The unique and the exotic make such interesting after-dinner stories, while the central
and common truths of humanity are forgotten.
In real life, then, women have not really been oppressed by men. Many men who
marry concubines and make cats' nests of their homes and dodge from one woman's
chamber to another are the real sufferers. There is, moreover, that curious sexual
attraction which makes it impossible for relatives of any degree, of different sex, to
dislike each other strongly. Women, therefore, are not oppressed by their husbands or
by their fathers- in- law, nor can sisters-in- law oppress one another, since they are of
equal rank, although they never like each other. The only remaining possibility is that
daughters- in- law may be oppressed by the mothers- in- law and this is often what
actually happens. The life of the daughter- in- law in a big Chinese family with its
manifold responsibilities is often a veryhard one. For it must be remembered that a
marriage in China is not an individual affair but a family affair; a man does not marry
a wife but "marries a daughter- in- law," as the idiomatic expression goes, and when a
son is born, the idiomatic expression is "a grandson has been born." A daughter- in-law,
therefore, has more severe obligations toward her parents than toward her husband. A
poem of the T'ang Dynasty by Wang Chien recorded a sympathetic sentiment for the
"New Bride":
On the third day, washing her hands,
She goes to make a soup of special savour.
She knows not how the parents like it,
And makes her husband's sister taste its flavour.
For a woman to please a man is a noble effort, but for her to please another woman is
heroic, and many of them fail. The son, torn between loyalty to parents and love for
his wife, never quite dares stand up for her. Practically all tales of cruelty to women
could be traced to an oppressor of the same sex. But then, the daughter- in-law bides
her time to be motherin- law in turn. If she does arrive at that much-desired old age, it
is truly a position of honour and power, well earned by a life of service.
III. IDEAL OF WOMANHOOD
The seclusion of women has, however, a very definite influence over our ideal of
beauty, our ideal of womanhood, the education of our daughters, and the forms of
love and courtship in China.
The Chinese and the Western conceptions of the feminine differ. While both
conceptions envelop the feminine with a sense of charm and mystery, yet the point of
view is essentially different. This is clearest in the field of art. While in Western art
the feminine body is taken as the source of inspiration and the highest perfection of
pure rhythm, in Chinese art the feminine body itself borrows its beauty from the
rhythms of nature. To a Chinese, nothing is more striking than that the statue of a
woman should be placed high up in the harbour of New York, to be looked at by all
people coming into the country. The idea of feminine exposure is indecorous to the
extreme. And when he learns that the woman there does not represent the feminine
but the idea of liberty, he is still more shocked. Why should Liberty be represented by
a woman? And why should Victory and Justice and Peace be represented by women?
The Greek ideal to him is new. For in the West man's imagination has somehow
deified woman and conferred on her a spiritual, ethereal quality, representing all that
is pure, noble, beautiful and unearthly.
To a Chinese, a woman is a woman, who does not know how to enjoy herself. A
Chinese boy is told that he cannot grow up if he passes under a woman's trousers on
the washing- line. The idea of worship of a woman on a pedestal and the exposure of
woman's body are therefore manifestly impossible. With the seclusion of women, the
exposure of the female form, both in art and in everyday life, seems indecorous to the
extreme, and some of the masterpieces of Western painting in the Dresden Gallery are
definitely classed under the category of pornography. The fashionable modern
Chinese artists who are aping the West dare not say so, but there are Continental
artists who frankly admit the sensuous origin of all art and make no secret of it.
But the Chinese libido is there, only dressed in a different expression. Women's dress
is not designed to reveal the body of the human form but to simulate nature. A
Western artist may see, through the use of his sensuous imagination, a female nude
form in the rising sea waves, while a Chinese sees in the draperies of the Goddess of
Mercy the sea waves themselves. The whole rhythm of a woman's form is modelled after the graceful rhythm of the weeping willows, which accounts for her intentionally
drooping shoulders. Her eyes suggest the apricot, her eyebrows the crescent moon, the
light of her eyes the silent waters of an autumn lake, her teeth are like the seeds of
pomegranate, her waist like the weeping willows, her fingers like the spring
bamboo-shoots and her bound feet again like the crescent moon. Such poetic
expressions are by no means absent in the West, but the whole spirit of Chinese art,
and the pattern of Chinese women's dress in particular, justify the taking of such
expressions seriously. For woman's body, as body, the Chinese have no appreciation.
We see very little of it in art. Chinese artists fail dismally in the portrayal of the
human form, and even an artist like Ch' iu Shihchou (Ming Period), famous for his
paintings of female life, shows the upper part of the female nude form very much like
a potato. Few Chinese, unversed in Western art, can tell the beauty of a woman's neck
or of a woman's back. The Tsashih Pishin, a work ascribed to the Han Dynasty but
really belonging to the Ming Period, gave a fairly good account of the perfect female
nude body, showing a real delight in its form as such, but it is almost the only
exception. This is one result of the seclusion of women.
