KOREAN WOMEN.
It has been very often said that the position of woman is more
deplorable in Korea than in any other civilized or semi-civilized
country. And I have comparatively little to urge against the statement.
Certainly woman’s life seems narrower in Korea than in either China or
Japan, or in Burmah, or Siam, or in India. Socially and politically, in
Korea, woman simply does not exist. She has not even a name. After
marriage she is called by her husband’s name with the prefix of Mrs.
Before marriage she has not even this pretence to a name. There is one
exception, and, I think, one only to this rule. The geisha girls have
names of their own, but then the geisha girls have individuality; live
lives, if not moral, why still, not colourless, and mix with men, if not
on an equality, at least with a good deal of familiarity; and it would
be rather awkward if the men who are dependent upon them for female
society in anything approaching a Western sense, had no name by which to
call them. The “Fragrant Iris” was the name of a geisha girl whose
acquaintance Mr. Lowell tells us he made in Korea, and four of her
companions were called “Peach Blossom,” “Plum Flower,” “Rose,” and
“Moonbeam.”
Korean girls, long before they reach a marriageable age, live in the
seclusion of the women’s quarters. After her betrothal a girl belongs
not to her father but to her mother-in-law. Upon marriage she becomes
the property of her husband, and is, in most cases, immediately taken to
his dwelling. As in China, married sons live with their fathers.
Sometimes three or four generations of one family occupy one home. But,
unlike Chinese wives, each Korean wife has a room or rooms of her own.
The only man who (in most families) ever enters them is her husband.
Unlike the wives of China, she may not, as a rule, be visited by her
husband’s father, her husband’s brother, or her husband’s grandfather.
But should his father or his grandfather fall ill, it is not only her
privilege, but her duty, to leave the women’s quarters, and, going to
his bedside, nurse him until he dies or recovers.
There are one or two advantages in being a woman in Korea. There are
very few crimes for which a Korean woman can be punished. Her husband is
answerable for her conduct, and must suffer in her stead if she breaks
any ordinary law.
Korean women are not uneducated, though they never go to schools; and
books and materials for writing and painting are freely at their
disposal.
The dress of Korean women is very much more like the dress of European
women than is that of the women of almost any other Oriental race. They
wear petticoats made very much in Western fashion, but stiffly starched
into crinoline-like ungracefulness. The women of the poorer classes wear
these skirts above their ankles. The women of wealth or of rank wear
skirts touching the ground. They wear a jacket or belt shaped very much
like, and answering the purpose of, a corset, and a shorter jacket which
is at best but an inadequate neckerchief. And under their petticoat they
wear three pairs of wide trousers. Except among the very poorest class,
respectable Korean women muffle themselves in a garment like a dress or
great-coat whenever they go abroad. Boys and girls are dressed alike
until they are five years old.
Among the poor all the household work is done by women, but among the
rich the women have no domestic duties except those of nursing and
sewing. All the garments of a Korean family are made by the women of the
family. The purchase of a ready-made garment, or to hire it made, would
be considered a disgrace to the family, and a deeper disgrace to its
women. Korean ladies sew as exquisitely as French nuns, and embroider as
deftly as those Japanese men whose profession embroidery is.
Korean girls are usually married between the ages of seventeen and
twenty-two; and if married to a bachelor, he is almost invariably three
or five, and often even eight, years their junior. But when a widower
marries, or a man takes a second, or third, or fourth wife, he
invariably selects a woman younger than himself.
Among the mandarin classes polygamy is a duty, and every mandarin is
expected to keep at least several concubines or second-class wives in
his yamun.
In Söul, and in one other large city, children are commonly betrothed
when the boy is seven or eight, but it is not so in the other parts of
Korea. Korean widows must remain unmarried, or marry men who are the
social inferiors of their dead husbands. And in Korea, as in China, a
widow who re-marries is disgraced, and becomes more or less of a social
outcast.
The customs preliminary to marriage are in Korea very like those same
customs in China and in Japan. The father of a marriageable daughter or
a marriageable son looks about for a suitable _parti_. If a husband is
desired, then the girl’s father usually interviews a number of eligible
youths, widowers, or married men until he finds what he wants. Then a
middle-man is sent to discover whether an offer of marriage would be
favourably received, and on what terms. If the bridegroom selected is
unmarried he has, unless he is an orphan and the head of his family, no
voice whatever in the matter, the only people really consulted being the
respective fathers. If a father is on the look-out for a
daughter-in-law, he sends his wife to interview and report upon the girl
whom he has been told is suitable in age, dower, etc. Now comes in
another of the few advantages of being a woman in Korea. She has very
largely the selection of her own daughters-in-law, and if the
daughter-in-law proves unsatisfactory she has only herself to blame.
When the middle-man has ascertained that the proposal of marriage will
be acceptable, the father who has negotiated the proceedings writes an
elaborate letter to the other father, and makes a formal proposal for
the hand of his son or daughter. But this letter is not binding upon the
writer until he receives one in return accepting the proposal.
After that there is no drawing back, and should the betrothed man die
before the marriage day the girl is regarded as a widow, and must remain
unmarried all her life, or else marry an inferior and with disgrace. The
man, on the other hand—should she die—is entirely free to marry, and
at once.
When a lucky day has been selected for the wedding, the bridegroom sends
to the bride presents in the Japanese fashion. Female clothing, bits of
stuff, and sweets are the most important items among these presents.
When they have been sent and received, the marriage ceremony has been
half performed. Then the bridegroom is allowed to knot up his hair in
manly fashion, but not until the day of marriage is he allowed to assume
the garb of a man—be dressed as a man. A Korean bachelor of seventy is
regarded as a child, treated as a child, and dressed as a child.
A prospective bridegroom pays visits of respect not to the relations of
his bride, but to the kinsfolk of his own father. The kinsfolk of his
mother do not count; indeed, a Korean wife is supposed to have no
kindred but the kindred of her husband. The bridegroom’s father gives a
great feast upon the night of the day on which the presents are sent.
The feast lasts all night, and the quantity of food eaten, and the
quantity of wine drunk, would sound almost incredible to European ears.
