THE ORIENTAL WOMAN.

Otago Witness, Issue 1970, 22 August 1889, Page 32

THE ORIENTAL WOMAN.

It is rather a curious reflection that in those countries where woman's rights are most completely non-existent, there the specially womanly duties of women are the most grossly neglected. Tavellers in Egypt, for instance, tell us that when the bells call the hour of prayer every man stops whatever work he is engaged in and prostrates himself to Allah. No woman takes any notice of the sound. She is too low in the scale of humanity to make her tribute to the Almighty worthy of acceptance. She ranks in this respect almost with the brute creation. She is not withdrawn from her domestic duties by the claims of religion upon her time and thoughts. And yet the same travellers tell us that one of the horrors of Egyptian life is the fearful neglect from which the children suffer. The poor little creatures are incrusted by dirt and sores and are swarming with vermin. Children are frequently seen lying in their mothers' arms with six or eight flies in each eye. Ophthalmia and various kinds of blindness are, of course, very prevalent, although death releases an enormously large proportion of the children from their sufferings. Three out of every five children who are born die during infancy, and of those who survive one in every 20 is blind. This is being " thoroughly masculine " with a vengeance, and points an instructive moral as to the consequences upon the character of women of the denial of liberty, education, and responsibility. The harem life of Oriental ladies of high rank is dull I and vacuous to the last degree. They play with their jewels, eat sweetmeats and smoke pipes, and thus their day passes. If their children are ill they are hopelessly bewildered and utterly unable to take care of them. They cling, with touching reverence, to

any average English or American woman who may happen to visit them, and implore her aid in doing the simplest kind of nursing and mothering for the ailing children. Nothing astonishes Orientals more than the position of women ia England. A Chinese mandarin has lately published his views on this subject. Women, he says, are even helped at meals before men ; in his own country the men eat first, and when they have quite finished, if anything is left, the women are allowed to have it. Another Eastern, Seyd Ahmed Khan, was amazed to find that the servant girl who waited upon him in his lodgings in London could read and write; and he recorded his deliberate opinion that the little scrub in a London lodging, " compelled to work as a maid servant for her living," was in reality superior in nearly all respects to Indian ladies of the highest rank. " Such," he adds, solemnly, "is the effect of education." — 11 The Fortnightly Review."