WOMEN--I
'Her cheek is more beautiful than the dawn, her eyes are deeper
than the river pools; when she loosens her hair upon her shoulders,
it is as night coming over the hills.'--_Burmese Love-Song._
If you were to ask a Burman 'What is the position of women in Burma?' he
would reply that he did not know what you meant. Women have no position,
no fixed relation towards men beyond that fixed by the fact that women
are women and men are men. They differ a great deal in many ways, so a
Burman would say; men are better in some things, women are better in
others; if they have a position, their relative superiority in certain
things determines it. How else should it be determined?
If you say by religion, he laughs, and asks what religion has to do with
such things? Religion is a culture of the soul; it is not concerned with
the relationship of men and women. If you say by law, he says that law
has no more to do with it than religion. In the eye of the law both are
alike. 'You wouldn't have one law for a man and another for a woman?' he
asks.
In the life of the Buddha nothing is said upon the subject. The great
teacher never committed himself to an opinion as to whether men or women
were the highest. He had men disciples, he had women disciples; he
honoured both. Nowhere in any of his sayings can anything be found to
show that he made any difference between them. That monks should be
careful and avoid intercourse with women is merely the counterpart of
the order that nuns should be careful in their intercourse with men.
That man's greatest attraction is woman does not infer wickedness in
woman; that woman's greatest attraction is man does not show that man is
a devil. Wickedness is a thing of your own heart. If he could be sure
that his desire towards women was dead, a monk might see them as much as
he liked. The desire is the enemy, not the woman; therefore a woman is
not damned because by her man is often tempted to evil; therefore a
woman is not praised because by her a man may be led to better thoughts.
She is but the outer and unconscious influence.
If, for instance, you cannot see a precipice without wishing to throw
yourself down, you blame not the precipice, but your giddiness; and if
you are wise you avoid precipices in future. You do not rail against
steep places because you have a bad circulation. So it is with women:
you should not contemn women because they rouse a devil in man.
And it is the same with man. Men and women are alike subject to the
eternal laws. And they are alike subject to the laws of man; in no
material points, hardly even in minor points, does the law discriminate
against women.
The law as regards marriage and inheritance and divorce will come each
in its own place. It is curiously the same both for the man and the
woman.
The criminal law was the same for both; I have tried to find any
difference, and this is all I have found: A woman's life was less
valuable than a man's. The price of the body, as it is called, of a
woman was less than that of a man. If a woman were accidentally killed,
less compensation had to be paid than for a man. I asked a Burman about
this once.
'Why is this difference?' I said. 'Why does the law discriminate?'
'It isn't the law,' he said, 'it is a fact. A woman is worth less than a
man in that way. A maidservant can be hired for less than a manservant,
a daughter can claim less than a son. They cannot do so much work; they
are not so strong. If they had been worth more, the law would have been
the other way; of course they are worth less.'
And so this sole discrimination is a fact, not dogma. It is a fact, no
doubt, everywhere. No one would deny it. The pecuniary value of a woman
is less than that of a man. As to the soul's value, that is not a
question of law, which confines itself to material affairs. But I
suppose all laws have been framed out of the necessities of mankind. It
was the incessant fighting during the times when our laws grew slowly
into shape, the necessity of not allowing the possession of land, and
the armed wealth that land gave, to fall into the weaker hands of women,
that led to our laws of inheritance.
Laws then were governed by the necessity of war, of subjecting
everything else to the ability to fight. Consequently, as women were not
such good fighters as men, they went to the wall. But feudalism never
obtained at all in Burma. What fighting they did was far less severe
than that of our ancestors, was not the dominant factor in the position,
and consequently woman did not suffer.
She has thus been given the inestimable boon of freedom. Freedom from
sacerdotal dogma, from secular law, she has always had.
And so, in order to preserve the life of the people, it has never been
necessary to pass laws treating woman unfairly as regards inheritance;
and as religion has left her free to find her own position, so has the
law of the land.
And yet the Burman man has a confirmed opinion that he is better than a
woman, that men are on the whole superior as a sex to women. 'We may be
inferior in some ways,' he will tell you. 'A woman may steal a march on
us here and there, but in the long-run the man will always win. Women
have no patience.'