Korea is the country of bachelors. There are two reasons for this. The
majority of the people are very poor and cannot afford the expense of
daughters-in-law. Then, too, polygamy is so extensively practised among
the rich that the supply of girls in the marriage market is never equal
to the demand, and the average Korean would far rather see his daughter
become the second, or the seventh, or the eighth wife, or concubine of a
rich or powerful man, than the one wife of a labourer or low-class man.
Marriage usually takes place three days after the presents are sent.
These three days are very busy ones to the Korean bride, for out of one
of the pieces of stuff sent her by the bridegroom, she must herself, and
without assistance, fashion the elaborate robe which he assumes on the
marriage night, and which is his first garment made after adult fashion.
Thus the three days before marriage are spent by a Korean girl in
performing her first duty as a wife. And the sending of the garment
signifies that she, with the assistance of whatever wives he may
afterwards marry, will, so long as they both live, make all the clothing
required by him, his children, and his women.
When the marriage day arrives the lucky hour is chosen, and the
bridegroom departs for the house of the bride. The bridegroom’s
procession is as long and as splendid as his purse, or the purse of his
father, can possibly permit. Everyone in that procession rides on
horseback, and in single file. First comes a servant-man on a horse
richly caparisoned; this servant carries a life-sized image of a wild
goose. It is covered by a red scarf, and the servant must hold it with
both hands—a circumstance which makes his horseback riding interesting,
if not perilous. After him comes the bridegroom, splendidly arrayed, and
followed by a groom and all his other servants. After them rides the
bridegroom’s father, and he, too, is followed by all the servants he
possesses or has been able to borrow. Relatives and friends in great
quantity of persons and great quality of garments bring up the splendid
rear.
In a marriage procession, or at a marriage, the poorest and lowliest man
in Korea is allowed to wear robes and hats as rich as those ordinarily
worn by the highest dignitary in the land, if he can manage to get them,
and of the same distinctive style and shape.
When the girl’s house is reached, the servant who has carried the goose
dismounts, the others remain on horseback. He goes into the house and
lays the goose upon a bowl of rice that is standing in a convenient
place. Then, without speaking, he leaves the house. The bridegroom’s
father dismounts next, then the bridegroom, then all the others. Before
entering the house they take off their boots and their hats, and their
outer robes. The bride’s father now comes out of his house, bids them
welcome, and leads them in. He is immediately followed by the
bridegroom, and then by the bridegroom’s father and the others. They all
sit solemnly down, and then ensues a scene not to be beaten for noise,
no, not even in all Asia, which, I assure you, is saying a good deal.
The bridegroom has been accompanied, as far as practicable, by all the
youths or men who are, or were, his fellow-students, or who belonged to
the same literary degree as himself. These seize upon him with
shrieking, and laughter, and singing, carrying him off to some distant
part of the house or compound, and refuse, under any circumstances, to
give him up, or to allow the marriage to proceed. The girl’s father,
after some time, offers them a present of money to depart, and leave the
chief actor in the proposed function free to play his part. After a good
deal of haggling, and when the bribe has reached as high a point as the
rollickers think it probably will, they accept the money and depart with
it, to spend it in a day and a night of roystering and banqueting.
A feast elaborate, and to European notions tedious, is then offered to
the bridegroom, his father and their attendants. After the feast the
bridegroom’s father and all the servants depart. The bride’s father
leads the bridegroom to the room in which the ancestral tablets of the
family are enshrined; for ancestral worship is as universal and as
sincere in Korea as in China. Before these tablets the prospective
husband must pay homage long and earnest.
Late in the evening the bridegroom is taken into the room of the bride,
whom he has not as yet seen. The room is empty, and he is immediately
left there alone; but the room is fragrant with iris, or sweet with
great bowls and branches of cherry-blossom, and splendid with wisteria
or magnificent bunches of the Korean peony. Two great bowls are there
heaped with rice, and in the centre of each bowl stands a brilliantly
yellow candlestick, holding a taper that is perfumed and lit. After a
time, the bride comes into the room, led by her mother, and surrounded
by all her kinswomen. No one speaks; the mother and the relatives go
out, as soon as they have fairly come in. The door is closed, and the
bride lifts her veil. On the following day, the young wife divides into
two the hair which hitherto hung down her back in one long plait. She
twists one part of it on to the left side of her head, and one on to the
right, and so she wears her hair for the rest of her life, taking it
down only to dress it or have it dressed, or to dishevel it about her
shoulders as a sign of mourning, on the death of her husband, or one of
his relatives. On the third day after the marriage the young couple
repair to the house of the bridegroom or the bridegroom’s father. They
may, however, elect to remain a little longer in the home of the bride’s
people, but unless they leave on the third day they are compelled to
remain where they are for an entire year.
Thirty years before Christ it was customary for a bridegroom to dwell
under the roof of his father-in-law until the first son had been born,
and attained to years of manhood. This is still the custom in some parts
of Korea, and among some Korean families. Whether the husband and wife
go to the home of his family three days, one year, or many years after
marriage, they must, upon entering the door, at once go to the tablets
of his ancestors, bend before them innumerable times, and repeat to them
innumerable prayers and benedictions.
Korean marriage certificates are rather quaint. They are on red paper,
of course, for red is the colour of happiness, and is used throughout
China and Korea for the records of births, marriages, for calling cards,
and all such things. These marriage certificates are inscribed with the
usual Chinese characters, but what makes them peculiarly interesting is
the fact that during the marriage ceremony they are equally divided, one
half is given to the husband, and one to the wife. It is the only
instance I know of a country in which it is thought necessary to provide
the bridegroom with a certificate of the marriage. But in Korea marriage
is even of more importance to men than to women. Marriage makes all the
difference possible in the life of a Korean man—it does not alter so
very much the life of a Korean woman. He passes from boyhood to manhood
in the twinkling of an eye; he takes precedence of all bachelors
whatever their age; can insult them or jostle them in the streets with
perfect impunity. Marriage alters the daily life of the woman very
little. It opens to her all the possibilities of maternity, and secures
her the occasional society of her husband, and, as I have said, it puts
up her hair. But I can think of no other material way in which it
affects her. She passes from one Korean house to another Korean house,
and the two are probably identical in their interior arrangements,
furnishings, and decorations, at least, so far as the women’s premises
are concerned. She eats the same food that she ate with her own mother
and sisters. She reads the same books, does the same needlework. If her
husband be poor, she performs the same drudgery. She hears the same
talk, thinks the same thoughts, and has, or lacks, the same amusements
that she has all her life. To be sure she sees about her the faces of,
for a time, strange women, but their lives and their minds are so
similar to those of the women she has always lived with, that their
companionship cannot possibly make any violent difference in her or in
her existence.
