"Teach not thy daughter letters; let her not live on the roof."

_Moorish Proverb._


Of no country in the world can it more truly be said than of the
Moorish Empire that the social condition of the people may be measured
by that of its women. Holding its women in absolute subjection, the
Moorish nation is itself held in subjection, morally, politically,
socially. The proverb heading this chapter, implying that women should
not enjoy the least education or liberty, expresses the universal
treatment of the weaker sex among Mohammedans. It is the subservient
position of women which strikes the visitor from Europe more than all
the oriental strangeness of the local customs or the local art and
colour. Advocates of the restriction of the rights of women in our own
land, and of the retention of disabilities unknown to men, who fail to
recognize the justice and invariability of the principle of absolute
equality in rights and liberty between the sexes, should investigate
the state of things existing in Morocco, where the natural results of
a fallacious principle have had free course.

No welcome awaits the infant daughter, and few care to bear the evil
news to the father, who will sometimes be left uninformed as to the
sex of his child till the time comes to name her. It is rarely that
girls are taught to read, or even to understand the rudiments of their
religious system. Here and there a father who ranks in Morocco as
scholarly, takes the trouble to teach his children at home, including
his daughters in the class, but this is very seldom the case. Only
those women succeed in obtaining even an average education in whom