Evening Star Newspaper, April 6, 1930, Page 92

=ms——————=° walks with firm, strong steps that seem to sym- belize her newly acquired indepemdence—which she accepts as @ right, not & coneession. Before she danced she learned to run. In school she played basket ball, hockey, hand ball, tennis— all the outdoor games Western girls know. And played them well. As the music ceases and our modern young woman retums to the table, note the poise of hes, the lithe, healthy grace of her. Incredibly narrow is her waist, for the Chinese girl inher- its the figure that Western women endure a punitive diet to achieve. But broad are her sheulders: exercise has strengthened them. And Mmufllepmmmuc'msmm' which must be hidden from eyes, but prideful lmbs, sinewy, shapely, strong. If her short skirt shocks the older people a little—why, so dees her bobbed hair, and what of it? In this little l]acy you have the mentor, the of Oriental femininity. The proto- types ave legion. It is she and her kind whe have set up a new standard for young women of the vast middle class—the bourgeois, if you like—in China. HE modern girl is most moticeable in the treaty ports. In thousands she exists, im Shanghai, Tientsin, Peiping, Tsingtao, Canton, Foochow, Amoy, Nanking, Hankow-—wherever Movies, radio, gramaphone, modern literature, returned students and the “equality of sexes” executives, there are hundreds of clerks and stenegraphers. The central executive commitice, the party hiesarchy which holds the final veteo power and shapes the policies of the National governmens, has feur woman members. The oldest of them, Mrs. Sun Yai-sen (Soemg Chimg-ling), is the .widow of China's new pairvici-deity, the so- .calied “Pather of the Republic” Her popu- .Jarity with the Chinese masses perhaps is sec- ond enly to that of her late husband. And just as the deified Sun Yat-sen is worshipped by thousands of impressionable Chinese boys, his widow Rhas become the mode! for the young .women. This is not altogether saisfactory to the older people, when they remember that, in order to marry her Sun “scrapped” the broken- footed bride of his youth; for divorce, while theoretically a simple matter in China, in the -past was so frowned uponm by public cpinion that it was literally impossible. Sun and his second bride, Soong Ching-ling, had to run the gantiet of public distaste, but both of them Bhave emerged today with their fame undimmed. What Sun Yat-sen had done with impunity, thought hundreds of his followers, they also ‘would do. Dissatisfied with similar bargains which their parents had made for them, acolytes of the “late leader” have followed his example. Divoree has become common; among the radi- cals it has become even popular. “Lotus wives”’ are being abandoned for more youthful mates themselves of “unfaithful” husbands—incongru- eus as this may sound in a nation where con- eubines have been the male prerogative for een- Rmmcw'mn«mm . the Nationalist Revolution. It was inevi- table that susceptible young men and women, thrown in dally contact as workers in the : THE SUNDAY STAR, WASHINGTON, D. C, APRIL 6, 1930. Chinese beauties are invading the stage, displacing men as actresses. who now reigns as the Pirst Lady of New China, is the mest striking example of the Westernized Chinese girl who is making history here today. Because of the circumstances under which she was married, the new Mme. Chiang has had to face the odium of disapproval from con- servative circles which still regard divorce as a thing of evil imported from across the seas. At present tongues still wag and the mossbacks still gossip, but this does not seem to discon- cert Soong Mei-ling. She is too absorbed with the problems of her own generation—the youth that is building national character for Chinese women. Besides her official duties—she is an- Iy g! 4 : ! s : d fuese i i 1 Bys : ; awakening the intevest of our countrywomen in And, as revealing the thinking proecesses of this first lady, note this paragraph: “Somewhere 1 have read that a woman is, first of all, a creature of emotion and that her emotion must be awakened before her reason- ing functions. Sounds a bit Nietzsche-esque! Be that as it may, I have discovered that to arcuse interest among ourselves the first step is to awaken the heart. This sounds like sob stuff and I dislite the tremulo chord, but I think it is understood what I am trying to say. After all, humanity—sympathy with people in pain and distress—can hold together a group of women who otherwise, because of differences in training and outlook on life, have little in common. I have found this clearly illustrated by the women of our association, some of whom are old-fashioned wives of high officials of the government, others of whom are modern wives of returned students.” in the association is made up President Chiang Keai-Shek and his wife. The fact that she typed the letier herself also is typical of the self-sufficiency of her “We sent telegrams,” she writes, “to every provinee, asking the leading women of each orm organizations similar to the 8. which we had begun in Nanking. In roved most gratifying, is run by a weman surgeon who has a dozen male doctors on her staff. In Shanghai the famous Bethel Hospital is run by Dr. Mary Stone and her sister. They have entered the field of journalism, t0o0. The editor of the most popular paper in North China is a young woman who succeeded her husband after he had been executed for subversive writing directed against the reign of Chang Tso-lin. At the nation’s capital the head of the United Press Bureau is a 25-year- ola skip of a girl who received her education at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. In the elementary schools women have almost replaced male