There is one very important reason why his half of the marriage
certificate should be, and is, zealously preserved by the husband:
without it he cannot procure another wife should his first die, or be
divorced, or prove inadequate. Her half of the brilliant paper is no
such talisman to the wife. Divorced, she can never re-marry; widowed,
she can only re-wed with degradation.
The marriage ceremony differs somewhat in different parts of Korea,
among different classes of people, and among different families. Often
the noisy students take no part in the function, and the bride is
present at the marriage feast. The bride in this case remains veiled,
eats nothing and says nothing, until the repast is over. Indeed, in many
parts of Korea the bride must not speak during her wedding day. At the
end of the feast the bride and groom bow to each other three times, and
then the bride throws back her veil, and they are man and wife.
In an antique paper or essay on the moral and domestic condition of
Korea, a paper written by one of the old French missionaries who
penetrated into Korea long before European commerce, or European
politics, had dared to do so, or at least, succeeded in doing so, I
found a description of a wedding ceremony differing somewhat from either
of the above. And yet so the marriage ceremony often is even to-day in
parts of Korea. The translation is very free:—
‘On the nuptial day both bride and groom cease to wear their hair as
children wear it. Her hair is arranged by some maiden of her
kindred—his arranged by some bachelor of his blood. These two amateur
hair-dressers are called “hands of honour,” and after the bride and
groom, and their respective fathers, are the most important personages
at a Korean marriage.
‘The bridegroom, accompanied by all his male relatives and all his male
friends, on the morning of the marriage day, goes to the bride’s house.
There she is given to him, and he carries her off to his house, or to
the house of his father. In the best room of that house a platform or
marriage altar has been arranged. It is very rich with embroidered
cloths, carved pieces, vessels of metal, jewelled ornaments, and as many
of the wonderful Korean flowers as are in season. Platters of rice and
fruits, and of sweetmeats and nuts, are usually there too, and
incense-sticks; and candles must by no means be absent. The bride and
the bridegroom step up on to the platform from opposite sides; both are
elaborately dressed, perfumed, and be-jewelled, and the bride is heavily
painted. She wears a veil and innumerable odd ornaments at her throat,
about her neck, at her girdle, on her breast, and on her back. The
bridegroom wears a marriage hat, for in this strange peninsula, not only
every rank, and every age, and every season, but almost every event
calls for a hat of special shape and material. The couple bow to each
other profoundly a number of times, and then leave the platform—she
going to the home of her new seclusion, the women’s quarters of her
husband’s house, and he going to his own rooms or to those of his
father. All the women present follow her; all the men follow him. For a
week or longer, if the father of the groom or the groom be a man of
wealth, a great feast is held both in the women’s quarters and in the
reception rooms of the men. Often the guests remain throughout this
period, or if they go home occasionally to sleep, they are sure to
return in a very few hours for more to eat, and more to drink. During
the ceremony, and during the week of rejoicing, the bridesmaids are busy
filling “the cup of mutual joy” with nuptial wine. From this cup the
bride and the bridegroom drink together during the ceremony, but
afterwards it is sent from the apartments of the one to the apartments
of the other, and _vice versâ_. At the marriage feast there must be a
goose, a dried pheasant, emblems of braided or twisted straw, arrack,
and gourds, and other fruits tied with tinselled and crimson ribbons:
for these are the Korean symbols of marital felicity.’
Often the girl of eight who is betrothed to a boy of five, or a girl of
twelve who is betrothed to a boy of eight, goes at once to her
father-in-law’s house, and is then and there lost to her own family. So
entirely does a Korean woman become a member of her husband’s family,
that after marriage she wears mourning for him and his relatives only,
and gives no sign of grief at the death of her own relatives, should she
chance to be informed of it. During the period of betrothal the bride
and bridegroom must each mourn for the death of any of their kindred,
and the marriage cannot take place while either of the parties are in
mourning. Korean mourning is as long, or longer than Chinese mourning.
Parents are mourned for three years or more, and other relatives for
shorter, but not short periods. It will be readily seen that a goodly
number of deaths in both families delay a marriage far beyond the limits
of all human patience, save that which characterizes the Far East. It is
not unusual for a marriage to be delayed for ten years in such a way,
and betrothed couples have been kept waiting thirty, and even
thirty-five years, before one or the other, or both of them, could lay
aside the robes of mourning for the brilliant vestments of marriage.
This is the reason, I believe the chief reason, why for hundreds of
years the population of Korea has not increased. Other reasons are the
fearful infant mortality, and the horrible and periodical recurrence of
epidemics.
Next to being a woman, perhaps the most unfortunate thing that can
happen to anyone in Korea is to be poor. But if there are several
advantages in being a woman even there, there is, at least, one in being
poor. Among the poor it is often the custom for the bride and bridegroom
to meet a month or more before the marriage, and if either of them is
dissatisfied they cannot be forced to fulfil the engagement.
Korean wives have one rather desirable prerogative—a prerogative which
the wives of China do not share with them, nor I fancy, do the wives of
Japan. A Korean man cannot house his concubines or second-class wives
under the roof that shelters his true or first wife, without her
permission. Strangely enough, the first wife very rarely objects to
living in rather close companionship with the other women of her
husband’s household. Perhaps the longing for human companionship is
stronger than jealousy in woman’s breast. And perhaps it is because the
companionship of men is forbidden her, that a Korean wife comes to not
only tolerate, but to enjoy the companionship of the women who share
with her, her husband’s affection, attention, and support.