As a matter of fact, these changes of fashion do not matter. Women's costumes will
change, and men will admire them as long as they are worn by women, and women
will wear them as long as men think them beautiful. The change from the Victorian
crinoline and farthingale to the slim boyish figure of the early twentieth century and
on to the Mae West craze of 1935 ^s actually more striking than the difference
between the Chinese and foreign women's dress. As long as women wear it, it is
always divine for men. An international pageant of women's dress ought to make this
point sufficiently clear. Only a decade ago Chinese women paraded the streets in
trousers and to-day they are floating in long gowns covering the ankles, while women
in the West are wearing skirts, but the trousered pyjama has every possibility of
coming into fashion. The only effect such changes give is that it engenders in men a
broad mind.
What is of far more importance is the connection between women's seclusion and the
ideal of womanhood. That ideal is the ideal of a "helpful wife and wise mother," a
phrase very much held up to ridicule in modern China, especially by those modern
women who desire above all "equality," "independence," "self-expression" and who
regard wives and mothers as dependent upon men, representing thus a typical
confusion of ideas.
Let us get the sexual relationships straight. It seems that a woman, when she becomes
a mother, never thinks of her position as "dependent" on the pleasure of her husband.
It is only when she ceases to be a mother that she feels her utter dependence. There
was a time even in the West when motherhood and bearing and rearing children were
not despised by society or by the women themselves. A mother seems to fit in with
her position, a very highly honoured position, in the family. To bring a child into the
world and lead him and guide him with her mother's wisdom into manhood is enough work Tor any human being in a sane-minded society. Why she should be regarded as
"dependent" on man, either socially or economically, because she can do this noble
work, and do it better than man, is a notion that is difficult to grasp. There are talented
women, as there are talented men, but their number is actually less than democracy
would have us believe. For these women, self-expression has a more important
meaning than just bearing children. But for the common people, whose number is
legion, let the men earn bread to feed the family, and let the women bear children. As
for their self-expression, I have seen selfish, mean little wights blossom forth into
gentle, allloving and self- sacrificing mothers, who are models of perfection and virtue
in their children's eyes. I have also seen beautiful girls who do not marry and who
shrivel up in their thirties and never reach that second period of woman's beauty,
glorious like the autumn forest, more mature, more human, and more radiant, best
seen in a happy wife three months after her confinement.
Of all the rights of women, the greatest is to be a mother. Confucius spoke of the ideal
society as the one in which there were "no unmarried men or women," and this, in
China, has been achieved through a different conception of romance and marriage. In
Chinese eyes the great sin of Western society is the large number of unmarried women,
who, through no fault of their own except the foolish belief in such a real being as
Prince Charming, are unable to express themselves. Many of them are great as
teachers or actresses, but they would be still greater as mothers. By falling in love and
marrying perhaps an unworthy husband, a woman may fall into nature's trap, whose
sole concern is for her to propagate the race, but she also may be rewarded by nature
with a curly-headed child, her triumph and her delight, more surprising than the
greatest book she has ever written and saturating her with more real happiness than
the moment of her greatest triumph on the stage. Isadora Duncan was honest e nough
to confess this. If nature is cruel, nature is fair. To the common women, as to the
talented ones, she gives this comfort. For the joys of motherhood are enjoyed by the
clever women and the common ones. So nature has ordained, and so let men and
women live.
IV. EDUCATION OF OUR DAUGHTERS
The different ideal of womanhood in China involved a different training for our
daughters. The training for girls differs, or used to differ, radically from that for boys.
It was much more severe for girls than for boys, and, coupled with the general earlier
maturity of women, girls learned this family discipline earlier and were consequently
soberer and better behaved than boys of the same age. The girl in any case had less of
a childhood than the boy, and from the age of fourteen she began to seclude herself
and learn the manners of womanliness, for the Chinese conception emphasizes the
womanly woman: She rises earlier than her brothers, dresses more neatly than they,
helps in the kitchen and often helps to feed her younger brothers. She plays with
fewer toys, does more work, talks more quietly, walks about more delicately, and sits more properly, with her legs close together. She learns, above all, demureness, at the
cost of sprightliness. Something of the childish fun and tomfoolery goes out of her,
and she does not laugh but only smiles. She is conscious of her virginity, and virginity
in old China was a possession more precious than all the learning of the world. She
does not easily let strangers see her, although she often peeps from behind the
partitions. She cultivates the charm of mystery and distance, and the more she is
secluded the more she is worth. Actually, in a man's mind, a lady shut up in a
medieval castle is more enchanting than a girl you daily see face to face across the
lunch counter. She learns embroidery, and with her young eyes and adroit fingers she
does excellent work and gets along much faster than she would in trigonometry. The
embroidery is pleasant because it gives her time to dream, and youth always dreams.
Thus she is prepared for the responsibilities of wifehood and motherhood.
In educated families the girls learned also to read and to write. There have always
been talented women in China, and to-day there are over half a dozen women authors
who have achieved a more or less national reputation. Many celebrated educated
women were known in the Han Dynasty, and later in the Wei and Ch' in Dynasties.
One of these women was Hsieh Taoytin, who, as a conversationalist, often saved her
brother- in-law from the verbal attacks of his guests. Literacy was limited in China, for
men and for women, but scholars* families always taught their daughters to read and
to write. The content of this literary education was necessarily limited to literature,
poetry, history and human wisdom, as absorbed from the Confucian classics. The girls
stopped there, but really the men did not advance very much further. Literature,
history, philosophy and the wisdom of life, together with some special knowledge of
medicine or the rules of government, were the sum of human knowledge. The
