THE POSITION OF WOMEN

It is, perhaps, tolerably safe to say that the position of women among
the Chinese is very generally misunderstood. In the squalid huts of
the poor, they are represented as ill-used drudges, drawers of water
and grinders of corn, early to rise and late to bed, their path
through the vale of tears uncheered by a single ray of happiness or
hope, and too often embittered by terrible pangs of starvation and
cold. This picture is unfortunately true in the main; at any rate,
there is sufficient truth about it to account for the element of
sentimental fiction escaping unnoticed, and thus it comes to be
regarded as an axiom that the Chinese woman is low, very low, in the
scale of humanity and civilisation. The women of the poorer classes in
China have to work hard indeed for the bowl of rice and cabbage which
forms their daily food, but not more so than women of their own
station in other countries where the necessaries of life are dearer,
children more numerous, and a drunken husband rather the rule than the
exception. Now the working classes in China are singularly sober;
opium is beyond their means, and few are addicted to the use of
Chinese wine. Both men and women smoke, and enjoy their pipe of
tobacco in the intervals of work; but this seems to be almost their
only luxury. Hence it follows that every cash earned either by the man
or woman goes towards procuring food and clothes instead of enriching
the keepers of grog-shops; besides which the percentage of quarrels
and fights is thus very materially lessened. A great drag on the poor
in China is the family tie, involving as it does not only the support