Korean women have not always lived in the strict seclusion in which they
live now. Some of the older historians, Chinese and others, describe the
appearance of the women and their manners without any hint that seeing
them and knowing of them was anything unusual. And Hamel boasts that his
blonde beard and that of his fellows, and their blue eyes, found great
favour with the women of Quelpaert. In the days of Hamel, as now, the
inhabitants of Quelpaert were purely Korean. Almost ever since Korea
obtained Quelpaert from Japan, the island has been used as a sort of
penal settlement; a place of confinement for foreigners who are
unfortunate or unwise enough to land upon the shores of the peninsula,
and for grave Korean miscreants who escape the death penalty. But it has
also had always a goodly number of inhabitants, of the freemen and the
official classes, and all of these, as well as the great bulk of
prisoners, have been unmixedly Korean. And the freedom and publicity
enjoyed by the women of the island, in Hamel’s time, was doubtless also
enjoyed by the women of the peninsula. On the other hand, Hamel may have
written only of the women of the labouring class. But even so his
testimony—and when has Hamel been proved untruthful?—proves that
during the last two hundred years times have greatly changed for Korean
women. To-day no Korean woman, however lowly, would look up at a strange
man long enough to like him; much less “look to like, if looking liking
move.”
In every Korean house of any pretension the women’s apartments are in
the most secluded part of the building. They open on to a garden, and
never on to a street. The compound is walled, and no two families ever
live upon the same compound. And no Korean may go upon the roof of his
own house without legal permission, and without giving due notice to all
his neighbours. The roof may leak, and the roof may crack in the middle,
but before the owner of the house or any mechanic in his employ may go
up to see what the matter is, and to remedy it, the occupiers of every
house, the garden of which can be seen from his roof, must be notified,
and ample time given for the ladies of those various establishments to
leave the gardens. So a Korean woman is as hidden from the world, in her
husband’s garden or summer-house, as is a nun in her cell.
The wives and daughters of well-to-do Koreans spend a great deal of time
in their gardens, sharing naturally enough the intense love of their
menkind for nature, and probably finding their peculiar lives more
endurable among the trees and the birds and the lotus ponds, than they
do in their queer little rooms, through the paper windows of which they
cannot look unless they poke a hole with their fingers first—rooms in
which there is little space and less furniture.
After the curfew rings it is illegal for a Korean man to leave his own
house, unless under circumstances which I have stated in a previous
chapter; then it becomes legal for Korean women to slip out and take the
air and gossip freely. But both the law and the privilege have fallen
somewhat into abeyance, especially in Söul. There are now so many
foreigners in Söul, members of legations, and servants connected with
legations, that it has been found impossible to keep the streets of Söul
free from men after curfew, and so the women of Söul have very greatly
lost that which was, a few years ago, one of their few, and one of their
most dearly prized privileges.
If the _dramatis personæ_ in Korean society are all men, not so the
_dramatis personæ_ in Korea’s history. As in China, and as in Japan,
important parts have been played by women in the great historical drama
of Korea—a drama that began centuries and centuries ago, and that is
not ended yet, or only now ending. Korea has had many remarkable women
who have left their as yet indelible stamp upon the customs and the laws
of their country, and upon the thought of their countrymen. Korea has
had at least three great queens. Korea has had her Boadicea. The present
King of Korea owes his kingship, in large part at least, to his
great-grandmother, Dowager Queen Cho, who adopted him, and in 1864 was
largely instrumental in securing for him the throne to which the royal
consul had elected him.
The most powerful women of whom we can read in the history of India,
from the time of the Rock Temples to the time of the Indian Mutiny, were
purdah-women; and the woman who has perhaps had more influence and more
power over her own husband than ever other woman had over other
husband—the woman who was perhaps at her death the most sincerely
mourned, and the woman who was entombed as no other woman has ever yet
been entombed, and probably as no other woman will ever be entombed—the
beautiful Arjamand Banu—lived in the strictest purdah. And until the
breaking out of the Chino-Japanese war, the most powerful person in
Korea was, and for twenty years had been, a woman, the king’s wife.
Queen Min, for even she has no name, and is known only by the name of
the race from which she has sprung, comes of one of the two great
intellectual families of Korea; and the great family of Min has produced
no cleverer woman or man than the wife of Li-Hsi.
A very large proportion of the literature at our disposal, which treats
in any dignified way of Korea, has been written by missionaries. This is
inevitably so of any Asiatic country whose first Western invaders have
been soldiers of the Cross. Fortunately for the interested student of
Korea, the missionaries who have gone to Korea seem almost from the
first to have been mentally, socially, and in culture, equipped above
the missionary average in other parts of heathendom. Whether they have
had a corresponding moral superiority it would be interesting to know,
but I am the last person in the world competent to judge the moral
status of a missionary. This of the European missionaries in Korea—from
the Jesuit fathers old France sent there to the Presbyterian brethren
recently sent from the United States—a surprising number of them had
the gift not of writing (for scribbling seems to come as naturally to
the average missionary as to the average nineteenth-century woman), but
of writing well, and with great discretion. If we would learn the
history of Korea, we must learn it very largely from the writings of
European missionaries, unless, indeed, we are able to read Chinese, and
have access to the fuller, more ably written, and probably more
authentic histories of Korea, written by Chinese _littérateurs_. It is a
matter of course that the Chinese, who are akin to the Koreans, and who
may almost be said to have brought them up, should make fewer blunders
in writing of Chosön than men of utterly dissimilar race and thought
habits. Then, too, the writing of the Chinese histories of Korea has
been largely contemporaneous with the enactment of that history. And no
man can write with entire breadth of a people to whose religion he is
bitterly antagonistic.
One blunder is conspicuous in most of the valuable books written by
Europeans—written on Korea. They state almost to a volume that the
women are uneducated and never pretty.
Educated after European methods they certainly are not. But why should
they be? And that they are not—does that prove that they are not
educated at all? There are more systems of education than one.
