Читать книгу The People of Palestine. An enlarged edition of "The Peasantry of Palestine, Life, Manners and Customs of the Village" онлайн

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Western people are so in the habit of pitying all the women of Asia that they will probably go on doing so until the end of time in spite of the facts. To our Western idea woman in the East is a pitiable, miserable abstraction. The Turkish harem, the Indian child-widow and the deformed Chinese foot stand for all Asia to many of us. There is probably a large, free area of life open to thousands of the women of Asia that does not seem cramped by comparison with the total civilization of which they are a part. The Bedawy woman would not change places with any of us, and the village peasant woman of Palestine enjoys life fully as well as the male villagers. She is not supposed to enter the field marked out by custom for male members of society, nor will the field she occupies be intruded upon by them. She shares with the man a preference for male children. Her position in this regard is only an exaggeration of the condition that prevails in all modern society. She, like her brothers and sisters the world over, is influenced by customs to which she yields obedience a little more gracefully than do many of us. She goes about her work cheerfully if she is well. Too often she is not well, and in a few years drudging toil and frequent childbearing age her. Like her sisters in other countries, she is sometimes tidy and sometimes not. She loves her children. Whether she loves her husband or not is not easy to discover, but she pays him proper respect and, if kind, she probably cherishes real esteem for him. The marriage was probably not of her choosing, and very likely not of his. Marriage is a state entered into dutifully by all sons and daughters. It builds the tribe or great family which is at bottom the object of a Syrian’s greatest devotion next to himself, and often before himself.