NEW WOMAN IN CHINA

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19842, 17 May 1927, Page 9

NEW WOMAN IN CHINA

MAKING HERSELF FELT ECLIPSING THE MEN. The avcrtige person away from China thinks of the Chinese woman as a little caged bird, imprisoned in a red and golden carved room, playing the dulcimer or painting willow patterns on porcelain, and utterly ignorant of the world, about her. It is perhaps a beautiful illusion, but it is utterly untrue, writes a Shanghai correspondent.

The Chinese woman in the remotest parts of the country, in distant Szechuan, in mountainous Yunnan, in interior Kaifeng, has demanded those things which her nineteenth-century sisters in the West called emancipation. This Women’s Movement is more fundamental, more virile, and more basically important than all the political bombshells which fill first pages of the newspapers here and abroad. The modernised Chinese woman will breed a new race, untainted by the vicious traditions of the past; more free in her personal actions and ideas, and more ready to branch out for herself. It is a curious phenomenon that the women of China seem to bo moro progressive in their views and in their habits than the men.

That may be explained in this way; China, in the past, has boon a man’* country. Man could do anything fia pleased, and woman had to submit to his opinions and wishes. If he introduced other women into his home, h’l wife usually welcomed them as younger sisters. She sacrificed every liner characteristic to please her lord and master. Not so the new womanl She has

ways of her own. Before marrying she exacts promises from the' husband, anl has been known to leave the husband’s house and board when the promises were broken. Most of the new women want to live in houses of their own, away from the mothers-in-law and the various wives and sons’ wives who compose an old-fashioned Chinese fam Dy. The girls are not always foreign educated. In fact, the foreign-educated young woman seems to return to China spmewhat subdued, and often suffering from a frightful inferiority complex. The young woman educated in the mission or Government schools and colleges of China, the girl who has played basket-ball and hockey on Chinese* fields, and has marched in nationalistic student demonstrations, has a way and a will of her own, which no foreign education can effect. She is a strong type.