The Harim and the Purdah: Studies of Oriental Women — John Shaqi
The Harim and the Purdah: Studies of Oriental WomenCooper, Elizabeth
Religion
The Harim and the Purdah: Studies of Oriental Women
Cooper, Elizabeth
East Asia -- Social life and customs; Women -- East Asia
Can the woman of the East be awakened to an advanced development without
harm to herself? Within her is found an enormous amount of suppressed
capacity for good and evil. This suppression, which has been her cue for
generations, possesses great dynamic power. Force becomes dangerous when
confined; it should be directed, and unless properly guided and
controlled, when it does burst forth, as it is bound to do with these
women who are becoming educated and learning their power, it is likely
to riot widely, with havoc for its effect. The Eastern woman who has
traded upon her emotional nature for her livelihood, who has used these
same emotions to keep her husband in a land where divorce is easy and
where polygamy is practised by many, may be guided by her feelings
rather than her intellect, using her new-found freedom to bring her
lasting unhappiness instead of the joy which she now believes is lying
just outside her doors. In India advance has come too rapidly at times,
and the woman in her desire to slavishly imitate her sisters from the
West has shocked the conservative traditions of her nation, and thereby
greatly retarded her cause. The Egyptian woman when in England or France
becomes almost ludicrous in her attempts to be like the European woman,
forgetting that she lacks the foundation of the years of freedom and
equality with men which bring judgment and confidence to the woman of
the Western world.
The woman of the Orient is awakening and is setting herself the task to
consider what is best to be done. How can she remedy the deficiency of
the social life of her land? The case is not a hopeless one by any
means, even though her capacities and wonderful possibilities have lain
dormant for so long. Many of these women now see the things that are
wrong; they see the iniquity of a system in which they are not allowed
to choose their own mate; they see the crying wrongs of their antiquated
marriage and divorce laws, made for another period than the twentieth
century—laws which do not fit the present conditions, however successful
they may have been in other times. These women are learning to respect
themselves and their position, learning to appreciate and value the
weight of their majorities, and some are having the courage to speak
out. These bolder ones are being punished for their intrepidity; but it
does not check them. The cause for which they are working is gradually
becoming more and more possible with the advent of education and Western
influences, which are causing the present-day educated men of the Orient
to require a certain amount of education in their wives and daughters.
As this new order comes to the land of the Nile and the Ganges, the
old-time woman who passed her days lounging on the divans, eating
sweets, drinking coffee, and gossiping with servants and friends as
ignorant as herself, will pass away. The new woman of the East will
never be a suffragette; she will never attend mass meetings nor carry
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