Arkansas State Gazette

THE WOMEN OF CHINA.

There is a pompous and a pedantic land which boasts supremacy in wisdom and science from an epoch anterior to all human record save its own,- China the land of many lanterns, of many letters, and of few ideas. Peopled by the long-eared, elliptic-eyed, flat-nosed, olive-colored, Mongolian race, it offers a population singularly deficient in intellectual physiognomy : though, to its absurd ugliness, the women of the higher classes occasionally offer striking exceptions. In China, polygamy prevails virtually, if not by name; and the sovereign, self-imprisoned in his golden-roofed palace with his one empress, six queens and three hundred (or if he pleases, three thousand) concubines, reflects, on the great scale, the domestic establishment of those among his subjects, whose wealth may permit the irrational indulgence of their passion or their pride. The female slave, who, at the head of a band of inferior slaves, is dignified with the name of superior, (adequate to that of wife.) who has been purchased with gold, and may be returned if on trial not approved, is not deemed worthy to eat at her master's table. Crippled from her cradle, morally and physically, ignorant of any one of the many thousand letters of her husband's alphabet, referred to the futile amusements of infancy for all resource against utter tedium in dress, and to smoke, her highest pleasures and to totter on the flat roof of her golden cage her sole privilege. She too, feeble and imbecile as she is, is outraged in the only feeling that nature may have rescued from the wreck of man's oppression; for the Chinese wife, like the odalisque of Turkey, yields up her offspring a sacrifice to the murderous policy of her master. if such is the destiny of the lady of the celestial empire. the women of the middle and the lower classes submit to a yet severer fate. She it is who feeds and rears the silkworm with an attention to details of which the female organization is so pre-eminently capable; she reels the produce and works and weaves the silk. it is woman, too, who cultivates the most tender tea plants, and whose delicate fingers are alone fitted to roll the finer tea leaf, having thus furnished her quota to the common means of national wealth she also works that exquisite gold and silver filagree, and prepares those gorgeous ornaments, in which imperial vanity delights to adorn the ponderous and puerile divine-righted ruler of the celestial empire. Descending yet lower in the social chain, the female peasant of China presents a still more extraordinary example of plodding industry. Exposed to the inclemency of the seasons, with the infant tied to horseback (which she may have rescued from the wild beast, or from the devouring wave, she ploughs, sows, reaps, and performs the thousand offices of toil and drudgery attached to the cultivation of the soil, from which she derives so little benefit and enjoyment. Denied too, all moral rights, she incurs, nevertheless, a fatal responsibility for her husband's delinquencies: and suffers death with him, as his defendant, for crimes in which she could have no moral participation. The natural death of her husband gives her over to the family-who, to recover the money expended in her purchase, may resell her to the highest bidder; while her own is very frequently the work of her own hand. Suicide, it is asserted is of frequent occurrence among the Chinese females of the lowest classes: and well may they seek death-to whom, from the cradle to the tomb, life holds forth not one solitary good.

Lady Morgan's Woman and her Master