India has 300,000,000 people; hence these meager beginnings of a woman's rights movement are infinitesimal when compared with the vast work that remains undone.[116] The educated Indian woman is participating in the nationalist movement that is now being directed against English rule. Brahmanism hinders the Indian woman in making use of the educational opportunities offered by the English government. Brahmanism and its priests nourish in woman a feeling of humility and the fear that she will lose her caste through contact with Europeans and infidels. The Parsee women and the Mohammedan women do not have this fear. The Parsee women (Pundita Ramabai, for example) have played a leading part in the emancipation of their sex in India. But the Mohammedan women of India are reached by the movement only with difficulty. By the Hindoo of the old régime, woman is kept in great ignorance and superstition; her education is limited to a small stock of aphorisms and rules of etiquette; her life in the zenana is largely one of idleness. "Ennui almost causes them to lose their minds" is a statement based on the reports of missionaries. There are modern schools for girls in all large cities (Calcutta, Madras, Bombay, etc.). The status of the native woman has been Europeanized to the greatest extent in Bengal. The best educated of the native women of all classes are the dancing girls (_bayadères_); unfortunately they are not "virtuous women" (_honnêtes femmes_), hence education among women has been in ill repute. A congress of women was held in Calcutta in 1906 with a woman as chairman; this congress discussed the condition of Indian women. At the medical congress of 1909, in Bombay, Hindoo women doctors spoke effectively. The women doctors have formed the Association of Medical Women in India. In Madras there is published the _Indian Ladies' Magazine_.[117] CHINA[118] Total population: 426,000,000. The Chinese woman of the lower classes has the same status as the Mohammedan woman,--ostensible freedom of movement, and hard work. The women of the property owning classes, however, must remain in the house; here, entertaining one another, they live and eat, apart from the men. As woman is not considered in the Chinese worship of ancestors, her birth is as unwished for as that of the Indian woman. Among the poor the birth of a daughter is an economic misfortune. Who will provide for her? Hence in the three most densely populated provinces the murder of girl babies is quite common. In many cases mothers kill their little girls to deliver them from the misery of later life. The father, husband, and the mother-in-law are the masters of the Chinese woman. She can possess property only when she is a widow (see the much more liberal provisions of the Koran).