WOMEN IN ASIA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3869, 8 May 1928, Page 66

WOMEN IN ASIA.

By

Plain Jane.

(Special for the Otago Witness.) Among the giant strides made by women in the immediate past, none are greater than the measure of freedom gained by the women of Turkey. * We escaped when the men were not looking,” the Turkish women exclaim when asked how they got away from the confinement and rules of the harem. The men were engaged in the. serious business of war, and their wives and daughters walked into the sunlight of freedom. . They discarded the veil, the emblem of femininity all down the centuries. Then they bobbed their hair and wore “ Christian ” hats, and have continued to grow in liberty. In Turkey, as elsewhere within the war zone, women had of necessity to take up their share of the work, the young men being needed at the front. So when they

took up real work in offices and elsewhere the veil was a handicap, and it vanished. A similar development is taking place throughout the Orient. Chinese women are making great strides in the race towards emancipation, and the Japanese sisters are also winning a larger measure of personal and mental freedom. Japanese women .have encountered a somewhat formidable obstacle in the Pan-Asiatic movement, and the slogan, “ Back to Asia.” In China, however, the signs of change are distinctly marked. Women and girls in the great cities of China may now be seen frequenting fashionable resorts and five-o’clock teas, dressed in the most modern European costumes, and spending hours in fox-trotting and dancing the Charleston, flirting meanwhile quite without compunction with both Europeans and Chinese. In the less cultivated circles of China and Japan alike, we are told, where women are still governed by the ancient rules, it is less a matter of adhering to the religions principles of Confucianism or Buddhism than of adhering to primeval customs and social traditions. With the lifting of the Turkish veil will doubtless come great changes for women. A young Turkish feminist, Hadije Selma Ekrem, a graduate of the American School for Girls at Constantinople, recently told an interesting story. In passing, it reminds us very much of some of our own experiences during the pioneer days of the shingle. “ I don’t think I could exactly be called the first Turkish woman to discard the veil,” says this young pioneer. “ The real truth is that I never wore one. I refused to. It caused trouble, of course. Remarksloud enough for me to hear were made about inc on the streets. I had to give up being seen on the streets with my family, because that branded me as a Turkish girl who was not wearing a veil, and put my mother and sister in danger of being insulted. And my father was in constant danger of arrest. But I was the first Turkish girl to ent my hair,” she continues. “In fact, I had mine cut like a boy’s long before any of the American girls in the American school at Constantinople had even bobbed theirs. I had long, heavy hair, and I didn t want to bo bothered with the combing and braiding. Neither my mother nor my father wanted it cut, and my father has never forgiven me for doing it.” Following this interesting confession, Selma Ekrem gives us a highly illuminating insight into the fashions of her sisters. She writes :— “ In order to understand just what the status of women in Turkey was before the World War, you must understand that there are several social classes,” she continued. “ The girl of the upper class, or of the educated Turkish families, usually wore a hat when she was small, but at about 14 years of age she had to put on the veil. In reality she adopted the tscharschaf, or national dress for Turkish women, which is composed of a full, long skirt and veil covering the upper portion of the body and the face. “ The women of the middle class and the peasants wear a white head covering. The children of these classes never wore the hat at all, because to them the hat which was worn by Europeans. was accepted as the symbol of Christianity. The educated people in Turkey realised that attributing such significance to the hat was foolish, and as the hat was a convenient headcovering for girls to wear, we wore it even though it often made trouble with the authorities. “ My eldest sister wore a tscharschaf, and once after I had been seen on the street with her, iny father received a threatening letter from the authorities about my being permitted to wear a hat. It was therefore necessary, since I persisted in wearing a hat, for me to be seen as little as possible on the streets with my family. So long as I was by myself, few people would know whether or not I was European, and I ran less chance of being molested or of causing trouble for my family. I was attending the American School for Girls in Constantinople at the time, and I could speak both French and English, in addition to Turkish, all of which made it more difficult to identify me as a Turkish subject." Custom makes cowards and, in a measure, slaves of us all. In the Koran every religious law has its significance, and it was generally supposed that Mohammed imposed the veil upon women. Miss Ekrem docs not agree, and she traces it back to some advice of the Prophet to certain women who had grown careless in their dress, adding:— “It was several hundred years later that these teachings of the Prophet were interpreted by corrupt rulers to moan that women should go heavily veiled. The seclusion of the women began first among the Arab tribes, was later adopted by the Persians, and, gradually, some time afterward, by the Turks after the wandering tribes united into one nation under Osman I, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.

“ This seclusion of the women of the upper classes was practised rigidly until the middle of die nineteenth century, when a few schools were established for girls. Little by little, after that Bine, the women began to gain some freedom in the home, but not in the streets. Men of culture and intelligence, particularly those who had been educated on the Continent, adopted broader views about the freedom of women in. their homes, and many of them abolished the harem. For instance, my mother’s father, who had been educated in France, ~ud who

was a general in the Turkish armies, never had but one wife, and his daughter, my mother, patterned her own household sifter his. My father had no harem. Polygamy has since been abolished by the Nationalist Government.”

Whether the law of the Prophet encompassed the veil for Turkish women may be allowed to remain a matter of opinion, but the revolutionary- order of Mustafa Kemal was definite: “ Let the Turkish woman show her face to the world and look the world in the face.” He made the necessary provision for this in the Turkish Civil Code. So that’s that. As elsewhere, people in Asia, and critics outside, are anxious to know what the Eastern woman will do with her newfound freedom. A German writer has some misgivings. He puts bis case thus: “ The sociologists of Soviet Russia declared that the entire system of European matrimonial laws was fitted only for capitalists—the bourgeoisie—and was quite uiisuited to the needs of the proletariat. The result was a sort of hybrid, which reminds one more of the concubinage than of the ideas of real marriage which have hitherto prevailed. The essence of this was the granting to women of equal property rights as well as political rights. The mad communistic idea of the absolute equality of all men is to-day generally rejected by Orientals, yet the logical conclusion of the complete equality of woman has found much acclaim among Oriental as well as Russian women under the regime of the Soviet Union.

“In two republics, Tartaristan and Azerbaijan, the Mohammedan women have reacted to Bolshevik propaganda with special rapidity. The very intelligent women -‘of the Volga Tartars have, indeed, abandoned for many decades a large number of the traditions confining women, and. this not alone in the upper generally well-to-do classes ; the young girls of the upper strata have long been m the habit of attending high schools and universities, while the women of the labouring class, many of whom work in factories, have naturally allowed the custom of veiling the face and other restrictions to fall into disuse of necessity. In general, since the founding of the Tartar Republic in 1921, education and culture, which were strongly repressed under the Czars, have visibly and rapidly been bettered among women as well as among men. Moreover, it is very remarkable, and is probably unique in the Islamic world, that since 1919 Tartar women residing in Moscow have been able to publish an organ, ‘ Daughters of the East,’ devoted to the emancipation of women; so swiftly did the Tartar women seize the opportunity offered by the revolution in Russia.”

The emancipation of women is a very fascinating subject, especially for women. I have no doubt this new freedom will be used much as men would use it. Something tangible has been won, and the new state is certainly a vast improvement on the old, and the time when a solitary Turkoman brigand might be seen returning from a raid with a dozen Persian maidens at heel, bound by a long rope attached to his saddle is passing. It will be a severe wrench to a race of men who have practised exogamous marriage for more than a thousand years, but it is high time that women took a hand in the arrangements. The passing of the veil will let new light into the mind of the Turkish woman, and she will imbibe European ideas. " To-morrow dawns more

promisingly for all women than did yesterday.