I have heard this said over and over again, even by women, that they
have less patience than a man. We have often supposed differently. Some
Burmans have even supposed that a woman must be reincarnated as a man to
gain a step in holiness. I do not mean that they think men are always
better than women, but that the best men are far better than the best
women, and there are many more of them. However all this may be, it is
only an opinion. Neither in their law, nor in their religion, nor--what
is far more important--in their daily life, do they acknowledge any
inferiority in women beyond those patent weaknesses of body that are,
perhaps, more differences than inferiorities.
And so she has always had fair-play, from religion, from law, and from
her fellow man and woman.
She has been bound by no ties, she has had perfect freedom to make for
herself just such a life as she thinks best fitted for her. She has had
no frozen ideals of a long dead past held up to her as eternal copies.
She has been allowed to change as her world changed, and she has lived
in a very real world--a world of stern facts, not fancies. You see, she
has had to fight her own way; for the same laws that made woman lower
than man in Europe compensated her to a certain extent by protection
and guidance. In Burma she has been neither confined nor guided. In
Europe and India for very long the idea was to make woman a hot-house
plant, to see that no rough winds struck her, that no injuries overtook
her. In Burma she has had to look out for herself: she has had freedom
to come to grief as well as to come to strength. You see, all such laws
cut both ways. Freedom to do ill must accompany freedom to do well. You
cannot have one without the other. The Burmese woman has had both.
Ideals act for good as well as for evil; if they cramp all progress,
they nevertheless tend to the sustentation of a certain level of
thought. She has had none. Whatever she is, she has made herself,
finding under the varying circumstances of life what is the best for
her; and as her surroundings change, so will she. What she was a
thousand years ago I do not care, what she may be a thousand years hence
I do not know; it is of what she is to-day that I have tried to know and
write.
Children in Burma have, I think, a very good time when they are young.
Parentage in Burma has never degenerated into a sort of slavery. It has
never been supposed that gaiety and goodness are opposed. And so they
grow up little merry naked things, sprawling in the dust of the gardens,
sleeping in the sun with their arms round the village dogs, very sedate,
very humorous, very rarely crying. Boys and girls when they are babies
grow up together, but with the schooldays comes a division. All the
boys go to school at the monastery without the walls, and there learn in
noisy fashion their arithmetic, letters, and other useful knowledge. But
little girls have nowhere to go. They cannot go to the monasteries,
these are for boys alone, and the nunneries are very scarce. For twenty
monasteries there is not one nunnery. Women do not seem to care to learn
to become nuns as men do to become monks. Why this is so I cannot tell,
but there is no doubt of the fact. And so there are no schools for girls
as there are for boys, and consequently the girls are not well educated
as a rule. In great towns there are, of course, regular schools for
girls, generally for girls and boys together; but in the villages these
very seldom exist. The girls may learn from their mothers how to read
and write, but most of them cannot do so. It is an exception in country
places to find a girl who can read, as it is to find a boy who cannot.
If there were more nunneries, there would be more education among the
women; here is cause and effect. But there are not, so the little girls
work instead. While their brothers are in the monasteries, the girls are
learning to weave and herd cattle, drawing water, and collecting
firewood. They begin very young at this work, but it is very light; they
are never overworked, and so it does them no harm usually, but good.
The daughters of better-class people, such as merchants, and clerks, and
advocates, do not, of course, work at field labour. They usually learn
to read and write at home, and they weave, and many will draw water. For
to draw water is to go to the well, and the well is the great
meeting-place of the village. As they fill their jars they lean over the
curb and talk, and it is here that is told the latest news, the latest
flirtation, the little scandal of the place. Very few men or boys come
for water; carrying is not their duty, and there is a proper place for
flirtation. So the girls have the well almost to themselves.
Almost every girl can weave. In many houses there are looms where the
girls weave their dresses and those of their parents; and many girls
have stalls in the bazaar. Of this I will speak later. Other duties are
the husking of rice and the making of cheroots. Of course, in richer
households there will be servants to do all this; but even in them the
daughter will frequently weave either for herself or her parents. Almost
every girl will do something, if only to pass the time.
You see, they have no accomplishments. They do not sing, nor play, nor
paint. It must never be forgotten that their civilization is relatively
a thousand years behind ours. Accomplishments are part of the polish
that a civilization gives, and this they have not yet reached.
Accomplishments are also the means to fill up time otherwise unoccupied;
but very few Burmese girls have any time on their hands. There is no
leisured class, and there are very few girls who have not to help, in
one way or another, at the upkeep of the household.
