CONCLUSION
The ocean that geographically divides the East from the West is not more wide nor deep than is that invisible ocean between the minds of the woman of the Orient and the woman of the Occident. A sympathetic understanding between peoples whose ideals have been so differently constructed, and who have had such radically opposite training, is next to impossible. No matter what the Western woman may do in the hope of touching the emotional life of the woman of the East, she soon finds that further progress is barred, that a gate before unseen has closed, shutting her out from the inner life.
I knew a very advanced woman in Southern India who had broken caste and who went about freely, mingling with both Europeans and Indians with the same freedom as an American woman would. She dressed in a costume partially Indian and partially European, wore slippers, and arranged her hair in the European fashion. One day I went to her house rather earlier than the usual hour for calling. I hardly recognized her,as she was the Indian woman of the home, dressed in a sari, her hair hanging down her back in braids, and with heavy anklets over her bare feet. She blushed and said: “Oh, I do not want you to see me like this,” and she did not understand me when I told her that I felt that I was seeing the real woman for the first time.
I thought many times in my long residence in the East that I had really entered into the life and understood the thoughts, hopes, and ambitions of the Eastern woman, when at some thoughtless word or action on my part a wall of fog would come between us, with a thick, impenetrable, blanket-like mist, made up of custom, tradition, and the results of environment, and when it would lift we would find our little boats far from each other on a sea of mutual misunderstanding.
Despite our incapacity to enter into the soul life of this ancient East, we find ourselves fascinated and bewitched by the charm of these secluded women of the Orient, who live a life of instinctive unselfishness, their days given to the making of happiness for others.
We say: “Must there always remain the width of the world between the Eastern woman and the woman of the West? Will the education which is being grasped so eagerly by the woman of the Orient lessen the distance, and will it break down the barriers?” Only time will tell. The children of the present boys and girlsin school and college will have had the foundation of the three generations of intellectual training, and will have learned to take what is best for them from Western knowledge and use it as a means of breaking the iron bands of ignorance, superstition, and loyalty to old-time custom and tradition, which stands an immovable mountain in the pathway of true friendship between the woman of the West and the woman of the East.
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON
UNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, THE GRESHAM PRESS, WOKING AND LONDON
TRANSCRIBER’S NOTESilently corrected typographical errors and variations in spelling.Archaic, non-standard, and uncertain spellings retained as printed.The cover image was created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.
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