Travels in China, Sir John Barrow [phonics readers txt] 📗

Condition of Women, a Criterion of the State of Society.—Degraded State of in China.—Domestic Manners unfavourable to Filial Affection.—Parental Authority.—Ill Effects of Separating the Sexes.—Social Intercourse unknown, except for gaming.—Their Worship Solitary.—Feasts of New Year.—Propensity to gaming.—Influence of the Laws seems to have destroyed the natural Character of the People.—Made them indifferent, or cruel.—Various Instances of this Remark in public and in private Life.—Remarks on Infanticide.—Perhaps less general than usually thought.—Character of Chinese in Foreign Countries.—Temper and Disposition of the Chinese.—Merchants.—Cuckoo-Clocks.—Conduct of a Prince of the Blood.—Of the Prime Minister.—Comparison of the Physical and Moral Characters of the Chinese and Mantchoo Tartars.—General Character of the Nation illustrated.

It may, perhaps, be laid down as an invariable maxim, that the condition of the female part of society in any nation will furnish a tolerable just criterion of the degree of civilization to which that nation has arrived. The manners, habits, and prevailing sentiments of women, have great influence on those of the society to which they belong, and generally give a turn to its character. Thus we shall find that those nations, where the moral and intellectual powers of the mind in the female sex are held in most estimation, will be governed by such laws as are best calculated to promote the general happiness of the people; and, on the contrary, where the personal qualifications of the sex are the only objects of consideration, as is the case in all the despotic governments of Asiatic nations, tyranny, oppression, and slavery are sure to prevail; and these personal accomplishments, so far from being of use to the owner, serve only to deprive her of liberty, and the society of her friends; to render her a degraded victim, subservient to the sensual gratification, the caprice, and the jealousy of tyrant man. Among savage tribes the labour and drudgery invariably fall heaviest on the weaker sex.

The talents of women, in our own happy island, began only in the reign of Queen Elizabeth to be held in a proper degree of consideration. As women, they were admired and courted, but they scarcely could be said to participate in the society of men. In fact, the manners of our forefathers, before that reign, were too rough for them. In Wales, wives were sold to their husbands. In Scotland, women could not appear as evidences in a court of justice. In the time of Henry the Eighth, an act was passed prohibiting women and apprentices from reading the New Testament in the English language. Among the polished Greeks, they were held in little estimation. Homer degrades all his females: he makes the Grecian princesses weave the web, spin, and do all the drudgery of a modern washerwoman; and rarely allows them any share of social intercourse with the other sex. Yet the very foundations on which he has constructed his two matchless poems are women. It appears also from all the dramatic writers of ancient Greece, whose aim was "to hold as 'twere the mirror up to nature, to shew the very age and body of the time its form and pressure," that notwithstanding their extreme delicacy of taste, and rapid progress in the fine arts, their manners were low and coarse, and that they were entire strangers to any other gratification arising from the society of women, than the indulgence of the sensual appetite. Even the grave Herodotus mentions, in the highest terms of approbation, the custom of Babylon of selling by auction, on a certain fixed day, all the young women who had any pretensions to beauty, in order to raise a sum of money for portioning off the rest of the females, to whom nature had been less liberal in bestowing her gifts, and who were knocked down to those who were satisfied to take them with the least money. This degradation of women would seem to be as impolitic as it is extraordinary since, under their guidance, the earliest, and sometimes the most indelible (I believe I may safely add, the best and most amiable) impressions are stamped on the youthful mind. In infancy their protection is indispensably necessary, and in sickness, or in old age, they unquestionably afford the best and kindest relief: or, as a French author has neatly observed, "Sans les femmes, les deux extrémités de la vie seraient sans secours, et le milieu sans plaisirs." "Without woman the two extremities of life would be helpless, and the middle of it joyless."

The Chinese, if possible, have imposed on their women a greater degree of humility and restraint than the Greeks of old, or the Europeans in the dark ages. Not satisfied with the physical deprivation of the use of their limbs, they have contrived, in order to keep them the more confined, to make it a moral crime for a woman to be seen abroad. If they should have occasion to visit a friend or relation, they must be carried in a close sedan chair: to walk would be the height of vulgarity. Even the country ladies, who may not possess the luxury of a chair, rather than walk, suffer themselves to be sometimes rolled about in a sort of covered wheelbarrow. The wives and daughters, however, of the lower class are neither confined to the house, nor exempt from hard and slavish labour, many being obliged to work with an infant upon the back, while the husband, in all probability, is gaming, or otherwise idling away his time. I have frequently seen women assisting to drag a sort of light plough, and the harrow. Nieuwhoff, in one of his prints, taken from drawings supposed to be made in China, yokes, if I mistake not, a woman to the same plough with an ass. Should this be the fact, the Chinese are not singular, if we may credit the Natural Historian of Antiquity[6], who observes that, to open the fertile fields of Byzacium in Africa, it was necessary to wait until the rains had soaked into the ground; "after which a little weakly ass, and an old woman, attached to the same yoke, were sufficient to drag the plough through the soil," post imbres vili asello, et a parte altera jugi anu vomerem trahente vidimus scindi.

In the province of Kiang-see nothing is more common than to see a woman drawing a kind of light plough, with a single handle, through ground that has previously been prepared. The easier task of directing the machine is left to the husband, who, holding the plough with one hand, at the same time with the other casts the seed into the drills.

The advantages which those women possess in a higher sphere of life, if any, are not much to be envied. Even at home, in her own family, a woman must neither eat at the same table, nor sit in the same room with her husband. And the male children, at the age of nine or ten, are entirely separated from their sisters. Thus the feelings of affection, not the instinctive products of nature, but the offspring of frequent intercourse and of a mutual communication of their little wants and pleasures, are nipped in the very bud of dawning sentiment. A cold and ceremonious conduct must be observed on all occasions between the members of the same family. There is no common focus to attract and concentrate the love and respect of children for their parents. Each lives retired and apart from the other. The little incidents and adventures of the day, which furnish the conversation among children of many a long winter's evening, by a comfortable fire-side, in our own country, are in China buried in silence. Boys, it is true, sometimes mix together in schools, but the stiff and ceremonious behaviour, which constitutes no inconsiderable part of their education, throws a restraint on all the little playful actions incident to their time of life and completely subdues all spirit of activity and enterprize. A Chinese youth of the higher class is inanimate, formal, and inactive, constantly endeavouring to assume the gravity of years.

To beguile the many tedious and heavy hours, that must unavoidably occur to the secluded females totally unqualified for mental pursuits, the tobacco-pipe is the usual expedient. Every female from the age of eight or nine years wears, as an appendage to her dress, a small silken purse or pocket to hold tobacco and a pipe, with the use of which many of them are not unacquainted at this tender age. Some indeed are constantly employed in working embroidery on silks, or in painting birds, insects, and flowers on thin gauze.