teachers, while a genesation ago they were regarded as curiosities. The presie dent of the large Gin-ling College at Nanking is Dr. Lu, a cultured and charming woman, who received her Ph. D. from an American university only a few years ago. And in private schools there are dozens of female principals. Women are eoming into their own in busi- ness. too. Wing On’s, S8un Sun's and Sincere’s, the three largest department steres in Shanghai, employ hundreds of girls as clerks. And each store has woman buyers who make annual trips abroad. The vice president of a large Chimes: insur- ance company is one of those ‘“butterfly” creatures frequently seen dancing at the Ma- jestic. The brains behind the success of Liao Kai Fook's, Shanghal’s most celebrated silk store, is a woman, and recently in Shanghai a new taxi company announced that its ears would be driven by experienced Chinese chauf- feurettes. Women even have gone in for banditry and kidnaping. Fer complicity in armed robberies three women were executed at the Shanghal garrison during the last six months. The noto- rious Bias Bay pirates, from whose lair near Hongkong shipping has been preyed upon for the Iast half dosen years, acknowledge as their leader a daring girl, who recently wrote her biography for a Cantonese paper. Stories of the exploits of an equally astonishing young woman who heads a kind of Robin Hood bandit aggre= gation in war-torn Honan have lately filled the Chinese press. Several times sh: has spurned official overtures offering her a responsible post in reward for her renunciation of bandit life. The theater, which for ec:nturies banned woman participants, is undergoing a revolution with their restoration to the stage. Formerly all female roles were enacted by men. Today women are women in the drama—and the audience seems to like the innovation. Upon all this new activity the irate elders, of whom there are just as many (or more) than elsewhere in the world, look with frown- ing disapprobation. Young America may be surprised to know that much the same recrimi- naticns as are heaped upon it are now being directed at the modern Chinese girl. As a mat- ter of fact, the most current eriticism one hears from the reactionaries concerns the American- ization of their women. “What we resent,” a dignified pater once told me, “is the desertion of the old virtues of Chinese womanhood for the cheap, the bizarre, the superficial accoutrements of the W:est—the type of girl who bobs her hair, smokes cigarettes, euts off half her skirt and imitates mannerisms which she has picked up from the latest flapper ‘movie.’” UT, oddly enough, it is the young men, often those who are the most modern and West= ernized, who are the severest critics of New Lady China. While editor of an English language journal that eirculates largely among Western-educated Chinese I accidentally opened up an interesting forum by publishing an editorial on the question. My attitude was that much undeserved criti- cism has been leveled at the modern girl. I even felt it was conceivable that, despite all her alleged shortcomings, she somehow would pull her race through another - g-neration. This opinion did not find eoncurrence among our male readers. I began to receive essays and articles which roundly scored the modern girl's tendency to imitate the West, maintaining that she was even more ornamental than the “porcelain woman” of yesterday. The perorae tion of these animadvertents was delivered, I think, by a young business man who wrote: “She (the modern girl) bobs her hair, puts on foreign-style shoes and dresses and carries foreign handbags. Prom hcad to foot every- thing on her either is of foreign make or imitation of foreign goods. To oe she is afraid of no man and goes out with them to dancing halls and cinema houses to have a good time. She stays out late at night and enjoys as much freedom as her pursuance of excite= ment she looks upon home life as dreary and tiresome and domestic affairs as trivial and unworthy. Thus she neither goes into the kitchen nor makes her own clothes, as her older sister did. “She defies the orders of her parents and laughs at the teachings of the old ' female virtues. She attends school not for the sake of education, but for bettering her chances in selecting a husband. At schoel her curriculum is learning new dance steps and imvorted love songs. “We find such modern girls everywhere, eon- stantly increasing im pumbers. The young man who has not yet married looks upon them with suspicion and terror and remains at the crosse roads to muse whether he should continue to lead a single but earefree life or bear the ! unnecessary burden of selecting a good-fore - nothing wife. And if you ask me what the modern Chinese girl has brought us, why, should say, ‘A bad matrimonal bargain and, thanks to the West, the ability to blow smoke through her nose!” ” O tempora! O mores! Oh, sad, embitlered young man! In you I seem to hear the echoes of 100,000 voices from afar. But the woman’s side of the guestion did not go unchampioned. Our gentler readers did not wait for some errant knight of words to come along—not they! They wrote their own defense, sent thrilling thrusts at the unsympathetic male. One young woman, in her conchiding sentence, paraphrased the last sentence of the letter just quoted: “And if you ask me what the modern girn has given to China, why, I should say, ‘More than the modern boy deserves, and, thanks to her native intelligenee, the wit to defend herself against all crities? Granting which, quite obvicusly nothing more need be added, unless it is to remind you that if you have anything to say about tragdie tional “Old Lady China” you had better hurry, for this spirited young woman is fast making her non est!