thus: "The Persian woman lives,
as it were, a negative life, but does not seem to strive for a change in
her condition." Certainly not. Like the Turkish and the Arabian woman, she
is bound by the Koran. Her educational opportunities are even less (there
are very few European schools, governesses, and women doctors in Persia).
Her field of activity is restricted to agriculture, domestic service,
tailoring, and occasionally, teaching. However, she is said to be quite
skillful in the management of her financial affairs. As far as I know, the
Persian woman took no part in the constitutional struggle of 1908-1909.

INDIA

Total population: 300,000,000.

The Indian woman's rights movement originated through the efforts of the
English. The movement is as necessary and as difficult as the movement in
China. The Indian religions teach that woman should be despised. "A cow is
worth more than a thousand women." The birth of a girl is a misfortune:
"May the tree grow in the forest, but may no daughter be born to me."[115]

Formerly it was permissible to drown newborn girls; the English government
had to abolish this barbarity (as it abolished the suttee). The Indian
woman lives in her apartment, the zenana; here the mother-in-law wields
the scepter over the daughters-in-law, the grandchildren, and the women
servants. The small girl learns to cook and to embroider; anything beyond
that is iniquitous: woman has no brain. The girls that are educated in
England must upon their return again don the veil and adjust themselves
to native conditions. At the age of five or six the little girls are
engaged, sometimes to young men of ten or twelve years, sometimes to men
of forty or fifty. The marriage takes place several years later. Sometimes
a man has more than one wife. The wife waits on her husband while he is
eating; she eats what remains.

If the wife bears a son, she is reinstated. If she is widowed, she must
fast and constantly offer apologies for existing. The widows and orphans
were the first natives to become interested in the higher education of
women. This was due to economic and social conditions.

India was the cradle of mankind. Even the highest civilizations still bear
indelible marks of the dreadful barbarities that have just been mentioned.
The Indian woman has rebelled against her miserable condition. The English
women considered it possible to bring health, hope, and legal aid to the
women of the zenana, through