Let us take the poor women of Söul, and compare them with the poor women
of Liverpool or of London, and with the women of many tongues, who flock
into New York through the portals of Castle Garden. The Korean women can
read and write, the large majority of them. They cook well, cleanly, and
economically. Out of a few simple ingredients (which her Western sister
would scorn), and with a few simple implements (that that sister would
not understand)—often almost without implements and with little
fire—fire that must be coaxed and humoured, and humoured and coaxed,
the poorest Korean woman will prepare a meal which no hungry European,
prince or peasant, need scorn to eat. It will be savoury, wholesome,
clean to daintiness, and pleasantly served. They can sew, make all that
they, their husbands, and their children wear, can these poor, ignorant,
heathen women. They are expert washerwomen. Most of them can make
pictures with sharp sticks, or with brush, and almost all of them are
more or less skilled in midwifery, in the care of the sick, in sick-room
cookery, and in the care of children. They know how to keep their
tempers, hold their tongues, control their appetites, to make much of
little, and to enjoy to the full and with thanksgiving any small
pleasure that falls to their scantily pleasured lot. Now let us turn to
the Seven Dials, or to the Five Points—No, on second thought let us
not!
As for Korean gentlewomen, they are skilled in Korean music, in Chinese
and Korean literature. They are unsurpassed mistresses of the needle,
more than able with the brush, and thoroughly acquainted with every
detail of the complicated Korean etiquette. They are deft in the nice
ceremonies of the toilet. They know the histories of Korea, of China,
and perhaps of Japan. They are familiar with their own folk-lore, and
can repeat it glibly and picturesquely. They are nurses and mothers and
wives by nature, and wives, mothers, nurses, and accoucheuses by
training. Above all, they are taught (and they learn) to be amiable.
They are instructed in the art of charming, and in the grace of being
gentle, as soon as they are taught to walk. I have known advanced women
in Europe who could scarcely boast of being more highly educated. And
the happiest women I have known have not always been the most learned. I
think that we are apt to underrate the education of women in the East
because it differs so essentially from ours: but then so do their
physique and the country in which they live; its flora, its climate, and
its sociology. A Korean once told me (he was a kinsman of Queen Min, a
traveller, a linguist, and a man of—cosmopolitanly speaking—most
considerable attainments) that his wife was more widely and more
thoroughly versed in Chinese literature, modern and classic, than he.
And Chinese literature is indisputably the greatest literature that Asia
has ever produced.
The Queen of Korea is, with the possible exception of the Dowager
Empress of China, as well educated as any royal lady in Asia.
As to the national lack of beauty among the women of Korea—why, it is
neither more nor less than nonsense, ignorant, and rather stupid
nonsense. I know no race in which the women who earn their individual
slice, and a goodly share of the family loaf, in the sweat of their
brows retain their beauty long. The women seen on the streets of Söul
and in the fields, and on the mountain slopes of Korea, belong—if I may
for the sake of emphasis repeat myself—belong to the hardest-worked,
the most weather-beaten, burden-bent, and ill-fed class in Korea. Their
personal appearance is no indication of the real type of Korean
womanhood. They are painted by the sun and the wind, disfigured with
trouble and back-ache, and their once pretty faces have been profaned by
many tears, and they are hideous. But the women of the Korean leisure
class are, as a rule (a rule with only just enough exceptions to prove
it), undeniably pretty—pretty with a prettiness that is closely akin to
the prettiness of the women of Japan and Burmah. The Queen of Korea is
quaintly pretty, and among the three hundred women who are, nominally at
least, the concubines of the king, and among the very many female
attendants of their two Majesties, there is scarcely a plain face. Of
course many Europeans who have been resident in Korea, and have written
of their residence, have not had access to the court, much less to the
Queen and her ladies. But surely any wide-eyed man who has spent some
time in Korea has seen and seen again the geisha girls. Who that has
lived in Korea denies their beauty? And would it not occur to an
observer of somewhat less than abnormal reasoning power that since the
only female members he had ever seen of the Korean leisure class were
beautiful, that it was fairly presumable that the Korean women who
worked even less, and lived in greater luxury, and under more healthy
conditions, were at least as beautiful?
Korean women (those of them who have not been scarred by over-toil, nor
deformed by privation) have remarkably small, and remarkably pretty
hands and feet, and of nothing are they prouder than of their dimpled
fingers, and their shapely, delicate feet, But the feet of a Korean
woman are small by nature, never by art. They have lovely eyes—these
women—musical voices, and are graceful of motion.
The Queen is pale and delicate-looking. She has a remarkable forehead,
low but strong, and a mouth charming in its colouring, in its outlines,
in its femininity, in the pearls it discloses, and sweet with the music
that slips through it when she speaks. She dresses plainly as a rule,
and in dark but rich materials. In this she resembles the high-born
matrons of Japan. And in cut her garments are more Japanese than those
of other Korean women: she wears her hair parted in the middle, and
drawn softly into a simple knot or coil of braid. She wears diamonds
most often; not many, but of much price. They are her favourite gems. In
this one particular she is almost alone among the women of the East; for
pearls are the beloved jewels of almost every woman and girl-child that
is born in the Orient.
Queen Min has been as assiduous as she has been powerful in advancing
the interests of her family—the family of her birth I mean, for her
marriage—unlike the marriages of other Korean women—has no whit
divorced her from the people of her blood. All the desirable offices in
Korea were held for years by her kinsmen.
Queen Min has not only been the power behind the Korean throne, but she
has been, even more than the King, the all-seeing eye of Korea. Her
spies have been everywhere, seen everything, reported everything.
Two things that are true of the Queen are peculiarly significant of the
grip that Oriental customs have upon the most autocratic of Oriental
minds. She—the most powerful Korean in Korea—is content to be
nameless; a sovereign with almost unlimited power, but without a nominal
individuality; and to be called merely by the family name of her
forefathers, and to be designated only as the daughter of her fathers,
the wife of her husband, and the mother of her son.
