ABSTRACT

i suppose that, from before the days of recorded history, man the warrior has been in the habit of capturing such of the enemy’s women as have pleased his fancy and of taking them home with him, along with his other booty, to show to his admiring friends. What the women themselves felt about such ravishment, we can only guess. Certainly in days when wife- capture by nomadic tribesmen was a commonplace, they had to endure far more shoving around than even the weakest and most abject of that sex could be expected to endure today. The suffragette movement occurred even later in China than it did in the West. For untold centuries it was not a good thing to be born a girl. No one rejoiced; and as Fu Hsuan, a poet of the third century a.d. reminds us, nothing on earth was held more cheap than a woman.