Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 40, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 11 June 1885 — Chinese Women. [ARTICLE]

Chinese Women.

Yau Phou Lee gave a very entertaining and instructive lecture in John Street Congregational Church, his subject being the “Chinese Women.” The lecturer, a young man, dressed in the conventional American attire, held the close attention of his hearers, and proved himself to be a person of no mean attainments, who speaks the English language understandmgly and with proper inflection. The Chinese woman, he said, is not in all respects so strange a creature as the American people have been led to believe. While, by comparison, she possesses certain defects, she would, under similar circumstances to those which surround the American girl, develop similar characteristics. Her birth is generally regarded as a disappointment because she was not of the opposite sex. The lecturer said that the crime of infanticide, the destroying of female infants, has been greatly exaggerated, still it cannot be denied that boys have the preference. It is expensive to marry off the girls, but the boy can support his parents in old age. The mother’s heart beats as warmly for her offspring in the Orient as in the Occident, however, and the crime of infanticide is hot due to the want of a natural affection, but to abject poverty. The trials cf the Chinese girl, especially if she is to be a fine lady, begin when she is about 5 or 6 years of age, at which time preparations are made for the compression of the feet. Various accounts are given for the origin of this custom, the lecturer favoring the theory that it originated in an attempt to imitate artificially the small feet which an Empress possessed. He estimated that the proportion of the Chinese women who suffer from this deformity is about two-thirds. He argued that the custom has its advantages and disadvantages. By it the Chinese is woman more completely brought into those subjective conditions for which she is destined. It is a custom upheld by the women, only tolerated'by the mfen because it is a custom. Its disadvantages are serious,*one of the chief of which is that the woman is debarred from that physical exercise which is essential to health. The education of the Chinese girl is very limited. At the age of 10 or 12 she is confined to the company of her own sex, and at the age of 14 or 15 her parents begin to make arrangements for her marriage, in which-she herself has no choice. Engagements are often made for girls whiie, j they are yet infants. Gobetweens make all the arrangements, love has nothing to do with the marriage, neither does adaptability. Thus the contracting parties haye not them-

selves to blame should the marriage prove an unhappy one; The lecturer thought it a question if. parents in America have pot too little, as in China they have too much, to do with their children’s marriage.— Lowell Courier.