CHINESE WIVES.

Auckland Star, Volume LXIII, Issue 161, 9 July 1932, Page 12

CHINESE WIVES.

X.OST THEIR OLD SECURITY. MONOGAMY NOT ACCEPTED. China'e women are ready for monogamy, but her men are Btill polygamously inclined, Penrl S. Buck, author of "Tho Good Earth," declared in a lecture at Peiping. "A Chinese woman expects to love her husband, nor does she expect to leave lim or have her feelings change toward him," Mrs. Buck said. "For the average Chinese woman her marriage ia her fate and she does not question it." Howover; bitterness and disunity have been caused in Chinese family life by tho concubinage system, now forbidden by law, she continued. "Until Chinese men change their psychology, women are in a precarious etate," Mrs. 7?uck said. "Men are accustomed to having more than one wife, and they often do not have a permanent feeling toward their wives. "Tho permanent quality of their feelings is linked to tho family and not to the wife personally. Consequently Chinese men are likely to bo emotionally unstable. "In the old days, if a woman was unable to hold her husband's love and he took a concubine she still had everything left. She still had her place in tho family and was not disgraced, nor left without support. "Now she is divorced and loses everything. If she is not .Western trained she has no way of making a living, but loses her place in her husband's family and in his life entirely." Chinese women usually are supreme in the home and in the domestic affairs of thro family, Mrs. Buck pointed, out. Although according to law the rule rests with the man, in practice it is the Jwoman who tells the man what he is to decree.