Mr. Rudyard Kipling tells of an astonishing young lady who played the
banjo. He has been more fortunate than myself, for I have never had such
good luck. They have no accomplishments at all. Housekeeping they have
not very much of. You see, houses are small, and households also are
small; there is very little furniture; and as the cooking is all the
same, there is not much to learn in that way. I fear, too, that their
houses could not compete as models of neatness with any other nation.
Tidiness is one of the last gifts of civilization. We now pride
ourselves on our order; we forget how very recent an accomplishment it
is. To them it will come with the other gifts of age, for it must never
be forgotten that they are a very young people--only children, big
children--learning very slowly the lessons of experience and knowledge.
When they are between eight and fourteen years of age the boys become
monks for a time, as every boy must, and they have a great festival at
their entrance into the monastery. Girls do not enter nunneries, but
they, too, have a great feast in their honour. They have their ears
bored. It is a festival for a girl of great importance, this ear-boring,
and, according to the wealth of the parents, it is accompanied by pwes
and other rejoicings.
A little girl, the daughter of a shopkeeper here in this town, had her
ears bored the other day, and there were great rejoicings. There was a
pwe open to all for three nights, and there were great quantities of
food, and sweets, and many presents given away, and on the last night
the river was illuminated. There was a boat anchored in mid-stream, and
from this were launched myriads of tiny rafts, each with a little lamp
on board. The lamps gleamed bright with golden light as they drifted on
the bosom of the great water, a moving line of living fire. There were
little boats, too, with the outlines marked with lamps, and there were
pagodas and miniature houses all floating, floating down the river,
till, in far distance by the promontory, the lamps flickered out one by
one, and the river fell asleep again.
'There is only one great festival in a girl's life,' a woman told me.
'We try to make it as good as we can. Boys have many festivals, girls
have but one. It is only just that it should be good.'
And so they grow up very quiet, very sedate, looking on the world about
them with very clear eyes. It is strange, talking to Burmese girls, to
see how much they know and understand of the world about them. It is to
them no great mystery, full of unimaginable good and evil, but a world
that they are learning to understand, and where good and evil are never
unmixed. Men are to them neither angels nor devils, but just men, and so
the world does not hold for them the disappointments, the
disillusionings, that await those who do not know. They have their
dreams--who shall doubt it?--dreams of him who shall love them, whom
they shall love, who shall make life one great glory to them; but their
dreams are dreams that can come true. They do not frame to themselves
ideals out of their own ignorance and imagine these to be good, but they
keep their eyes wide open to the far more beautiful realities that are
around them every day. They know that a living lover is greater, and
truer, and better than any ideal of a girl's dream. They live in a real
world, and they know that it is good.
In time the lover comes. There is a delightful custom all through Burma,
an institution, in fact, called 'courting-time.' It is from nine till
ten o'clock, more especially on moonlight nights, those wonderful tropic
nights, when the whole world lies in a silver dream, when the little
wandering airs that touch your cheek like a caress are heavy with the
scent of flowers, and your heart comes into your throat for the very
beauty of life.
There is in front of every house a veranda, raised perhaps three feet
from the ground, and there the girl will sit in the shadow of the eaves,
sometimes with a friend, but usually alone; and her suitors will come
and stand by the veranda, and talk softly in little broken sentences, as
lovers do. There maybe be many young men come, one by one, if they mean
business, with a friend if it be merely a visit of courtesy. And the
girl will receive them all, and will talk to them all; will laugh with a
little humorous knowledge of each man's peculiarities; and she may give
them cheroots, of her own making; and, for one perhaps, for one, she
will light the cheroot herself first, and thus kiss him by proxy.
And is the girl alone? Well, yes. To all intents and purposes she is
alone; but there is always someone near, someone within call, for the
veranda is free to all. She cannot tell who may come, and some men, as
we know, are but wolves in sheep's clothing. Usually marriages are
arranged by the parents. Girls are not very different here to elsewhere;
they are very biddable, and ready to do what their mothers tell them,
ready to believe that it is the best. And so if a lad comes wooing, and
can gain the mother's ear, he can usually win the girl's affection, too;
but I think there are more exceptions here than elsewhere. Girls are
freer; they fall in love of their own accord oftener than elsewhere;
they are very impulsive, full of passion. Love is a very serious matter,
and they are not trained in self-restraint.
