Empress and Mrs. Conger, The: The Uncommon Friendship of Two Women and Two Worlds

17 - Forbidden cities

17 Forbidden cities Perhaps it was in the great Lama Temple in Beijing where Sarah had her most significant epiphany regarding the lot of Chinese women. While attending a Buddhist service there, she had looked around and been surprised to find herself the only female in the temple. Her reaction was not just that of a woman used to seeing women and men sitting side by side in churches in America. It was the feminism that moved such women as Margaret Sanger, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Mary Baker Eddy to look at the inequalities of the sexes and wonder what gave men the right to impose them. For Sarah, who often wrote of the “Father and Mother God,” men had even less right to decide whether a woman should show herself in a house of worship. “Why should the worship of the Supreme Creator, Protector, and Sustainer of all good,” Sarah asked, “be so hedged in by forms, ceremonies, laws and rituals, as to bar out woman?”1 “When I came to China,” Sarah confided to a friend, “it was my unyielding effort, from the first, to learn all that I could of her people and from her people.” Yet, as she found, “high walls, locked gates, curtained chairs and carts, and long-established customs” kept her from knowing the female half of China’s population. “The streets of Peking were 250 The Empress and Mrs. Conger thronged with men,” she recorded, “but women were seldom seen.” She had patiently “listened for answers,” doing what she could to penetrate these many “forbidden cities.” From a desire to see and know these hidden women, Sarah settled down to work the system, and little by little, the locked doors opened. By this last year of her Chinese sojourn, and for all her reservations about some of their practices, Sarah believed that missionaries in China could be commended for one very important act: opening, and holding open, the door not just between China and the West, but between China’s women and the world.2 Female missionaries in particular had been extremely helpful to Sarah in her own Chinese self-education. They had given her the key, through their services as interpreters and sources of insider knowledge, to unlock the doors she needed to get behind so that she could meet the real women of China. Had these missionary women not bridged the gap between her and Cixi, all the opportunities of standing together with the dowager, holding hands as they gazed at beautiful vistas, would not have helped her, or Cixi, know who the other woman really was.3 There were other foreign women in China who, in deploring the way foreign males abused China’s sovereign rights, defended what one historian calls “a female kind of authority when they defended China.” Unlike Sarah, who supported a woman’s right to vote and thought a world without gender equality (“a grand brotherhood”) a place not just off-kilter but an obstacle to a divine plan, many foreign women in China stood up for the Chinese but would not have dreamed of defending their own rights. Yet they often saw the two as intertwined. “According to the tenets of domestic ideology, authority was best applied indirectly,” notes one historian, and at the very least, authority should be conducted at all times “according to the rules of decorum.” American women had emerged from the Civil War in both the north and south embodying the woman’s role as imparted by the Victorian age: to be the bearers of succor to their men, whether wounded in battle or weary after a hard day at work; to be the civilizing influence, teaching the children manners, and softening, if only by example, a husband’s rougher edges. The women who came to China had, by and large, lived through the Civil War or were the daughters of women who had. They came to China emboldened by the Gospel or the spirit of adventure (evangelism demanding both) 251 Forbidden cities to bring that sense of decorum with which Victorian Christendom was imbued and offer it to people assumed to be living godless lives of error. These women literally believed themselves sent “to bear witness of that Light . . . which lighteth every man that cometh into the world.” When some of them reached China, however, like Sarah their sympathy for the Chinese superseded the orthodoxy of Christian belief...