The adoration of women, individually or collectively, is, however, an
entirely modern phenomenon, and is even now very far from being
universal. As Professor Chamberlain has pointed out (345): "Among
ourselves woman-worship nourishes among the well-to-do, but is almost,
if not entirely, absent among the peasantry." Still less would we
expect to find it among the lower races. Primitive times were warlike
times, during which warriors were more important than wives, sons more
useful than daughters. Sons also were needed for ancestor worship,
which was believed to be essential for bliss in a future life. For
these reasons, and because women were weaker and the victims of
natural physical disadvantages, they were despised as vastly inferior
to men, and while a son was welcomed with joy, the birth of a daughter
was bewailed as a calamity, and in many countries she was lucky--or
rather unlucky--if she was allowed to live at all.
A whole volume of the size of this one might be made up of extracts
from the works of explorers and missionaries describing the contempt
for women--frequently coupled with maltreatment--exhibited by the
lower races in all parts of the world. But as the attitude of
Africans, Australians, Polynesians, Americans, and others, is to be
fully described in future chapters, we can limit ourselves here to a
few sample cases taken at random.[25] Jacques and Storm relate (Floss,
II., 423) how one day in a Central African village, the rumor spread
that a goat had been carried off by a crocodile. Everybody ran to and
fro in great excitement until it was ascertained that the victim was
only a woman, whereupon quiet was restored. If an Indian refuses to
quarrel with a squaw or beat her, this is due, as Charlevoix explains
(VI., 44), to the fact that he would consider that as unworthy of a
warrior, as she is too far beneath him. In Tahiti the head of a
husband or father was sacred from a woman's touch. Offerings to the
gods would have been polluted if touched by a woman. In Siam the wife
had to sleep on a lower pillow than her husband's, to remind her of
her inferiority. No woman was allowed to enter the house of a Maori
chief. Among the Samoyedes and Ostyaks a wife was not allowed in any
corner of the tent except her own; after pitching the tent she was
obliged to fumigate it before the men would enter. The Zulus regard
their women "with haughty contempt." Among Mohammedans a woman has a
definite value only in so far as she is related to a husband;
unmarried she will always be despised, and heaven has no room for her.
(Ploss, II., 577-78.) In India the blessing bestowed on girls by
elders and priests is the insulting
"Mayst thou have eight sons, and may thy husband survive
thee." "On every occasion the poor girl is made to feel that
she is an unwelcome guest in the family." (Ramabai
Saravasti, 13.)
William Jameson Reid, who visited some of the unexplored regions of
Northeastern Thibet gives a graphic description of the hardness and
misery of woman's lot among the Pa-Urgs:
"Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable
commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and
her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals
of her lord and master. Polyandry is generally
practised, increasing the horror of her position, for
she is required to be a slave to a number of masters,
who treat her with the most rigorous harshness and
brutality. From the day of her birth until her death
(few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one
protracted period of degradation. She is called upon to
perform the most menial and degrading of services and
the entire manual labor of the community, it being
considered base of a male to engage in other labor than
that of warfare and the chase....
"When a child is to be born the mother is driven from
the village in which she lives, and is compelled to
take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the
open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her
husbands, being brought to her by the other women of
the tribe. When the child is born the mother remains
with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a
cave, returns to the village and informs her eldest
husband of its birth and the place where she has left
it. If the child is a male, some consideration is shown
to her; should it be a female, however, her lot is
frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which
she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn
and contumely of the rest of the tribe. If a male
child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back
to the village; if it is of the opposite sex he is left
to his own volition; sometimes he returns with the
female infant; as often he ignores it entirely and
allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other
man as a prospective wife."[26]
In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receive
separate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension to
speak to his wife. When a young man of the ruling classes marries, he
spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his
concubine, "in order to prove that he does not care much for the
bride." (Ploss, II., 434.) "The condition of Chinese women is most
pitiable," writes the Abbé Hue:
"Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery
and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and
accompany her to the tomb. Her birth is commonly
regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the
family--an evident sign of the malediction of heaven.
If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is
regarded and treated as a creature radically
despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race."
He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the
bride is to commit suicide. Even the Japanese, so highly civilized in
some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening
themselves to heaven and the women to earth. There are ten stations on
the way up the sacred mount Fuji. Formerly no woman was allowed to
climb above the eighth. Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, of the
University of Tokyo, has a foot-note in his _Things Japanese_ (274) in
which he relates that in the introduction to his translation of the
_Kojiki_ he had drawn attention to the inferior place held by women in
ancient as in modern Japan. Some years afterward six of the chief
literati of the old school translated this introduction into Japanese.
They patted the author on the head for many things, but when they
reached the observation anent the subjection of women, their wrath
exploded:
"The subordination of women to men," so ran their
commentary, "is an extremely correct custom. To think
the contrary is to harbor European prejudice.... For
the man to take precedence over the woman is the grand
law of heaven and earth. To ignore this, and to talk of
the contrary as barbarous, is absurd."
The way in which these kind, gentle, and pretty women are treated by
the men, Chamberlain says on another page,
"has hitherto been such as might cause a pang to any
generous European heart.... At the present moment the
greatest duchess or marchioness in the land is still
her husband's drudge. She fetches and carries for him,
bows down humbly in the hall when my lord sallies forth
on his walks abroad, waits upon him at meals, may be
divorced at his good pleasure."
This testimony regarding a nation which in some things--especially
aesthetic culture and general courteousness--surpasses Europe and
America, is of special value, as it shows that love, based on sympathy
with women's joys and sorrows, and adoration of their peculiar
qualities, is everywhere the last flower of civilization, and not, as
the sentimentalists claim, the first. If even the advanced Japanese
are unable to feel romantic love--for you cannot adore what you
egotistically look down on--it is absurd to look for it among
barbarians and savages, such as the Fuegians, who, in times of
necessity, eat their old women, or the Australians, among whom not
many women are allowed to die a natural death, "they being generally
despatched ere they become old and emaciated, that so much good food
may not be lost."[27]
There are some apparent exceptions to the universal contempt for
females even among cannibals. Thus it is known that the Peruvian
Casibos never eat women. It is natural to jump to the conclusion that
this is due to respect for the female sex. It is, however, as Tschudi
shows, assignable to exactly the opposite feeling:
"All the South American Indians, who still remain under
the influence of sorcery and empiricism, consider women
in the light of impure and evil beings, and calculated
to injure them. Among a few of the less rude nations
this aversion is apparent in domestic life, in a
certain unconquerable contempt of females. With the
anthropophagi the feeling extends, fortunately, to
their flesh, which is held to be poisonous."
The Caribs had a different reason for making it unlawful to eat women.
"Those who were captured," says P. Martyr, "were kept for breeding, as
we keep fowl, etc," Sir Samuel Baker relates (_A.N._, 240), that among
the Latookas it was considered a disgrace to kill a woman--not,
however, because of any respect felt for the sex, but because of the
scarcity and money value of women.