s wages are one half
or three fourths of those of the men.

The lives of the Chinese women, especially among the lower classes, are so
wretched that mothers believe they are doing a good deed when they
strangle their little girls, or place them on the doorstep where they will
be gathered up by the wagon that collects the corpses of children. Many
married women commit suicide. "The suffering of the women in this dark
land is indescribable," says an American woman missionary. Those Chinese
women that believe in the transmigration of souls hope "in the next world
to be anything but a woman."

Foreign women doctors, like the women missionaries, are bringing a little
cheer into these sad places. Most of these women are English or American.
The beginning of a real woman's rights movement is the work of the
Anti-Foot-Binding societies, which are opposing the binding of women's
feet. This reform is securing supporters among men and women.

For seventeen years there has existed a school for Chinese women. This was
founded by Kang You Wei, the first Chinese to demand that both sexes
should have the same rights. The women that have devoted themselves during
these seventeen years to the emancipation of their sex must often face
martyrdom. Tsin King, the founder of a semimonthly magazine for women, and
of a modern school for girls, met death on the scaffold in 1907 during a
political persecution directed against all progressive elements.

Another woman's rights advocate, Miss Sin Peng Sie, donated 200,000 taels
(a tael is equivalent to 72.9 cents) for the erection of a _Gymnasium_ for
girls in her native city, 100,000 taels to endow a pedagogical magazine,
and 50,000 taels for the support of minor schools for girls. Still another
woman's rights advocate, Wu Fang Lan, resisted every attempt to bind her
feet in the traditional manner. There exists a woman's league, through
whose efforts the government, in 1908, prohibited the binding of the feet
of little girls.

In recent years the _women's magazines_ have increased in number. Four
large publications, devoted solely to women's interests, are published in
Canton; five are published in Shanghai, and about as many in every other
large city. The new system of education (adopted in 1905) grants women
freedom. Girls' schools have been opened everywhere; in the large cities
there are girls' secondary schools in which the Chinese classics, foreign
languages, and other cultural subjects a