CHAPTER XIV
CHILD WIVES
The Persian girls stay at home longer than the little apprentices, but not so long as the richer schoolboys.
The usual age for a Muhammadan girl to marry is thirteen or fourteen, but in many places they marry as early as eight or nine.
This perhaps explains why the girl is given no voice in the choice of a husband, and all is left to the parents.
It perhaps partly explains too why Muhammadans are allowed to beat their wives, though they will tell you, as a proof of their prophet’s kindness to women, that he forbade them to do it with a chain. A little girl who has not had time to grow up and learn to behave herself, will often no doubt be difficult to control.
The young wife of a shoemaker one day lost her temper because her husband said he could not afford to buy her something she wanted. She proceeded to break all the ornaments in the house and to tear her best chādar to rags. Her husband, who was a Christian, went to the English missionary to ask whether it would be allowable under the circumstances to beat her.
Another girl refused to cook her husband any food when he came home from his work, and would not even speak to him. She admitted that he was very kind to her, and that she liked him better than her own brothers, but still continued to sulk in this way. Her own relations said a good beating was what she wanted, but her husband had scruples about wife-beating, and would not do anything. But not many Persian husbands are so forbearing.
Another necessary result of these early marriages is the custom of living with the husband’s parents. A girl of even fourteen is not fit to be given sole charge of a house. So the bridegroom takes his bride home to his father’s house, and puts her under the charge of her mother-in-law. When, however, the mother-in-law becomes a widow, she has to take a secondary place, if her daughter-in-law is at all of an age to manage her own affairs. Then the old lady often prefers to leave her son’s house, and to go and live with a married daughter, and the men are generally very good in taking in their mothers-in-law.
Poor little girl wives! They are taken away from home before they are grown up, and although they are now married women they cannot help behaving as children. There was one young wife of a Government official who received her visitors with the utmost dignity and propriety, and then could not resist the temptation to pinch the old black woman who was handing the tea and make her jump.
And they hardly know what to do with their babies. They love to nurse them and play with them, but they get very tired of them and are often glad to hand them over to the grandmother. I went to condole with one girl on the death of her dear little baby, and she said, “It was just as well it died before the winter. It would have been such cold work getting up in the night to look after it.”