandmothers since the days before the dawn of history, and very, very slowly is the idea of the possibility of better things percolating through to the masses in China. It will come, I suppose, because already there are Government schools for women, though they are few and far between, and in some places, so far has the desire for freedom gone, the girls have banded themselves into societies, declaring that rather than marry a man they have never seen they will commit suicide, and more than one has taken her own life. But in the parts of Shansi and Chihli where I was so much light has not yet penetrated. The wife and mother has influence because any living thing with which we are closely associated—even if it be but a little dog—must needs influence us, but all the same the Chinese women are as a rule mere chattels, dependent entirely upon their menfolk. Amongst the Chinese the five happinesses are: old age, a son, riches, official position and a moustache; so slight a thing is a woman that she does not come in in this connection.
“As far as the heavens are above the earth, so far am I,” disdainfully proclaimed a Chinese teacher, “above my wife.” And he only spoke as if stating a self-evident fact, a thing that could not be questioned. “How could she be my equal?” Just as I might have objected to being put on the same plane as my mule or my little dog. Indeed I doubt very much whether he gave the same consideration to his wife as I would do to my little dog, who is much beloved.
This is not to say, of course, that the men don't consider the women. They do.
I remember the gate-keeper at Pao Ting Fu mission paying up for his daughter's schooling. He was a jovial old soul, so old that I was surprised to hear he had a mother.
“Short am I?” said he cheerfully. “Short? Oh, that dollar and a half!” He paused to consider the matter, then added: “And I was thinking about borrowing a dollar from you. My mother's dying, and I want to buy her a skirt! Must be prepared, you know!”
The old lady, said Miss Newton, had probably never owned such a luxury as a skirt in her life, but that was her son's way of being good to her, for the people have a proverb to the effect that the most important thing in life is to be buried well, an idea that isn't entirely unknown in Western and more enlightened lands. Poor old lady, whose one and only skirt came to her to be buried in, or perhaps it would be taken off before she was buried, for the Chinese are a careful people. I remember one frugal man who celebrated the funeral of his mother and the marriage of his son at the same time, so that the funeral baked meats did for the marriage feast, and the same musicians did for both. The coffin, of heavy black wood, tall as a mantelpiece, stood in the yard, with the eldest son and his wife clad in white as mourners, and the rest of the company made merry in the house over the bridal. It was the most exquisite piece of thrift, but the Chinaman is par excellence an economist.