WOMEN IN CHINA

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 291, 21 November 1936, Page 2

WOMEN IN CHINA

Town and Country Aspects The modern young women of China are as chic, as intelligent, as poised, and as efficient in all'spheres of life, as are modern women everywhere, states an English exchange. And, Kke other modern young women, they are doing things that must make their grandmothers turn in their graves. For instance, their grandmothers, swaying on “lily” feet, practised tho doctrine that woman’s place is in the home. Modern Chinese girls, freed from the cruel poetic fiction about “swaying on lily feet,” nimbly play tennis, basketball, and hockey; dance waltzes, blues, and the carioca. Boldly, like men, they leave home to earn their living in strange cities, competing against men in all vocations and professions. They are teachers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, journalists, dentists, aviators, traders, architects. But in cities and hamlets remote from the coast and from foreign influence, tradition, centuries old, still holds the people in thrall. Here small girls shriek with pain whilp their feet are being tightly bound, although the laws of the Republic forbade tho practice fifteen years ago. As a startling illustration of the contiguity in China of the ultra-modern and the ancient regime, I have on my desk two clippings taken from a Chinese newspaper. The first, showing the photograph of a very pretty young matron named Mrs. Elsie Soong, describes a Chinese fashion parade in which the mannequins were Shaighai society girls. Mrs. Soong, who organised the show, was educated in the United States, is a dress designer, and also a member of Shanghai’s younger smart set. The newspaper reminds readers that a few months earlier Mrs. Soong had made a reputation as an amateur actress in a local performance in English of “Lady Precious Stream.” A generation ago no respectable Chinese woman would have appeared in public either as mannequin or actress.

The. other clipping tells tho tragic story of a modern girl whose behaviouroffended custodians of the ancient regime. Not twenty miles from Peking she was buried alive because she had dared to wear fashionable clothes and to go freely about the streets of her native village. Her father, a prosperous farmer named Liang, was the head of an old and respected family of Nankehchuang. As a concession to Republican ideas, ho had sent his daughter to a girls’ school in Peking. Meantime she had been betrothed to the son of his friend Wang, who, like himself, was a farmer of humble but ancient and honourable lineage. To the sorrow of her own family and tho horror of her future parents-in-law, Miss Liang, her schooling finished, returned to Nankeh-chuang wearing short-sleeved, tight-fitting gowns, her hair bobbed and curled. These might have been changed, but the girl showed an intractable spirit regarding the time-honoured rituals and taboos of her native hamlet. Wang conferred bitterly with Liang, and the two agreed that both families had been disgraced. There was only one way to regain, honour for tho respectable names so besmirched. They took that way. Carrying the girl in a closed sedan chair to a secluded spot m the country, they dug a deep grave and buried her there alive, purging tho village of the curls and finery, and tho intractable spirit that had presumed to flaunt its freedom in the face of tradition.