ly asleep at home. You should see them with their short, wooden
mallets, like small clubs, beating the dirt out of the wet cotton
garments, soap being as yet an unknown luxury in the Corean household.
The poorer women, who have no washing accommodation at home, have to
repair to the streams, and, as the clothes have to be worn in the day,
the work must be done at night. Sometimes, too, three or more join
together and form washing parties, this, to a certain extent, relieving
the monotony of the kneeling down on the cold stone, pounding the clothes
until quite clean, and constantly having to break the ice that is
continually reforming round their very wrists. The women who are somewhat
better off do this at home, and if you were to take a walk through the
streets of Seoul by night you soon get familiar with the quick tick,
tick, tick, the time as regularly marked as that of a clock, heard from
many houses, especially previous to some festivity or public procession,
when everybody likes to turn out in his best. If a woman in our
country were sent out to do the washing under similarly trying
circumstances--and, mind, a suit of clothes takes no less than a couple
of hours to wash properly--I have no doubt that she might be tempted to
ask for a divorce from her husband for cruelty and ill-treatment; but the
woman of Cho-sen thinks nothing of it, and as long as it pleases the man
whom she must obey she does it willingly and without a word of complaint.
In fact, I am almost of opinion that the Corean woman likes to be made a
martyr, for, not unlike women of other more civilised countries, unless
she suffers, she does not consider herself to be quite happy!

It sounds funny and incongruous, but it really is so. While studying the
women of Corea, a former idea got deeply rooted in my head, that there is
nothing which will make a woman happier than the opportunity of showing
with what resignation she is able to bear the weight and drudgery of her
duty. If to that she can add complaint of ill-treatment, then her
happiness is unbounded. The woman of Cho-sen gets, to my mind, less
enjoyment out of life than probably any other woman in Asia. This life
includes misery, silence, and even separation from her children--the male
ones--after a certain age. What things could make a woman more unhappy?
Still, she seems to bear up well under it all, and even to enjoy all this
sadness, I suppose one always enjoys what one is accustomed to do,
o