CHINA’S MODERN WOMEN “A CURSE”

Dominion, Volume 23, Issue 75, 21 December 1929, Page 33

CHINA’S MODERN WOMEN “A CURSE”

A curse to her parents in girlhood, and a dead-weigbt to her husband in marriage, is the deplorable offering of modern Chinese women, according to Chinese men writers, who are terrified at the extremism of Chinese women’s emancipation in China. The very idea that the birth of New China has raised the status of Chinese girls to the same level as Chinese boys seems awesome to some conservative Chinese observers. Schools have lifted the ban against girls, commercial houses have employed them “without discrimination,” and the law, it is lamented, has even gone so far as to “grant unmarried women equal rights of inheritance with boys.” The result, as examined by Faul K. Whaug in “The China Weekly Review (Shanghai), is that in addition to political revolution, much advertised in fhe foreign press, China has been undergoing a social revolution “of greater consequence,” to which the world has not so far given much attention. It is not Western civilisation that is blamed so much by Mr. Whang, as the fact that the modern Chinese girl is too much under its influence and “blindly worships” everything imported from Europe and America. We are told: “She bobs her hair, puts on foreignstyle dresses and shoes, and carries foreign-made handbags. From, head to foot, everything on her, and everything she carries, either is of foreign make or a domestic imitation of foreign goods. To be sure, she is afraid of no men, and goes with them to have a good time in dancinghalls and cinema-houses. She stays out late at night, and enjoys as much freedom as her brothers. While in daily pursuit of pleasure and excitement, she looks upon the home-life as dreary and tiresome, and domestic affairs as trivial and unworthy. Thus she neither goes into the kitehen nor makes her own clothes, as her older sisters did. She. defies the orders of her parents, and laughs at the old teachings of female virtues. She may attend the school • but she does so not for the sake of education, but for bettering her chances m selecting a husband. At school, her curriculum is to learn new dancing steps and imported love-songs. She is modernised so far as her personal appearance is concerned, and, besides that, there is nothing in her which commands our respect. While a girl, she is a curse to her parents; and when married, she is a burden to her husband.” „ A sharper reproach to the modern Chinese girls appears in the statement of Mr. Whang that they lose sight of the fact that Western civilisation, just as Chinese civilisation, has “its virtues as well as its vices,” and he urges:— “In adopting Western ‘culture and ideas, our girls should not merely copy the superficial and trivial things, but they should pick up some qualities which are worthy of adoption. In the meantime, they should retain those old virtues and traditions which have been handed down from their forefathers.'”