Without stating that women as a whole are miserable, I think it would be no exaggeration to say that they are infinitely less happy than their Western sisters. Many of the national customs militate against their happiness. The custom of child betrothal, for instance, condemns a woman to live completely subject to a man for whom she perhaps {128} has the greatest natural antipathy. Stories are told of brides committing suicide rather than leave their father's house to be married to men for whom they feel no affection; yet as a whole they accept their position, and a Chinese woman has neither the will nor the power to be untrue to her husband. Again, the rule of the husband's mother is very often extremely harsh; the child-wife is little better than her drudge. On the other hand, when a woman grows older, her position is one of considerable strength. I was assured that they take a keen interest in the management of their husbands' properties, and often show themselves excellent business women. The position which the late Empress of China acquired shows that women's position is the very reverse of inferior when dignified by age. And now before all this woman's world glitters Western civilisation; the greater dignity which is accorded therein to women is envied and the laws which restrain her are misunderstood. The Chinese women hear stories of Western life. At first such strange perversions are believed as that in the West women rule. One missionary explained that this absurd figment came from the rule of the late Queen; another attributed it to the custom men have when travelling in China of walking while their wives remained in the carrying chair. To the Chinaman such a course admits of but one explanation: the {129} woman must be greater than the man because she is carried while he walks. Again, in Western China they learnt through their local press that girls and boys received a similar education in England, and they concluded that the dress must be also similar, and the missionaries were more amused than scandalised at seeing a Government girls' school turned out in boys' clothes. It was explained to us that this was far from being an uncommon custom in China; slave-girls who have been brought up with natural feet are habitually dressed as boys, and it is common now for fathers of small daughters with unbound feet to avoid the unpleasant taunts of the ignorant by allowing their daughters while they are children to wear boys' clothes.