“Although, owing to the scarcity, a woman is a valuable commodity, she is treated with the utmost contempt, and her existence is infinitely worse than the very animals of her lord and master.  Polyandry is generally practised, increasing the horror of her position, for she is required to be a slave to a number of masters, who treat her with the most rigorous harshness and brutality.  From the day of her birth until her death (few Pa-Urg women live to be fifty) her life is one protracted period of degradation.  She is called upon to perform the most menial and degrading of services and the entire manual labor of the community, it being considered base of a male to engage in other labor than that of warfare and the chase....

“When a child is to be born the mother is driven from the village in which she lives, and is compelled to take up her abode in some roadside hut or cave in the open country, a scanty supply of food, furnished by her husbands, being brought to her by the other women of the tribe.  When the child is born the mother remains with it for one or two months, and then leaving it in a cave, returns to the village and informs her eldest husband of its birth and the place where she has left it.  If the child is a male, some consideration is shown to her; should it be a female, however, her lot is frightful, for aside from the severe beating to which she is subjected by her husband, she suffers the scorn and contumely of the rest of the tribe.  If a male child, the husband goes to the cave and brings it back to the village; if it is of the opposite sex he is left to his own volition; sometimes he returns with the female infant; as often he ignores it entirely and allows it to perish, or may dispose of it to some other man as a prospective wife."[26]

In Corea women are so little esteemed that they do not even receive separate names, and a husband considers it an act of condescension to speak to his wife.  When a young man of the ruling classes marries, he spends three or four days with his bride, then returns to his concubine, “in order to prove that he does not care much for the bride.” (Ploss, II., 434.) “The condition of Chinese women is most pitiable,” writes the Abbe Hue: 

“Suffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery and degradation, seize on her in the cradle, and accompany her to the tomb.  Her birth is commonly regarded as a humiliation and a disgrace to the family—­an evident sign of the malediction of heaven.  If she be not immediately suffocated, a girl is regarded and treated as a creature radically despicable, and scarcely belonging to the human race.”

He adds that if a bridegroom dies, the most honorable course for the bride is to commit suicide.  Even the Japanese, so highly civilized in some respects, look down on women with unfeigned contempt, likening themselves to heaven and the women to earth.  There are ten stations on the way up the sacred mount Fuji.