There are very many romances played out every day in the dusk beside the
well, in the deep shadows of the palm-groves, in the luminous nights by
the river shore--romances that end sometimes well, sometimes in terrible
tragedies. For they are a very passionate people; the language is full
of little love-songs, songs of a man to a girl, of a girl to a man. 'No
girl,' a woman once told me, 'no good, quiet girl would tell a man she
loved him first.' It may be so; if this be true, I fear there are many
girls here who are not good and quiet. How many romances have I not seen
in which the wooing began with the girl, with a little note perhaps,
with a flower, with a message sent by someone whom she could trust! Of
course many of these turned out well. Parents are good to their
children, and if they can, they will give their daughter the husband of
her choice. They remember what youth is--nay, they themselves never grow
old, I think; they never forget what once was to them now is to their
children. So if it be possible all may yet go well. Social differences
are not so great as with us, and the barrier is easily overcome. I have
often known servants in a house marry the daughters, and be taken into
the family; but, of course, sometimes things do not go so smoothly. And
then? Well, then there is usually an elopement, and a ten days' scandal;
and sometimes, too, there is an elopement for no reason at all save that
hot youth cannot abide the necessary delay.
For life is short, and though to-day be to us, who can tell for the
morrow? During the full moon there is no night, only a change to silver
light from golden; and the forest is full of delight. There are
wood-cutters' huts in the ravines where the water falls, soft beds of
torn bracken and fragrant grasses where great trees make a shelter from
the heat; and for food, that is easily arranged. A basket of rice with
a little salt-fish and spices is easily hidden in a favourable place.
You only want a jar to cook it, and there is enough for two for a week;
or it is brought day by day by some trusted friend to a place previously
agreed upon.
All up and down the forest there are flowers for her hair, scarlet dak
blossoms and orchid sprays and jasmine stars; and for occupation through
the hours each has a new world to explore full of wonderful undreamt-of
discoveries, lit with new light and mysterious with roseate shadows, a
world of 'beautiful things made new' for those forest children. So that
when the confidante, an aunt maybe or a sister, meets them by the sacred
fig-tree on the hill, and tells them that all difficulties are removed,
and their friends called together for the marriage, can you wonder that
it is not without regret that they fare forth from that enchanted land
to ordinary life again?
It is, as I have said, not always the man who is the proposer of the
flight. Nay, I think indeed that it is usually the girl. 'Men have more
patience.'
I had a Burmese servant, a boy, who may have been twenty, and he had
been with me a year, and was beginning to be really useful. He had at
last grasped the idea that electro-plate should not be cleaned with
monkey-brand soap, and he could be trusted not to put up rifle
cartridges for use with a double-barrelled gun; and he chose this time
to fall in love with the daughter of the headman of a certain village
where I was in camp.
He had good excuse, for she was a delicious little maiden with great
coils of hair, and the voice of a wood-pigeon cooing in the forest, and
she was very fond of him, without a doubt.
So one evening he came to me and said that he must leave me--that he
wanted to get married, and could not possibly delay. Then I spoke to him
with all that depth of wisdom we are so ready to display for the benefit
of others. I pointed out to him that he was much too young, that she was
much too young also--she was not eighteen--and that there was absolutely
nothing for them to marry on. I further pointed out how ungrateful it
would be of him to leave me; that he had been paid regularly for a year,
and that it was not right that now, when he was at last able to do
something besides destroy my property, he should go away.
The boy listened to all I had to say, and agreed with it all, and made
the most fervent and sincere promise to be wise; and he went away after
dinner to see the girl and tell her, and when I awoke in the morning my
other servants told me the boy had not returned.
Shortly afterwards the headman came to say that his daughter had also
disappeared. They had fled, those two, into the forest, and for a week
we heard nothing. At last one evening, as I sat under the great fig-tree
by my tent, there came to me the mother of the girl, and she sat down
before me, and said she had something of great importance to impart: and
this was that all had been arranged between the families, who had found
work for the boy whereby he might maintain himself and his wife, and the
marriage was arranged. But the boy would not return as long as I was in
camp there, for he was bitterly ashamed of his broken vows and afraid to
meet my anger. And so the mother begged me to go away as soon as I
could, that the young couple might return. I explained that I was not
angry at all, that the boy could return without any fear; on the
contrary, that I should be pleased to see him and his wife. And, at the
old lady's request, I wrote a Burmese letter to that effect, and she
went away delighted.