It strikes an Occidental as even more strange that a woman so supremely
powerful with her husband and king should be so graciously tolerant of
the women of his harem. She not only tolerates them, she seems to like
them, to take pride in them, and she is on the friendliest terms with
Li-Hsi’s eldest son, who is also the son of a concubine. True her own
son is the crown prince, but it is probable that his elder brother and
not he will be Korea’s next king, if the present dynasty be destined to
have another king. Li Hsia—Queen Min’s son—is not the imbecile he has
been reported, but he has not the greatest mental strength, and less
strength of body.
Queen Min is admirable and affable in her home circle. She is a woman of
no great physical strength. But she has considerable courage, moral and
physical, and both have been well tried.
Queen Min has always advocated the opening of Korea to foreigners, and
the establishing of relations with foreign Powers. Whether this shows
her wisdom or her folly it is too soon to say: but it certainly proves
her—woman of the Far East that she is—to have a mind of her own, even
though she lacks a personal name.
No one man or woman who wishes to have a part in the solving of the
great and complicated woman-question should fail to make an, as far as
possible, exhaustive study of the women of Asia. The women of the East
differ from the women of the West, chiefly in being more secluded from
public places, public duties, and public influence; in being more
confined to, and more absorbed in their own firesides; in being less on
a nominal equality with man, and in being more definitely, if less
happily and less highly placed in the State and in the family. They
differ from the women of the West in the manner of their education, and
in the aims of their education.
Before we consider whether these differences are to the advantage or
disadvantage of Eastern women, it is only fair that we (we Western women
who are interested in working out, not only our own salvation, but the
salvation of mankind) should consider very carefully how the position of
woman in the East has affected man in the East, and the Eastern races in
their entireties. Does the absence of woman from the general daily life
of a race render that daily life less refined, and more brutal? One
might, at first thought, have concluded so. We may assume for a premise
that women are more refined, more gentle of heart, and more graceful of
manner than men, and it is, I believe, commonly thought among the great
mass of people in the West, who are almost altogether uninformed and
altogether ill-informed about the East, that the men of the East are
brawlers, half-savage, and uncouth. No grosser mistake could be made.
Probably the two most brutalizing passions are envy and jealousy. There
have been in the history of the world, I think, no two other causes of
so much bloodshed, so much brutality, so much infinite cruelty, and so
much horrible vulgarity. The wrangling over women, the rivalry for
women, and the suspicions and the enormous heartburns occasioned by
these rivalries have, in the lands where the women mingled freely with
the men, more than counterbalanced the refining effect produced by the
fact that the men of these countries have wished to appear at their best
before the women, and have been on the whole inspired to civility and
gentle behaviour in the presence of women. Because an Oriental’s wife is
his property, unquestionably so, she is the cause of no bloodshed, no
jealousy, and her refining influence is more proved in the breach than
in the observance. The Korean gentleman, the Chinese mandarin, or the
husband of a high-caste Hindoo woman who goes to a dinner-party, has the
soothing consciousness that his wife is safe at home. Under lock and
key, perhaps: certainly debarred, by the strong prejudices of centuries,
from going abroad, or showing her face to men. He can devote himself
with placid heart and undiverted mind to the meat and drink set before
him and the men sitting about him. No torturing wonder as to which of
his wife’s platonic friends has dropped in to have an after-dinner cup
of coffee with her can come to destroy his appreciation of the fine
flavour of his soup. He can glance around that dinner table with eyes
fearless and proud, for they will not encounter his wife flirting, ever
so harmlessly, with someone else’s husband: a sight calculated to make
any man whose heart is not made of dough, and his brain of pulp, choke
over his cutlets, and end his dinner miserably in a fit of ill-humour
and indigestion. True, on the other hand, he is not able to flirt with
his neighbour’s wife. The social arrangements are such, in the East,
that no fairly well-to-do man need lack ample female society both at
home and abroad. But the female society which is open to him outside of
his own house is not the society of wives, mothers, nor of maidens. And
moreover, the majority of men enjoy a good stag-dinner very much more
than they do an equally good feast which is shared with them by a number
of women. When a party of gentlemen dine together, in the East, or in
the West, I very much fear that their table-talk is far more
intellectual, entertaining, and altogether worth while than the
table-talk of women who dine with each other, or of men and women who
dine together. And I am sure that it is quite as refined, free from
undesirable insinuations, coarse witticisms, and imbecile pleasantries.
I am not speaking, of course, of dinners _tête-à-tête_, nor would
anything I have said apply to them. I have been an unseen spectator of
many stag-dinners in the East, and I was once an unseen, but all-seeing,
guest at a stag-dinner in the West. And in my salad days I have often
broken bread with women, women, only women. It is my conclusion that the
European men who dine at their clubs, and the Asiatic men who dine with
their fellows, gain almost as much as they lose, and I can partly
understand man’s preference for the table companionship of men. I
believe that good digestion waits on appetite more often in dinner
parties of the East than in dinner parties of the Occident.
The Eastern man rarely or never commits the sin of coveting his
neighbour’s wife, because he rarely or never sees her, and so, at least,
we cannot say that the unrighteous laws governing the relative positions
of the sexes in the Orient, lead the men of the Orient into the worst of
all temptations. Among the very poorest classes in Korea the men
invariably see more or less of the women; but those men are too poor,
too hard worked, too absorbed, body, brain, and heart, in a struggle for
existence to covet other men’s wives, or, often indeed, to have wives of
their own.