They must have been in hiding close by, for it was early next morning
that the boy came into my tent alone and very much abashed, and it was
some little time before he could recover himself and talk freely as he
would before, for he was greatly ashamed of himself.
But, after all, could he help it?
If you can imagine the tropic night, and the boy, full of high resolve,
passing up the village street, now half asleep, and the girl, with
shining eyes, coming to him out of the hibiscus shadows, and whispering
in his ear words--words that I need not say--if you imagine all that,
you will understand how it was that I lost my servant.
They both came to see me later on in the day after the marriage, and
there was no bashfulness about either of them then. They came
hand-in-hand, with the girl's father and mother and some friends, and
she told me it was all her fault: she could not wait.
'Perhaps,' she said, with a little laugh and a side-glance at her
husband--'perhaps, if he had gone with the thakin to Rangoon, he might
have fallen in love with someone there and forgotten me; for I know they
are very pretty, those Rangoon ladies, and of better manners than I, who
am but a jungle girl.'
And when I asked her what it was like in the forest, she said it was the
most beautiful place in all the world.
Things do not always go so well. Parents may be obdurate, and flight be
impossible; or even her love may not be returned, and then terrible
things happen. I have held, not once nor twice alone, inquests over the
bodies, the fair, innocent bodies, of quite young girls who died for
love. Only that, because their love was unreturned; and so the sore
little heart turned in her trouble to the great river, and gave herself
and her hot despair to the cold forgetfulness of its waters.
They love so greatly that they cannot face a world where love is not.
All the country is full of the romance of love--of love passionate and
great as woman has ever felt. It seems to me here that woman has
something of the passions of man, not only the enduring affection of a
woman, but the hot love and daring of a man. It is part of their
heritage, perhaps, as a people in their youth. One sees so much of it,
hears so much of it, here. I have seen a girl in man's attire killed in
a surprise attack upon an insurgent camp. She had followed her outlawed
lover there, and in the melee she caught up sword and gun to fight by
his side, and was cut down through neck and shoulder; for no one could
tell in the early dawn that it was a girl.
She died about an hour afterwards, and though I have seen many sorrowful
things in many lands, in war and out of it, the memory of that dying
girl, held up by one of the mounted police, sobbing out her life beneath
the wild forest shadow, with no one of her sex, no one of her kin to
help her, comes back to me as one of the saddest and strangest.
Her lover was killed in action some time later fighting against us, and
he died as a brave man should, his face to his enemy. He played his
game, he lost, and paid; but the girl?
I have seen and heard so much of this love of women and of its
tragedies. Perhaps it is that to us it is usually the tragedies that are
best remembered. Happiness is void of interest. And this love may be,
after all, a good thing. But I do not know. Sometimes I think they would
be happier if they could love less, if they could take love more
quietly, more as a matter of course, as something that has to be gone
through, as part of a life's training; not as a thing that swallows up
all life and death and eternity in one passion.
In Burmese the love-songs are in a short, sweet rhythm, full of quaint
conceits and word-music. I cannot put them into English verse, or give
the flow of the originals in a translation. It always seems to me that
Don Quixote was right when he said that a translation was like the wrong
side of an embroidered cloth, giving the design without the beauty. But
even in the plain, rough outline of a translation there is beauty here,
I think:
_From a Man to a Girl._
The moon wooed the lotus in the night, the lotus was wooed by the moon,
and my sweetheart is their child. The blossom opened in the night, and
she came forth; the petals moved, and she was born.
She is more beautiful than any blossom; her face is as delicate as the
dusk; her hair is as night falling over the hills; her skin is as bright
as the diamond. She is very full of health, no sickness can come near
her.
When the wind blows I am afraid, when the breezes move I fear. I fear
lest the south wind take her, I tremble lest the breath of evening woo
her from me--so light is she, so graceful.
Her dress is of gold, even of silk and gold, and her bracelets are of
fine gold. She hath precious stones in her ears, but her eyes, what
jewels can compare unto them?
She is proud, my mistress; she is very proud, and all men are afraid of
her. She is so beautiful and so proud that all men fear her.
In the whole world there is none anywhere that can compare unto her.