Oriental polygamy seems so delicate a subject, such thin conversational
ice to the average Western mind, that the best informed writers are
rather in the habit of skating about its edges and of speaking loosely
and indefinitely, and with the greatest confusion about the wives and
the concubines of the East. I have spoken of the well-to-do Korean as
having a plurality of wives. This is not so. And that such a
mis-statement has been made by writers of eminence, and ordinarily of
great exactness, is no excuse for me. A Korean can have but one wife,
one true and absolute wife, but (and here comes in the fact which is
hard, very hard, of comprehension even to intelligent Europeans, who
have not lived in the Orient) he may have as many concubines as he can
afford, and their position, though not so high of rank, is as
honourable, and as respectable as that of his wife. The word concubine,
in the sense given it by our English dictionaries, can no more justly be
applied to the women of a Korean’s seraglio than it can be applied to
Hagar. I use the word, because it is the word used by all European
scholars to indicate the women of whom I am writing, and is also the
word used to designate them in the countries of the East. As I have
said, they are not on a social equality with the wife, but they are, to
the best of my belief, on a moral equality with her, both in the eyes of
Oriental law and in the eyes of morality itself. I see no difference
ethically between the woman who consents to marry (as every well-born
Korean woman does consent to marry) a man who she knows has, or will
have, a well filled harem—I see no difference between her and the woman
who consents to make that harem her home.
A Korean’s concubines are almost as absolutely the handmaidens of his
wife as of himself. They must serve her and do her bidding, and can only
escape from this in the rare instance when one rises in the man’s eyes
to higher favour than the wife.
The children of a concubine do not as a rule rank with the children of a
wife, but they are neither despised nor shamed. They are born to a
slightly lower rank, it is true, but that signifies little, for in Korea
every man must carve out his own niche in the social rock, and they, the
children of the handmaidens, have as fair a start in life, and as clean
a name, as the children of the wife. In this, at least, Korean
civilization puts us to the blush.
I am not advocating polygamy. It seems to me an evil only less than the
evil which makes innocent children nameless, and unfortunate women
homeless and hopeless. It is an evil, I am convinced, that can never
work in the West, never be endured by the women of the West. But it does
work in the East—works fairly well. And I think it just possible that
with the Orientals, with their quickly developed bodies, and their
slowly developed minds, it is, under existing circumstances, the lesser
of two evils, one of which would be inevitable. In Utah I have known a
great many Mormons. I knew Brigham Young when I was a child, and I have
since known several of his wives, and many of his children. With the
exception of Brigham Young himself and one woman, who was, in the most
brazen sense of the word, an adventuress, I have never known a Mormon of
even average intellect. Yet, even so, I never knew the wives of a Mormon
man to live in peace together. The men were degraded and brainless; the
women degraded, almost imbecile and discontented. But it is not so in
the Orient; high caste or high class men are refined, gentlemanly, clean
of person, and keen of intellect, and the women in their lesser and
feminine way are very fit mates of those men. The women of a Korean
household are, as an almost invariable rule, happy together. There is
less differentiation between the personalities of an Eastern race than
between those of a Western, and this is especially true of the women, I
think. The wife and all the concubines of a Korean have tastes in
common, habits in common, likes and dislikes and accomplishments in
common. It is a matter of course to them to live under the same roof,
and at the disposal of the same man, and it never occurs to them to
question either its fitness or its desirability. All must yield
unquestioning obedience to the husband, and, in his absence, all the
concubines must yield and do yield as implicit obedience to the wife.
She in return is very apt to make them her playfellows and her bosom
friends. The Sarahs of the East are far more just, far more kind to the
Hagars of the East than Sarah of old was to the mother of Ishmael. Would
that the women of the West, who are secure in their sole
wifehood—secure at least in the sole legality of their position, had
more humanity for the less fortunately placed women of the West.
Whatever the social conditions of the West, the women of the West are,
in part at least, responsible for them; not the outcast women, not the
women who have made a public failure of life, but the women of assured
positions, of intellect, and of moral weight. Whatever the position of
woman is in Korea, however low the standard of morality in Korea, the
women of Korea, to-day at least, are in no way responsible for it, in no
way—in no direct way at least—able to alter it, and I think it greatly
to the credit of Korean wives that they treat with no pharisaical
contempt, with no feminine injustice, and with no inhumanity, the women
who like themselves are, comparatively speaking, moral and social
puppets in the hands of a social system in the regulating of which they
have no direct voice.
I think I have said repeatedly, and I am going to again say in a
succeeding chapter, that Korea has no religion. Whether the facts I
shall be able to give will prove my statement to the majority of
readers, I am not quite prepared to say. At all events, there is
certainly no civilized country, not excepting China, in which religion
counts for so little, and in which the professors of religion are under
so positive a social ban as they are in Korea. Yet, strangely enough, in
Korea there are not only monks and monasteries, but nuns and nunneries.
Both monasteries and nunneries seem to have existed almost as long as
Korea has existed in anything like its present social condition. Hamel
speaks of two nunneries in Söul, and says that the nuns in one were
exclusively women of high birth; that the nuns in the other were maids
born of the common people. Their hair was shorn as was the hair of
monks, and they performed the same duties, obeyed the same rules as did
the monks. There were then, and have been since, a number of other
nunneries scattered throughout Korea. But it is certainly several
hundred years since any body of nuns defended their house from an
invading army, or took any part in Korean warfare, local or otherwise,
and I very much doubt if they ever did so. But it is probable that in
every other way their lives resembled, as indeed they now resemble, the
lives of the religious men. In the days of Hamel the nunneries were
maintained by the bounty of the king and some of his principal subjects.
The king who was reigning in Korea a little over two hundred years ago
(the same of whom Hamel speaks), gave the nuns of Söul permission to
marry. There are now no nunneries in Söul, but there are still several
in Korea. Besides the nun who is shaven and shorn, there is a female
_devotée_ called Po-sal, who does not cut her hair, and whose vows are
less binding than those of other nuns.
I merely mention the fact that there are nuns in Korea, while on the
subject of Korean women, because it is a curious item of what I have
been able to learn about the women of Chosön, and is uniquely in
contrast to almost all the other items that I have been able to gather.
And now almost last, a few words more about the dress of Chosön’s
women-folk. As I have said, it is less Oriental-looking than the dress
of the women of any other Eastern race, and this is remarkable, if not
surprising, because the women of Korea to-day dress exactly as the women
of China dressed before the present Chinese dynasty came into power, and
the race from which it sprang conquered China. In dress, at least,
indeed in many other ways, the Koreans have strictly maintained the
habits and the fashions that they adopted from, or that were forced upon
them by old China. This is why the men wear no queues and the women do
not pinch their feet. In dress and in toilet habits the Koreans of
to-day are probably an exact replica of the inhabitants of China, before
China became dominated by the Tartars.
The women of Korea’s poor almost invariably wear the same colour as do
the men of the same class: a blue so pale, so indefinite, and, from a
short distance, so imperceptible, that it has generally been called
white. Even so exact an observer and so careful a chronicler as Mr.
Curzon speaks of “the white-clad Koreans.” Mr. Curzon may, by-the-bye,
have made several mistakes in writing of the East; but, with the best
intentions in the world, I have not been able to discover another of his
making. One may differ occasionally from his opinions; one may not
always share his likes or his dislikes; but I assure the student of
things Eastern that he can depend absolutely upon the truth of Mr.
Curzon’s statements of facts, and their exactness.
Korean women of position wear almost every conceivable colour. In China,
pink and green are set aside for women, and are sacred to their wearing.
I do not think that the women of Korea have the sole right to wear any
colour, but they certainly have the right to wear, and the habit of
wearing, almost every conceivable colour. Purples and greens are their
high favourites, and green is almost invariably the hue—and a bright,
deep green at that—of the generously-sleeved dress which the
middle-class Korean woman (or on rare occasions, a lady) throws about
her head and shoulders when she walks abroad. This green dress, which is
used as a cloak, is almost exclusively the garment of the women of the
middle class—the women who are not so poor that they are obliged to
draw water, or to engage in any other forms of hard labour which would
make the covering of their faces impossible—but who, at the same time,
are occasionally obliged to go abroad on some matter of household
business. Wives and concubines and daughters of mandarins and of men of
wealth do not often leave their own (by courtesy) house and gardens.
When they do, they go in palanquins. They enter the palanquin in their
own court-yard; the blinds or curtains are tightly closed. The chair is
borne away on the shoulders of coolies, and is usually followed by one
or more female servants or waiting women, who run closely behind it,
looking on the ground, and carrying a fan, which indicates the rank of
the palanquined mistress.
In some parts of Korea, among some classes of the poor, the women wear a
very short white jacket which barely covers the upper part of the bosom.
This jacket looks like an exaggerated caricature of the pretty white
jacket worn by the Singalese women.
The dress of a Korean lady is as elaborate as the dress of a Korean
working-woman is plain. The example of simplicity set by Queen Min is
followed by almost none of the Korean women who can afford to do
otherwise. The wardrobe of a Korean lady contains garments of silk,
surprising in quantity, and covetable in quality, but satins are
unknown, and the glimmer and glitter, which is so dear to the eye of
every Oriental, must be made alone by the lustre of silk, and enhanced
by as much tinsel, as many jewels and ornaments as the wearer can
possibly afford.
I have spoken of the brown interspace which is often seen between the
jacket and the skirt of a Korean woman, but it is only seen among the
very poorest, and I believe is a lack of material, and a matter of
indifference, rather than an intentional exposure of person. I have
never seen a Korean lady—I have never seen a gentlewoman of any Eastern
race—_décolleté_, except Japanese ladies in European dress. It seems
strange, at first thought, that races, whose standards of sexual
morality seem to us so far beneath our own, should be so universally
modest in their covering of their persons. I am inclined to think that
it is not modesty at all, but rather a peculiar phase of Oriental
dignity which causes the people of the East to drape themselves as
entirely as possible. Mr. Lowell, whose inimitable book on Korea must be
a source of almost endless enjoyment to anyone who has known and
delighted in the quaint peninsula, says so exactly what I think we ought
to understand about the standpoint from which the Orientals regard
dress, and how they have come to so regard it, that I take the liberty
of borrowing a page from his volume; one of those books which constantly
tempt one to quote them from cover to cover. In discussing the manner in
which dress in Eastern Asia has been influenced by woman, Mr. Lowell
writes:—
“Her absence has been as potent a force there as her presence has been
elsewhere; for I think we must admit that to her indirectly is due the
following singular feature of Asiatic thought.
“The way in which the far Oriental regards dress is somewhat peculiar. I
can think of no simile so descriptive as the connection we tacitly
assume between spirit and body. We hardly, in ordinary life, think of
the one as devoid of the other, and we regard the latter as at least the
sense-impression to us of the person within. So do they with dress. To
their eyes it forms an essential part of their conception of the man.
Somewhat in like manner we are ourselves impressed by dress, in the
customary take-at-what-we-see estimate of our fellows. They differ from
us in carrying the real into the ideal.
“This is very strikingly seen in the matter of painting. Perhaps one of
the most notable features about far Eastern paintings is its utter
ignoring of the human figure. There is a complete void in that branch
which among Europeans has always claimed attention—the study of the
nude. To them artistically man is nothing but a bundle of habits in the
sartorial sense. The practice is not due to an excess of what we call
modesty. We may, perhaps, define modesty as the veiling from public gaze
of all of ourselves, in person or in mind, except so much as is
sanctioned to exposure by conventionality. Substitute ‘necessity’ for
‘conventionality,’ and you have the far Eastern definition. Convenience,
not convention, is the touchstone of propriety. They have not the
smallest objection to being seen in a state of nature where occasion
demands it; and, on the other hand, nothing would induce them to exhibit
any portion of their persons for the purpose of display. To them to be
clothed or naked is a matter of indifference; it is merely a question of
temporary comfort. The reason why they disregard the body is other than
this. It is simply that they have never been led to regard the body as
beautiful. That this is so, is due to the low position of woman. She has
never risen high enough in their estimation to attain even to that poor
level of admiration—that of being an object of beauty. All that should
be her birthright they heap as a dowry upon Nature.
“The study of drapery has benefited at the expense of what it encases,
and plays a certain part even in the expression of the emotions.”
I must pause right here, much as I admire his work, and much as I owe
him, to quarrel with Mr. Lowell, who says that the people of the East,
of the Far East at least, have never been led to regard the body as
beautiful.
Is it possible that Mr. Lowell is unfamiliar with, or unappreciative of,
the literature of Hindostan, the dramas of China, and the poems of
Japan?