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WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY

quil, felicitous married life in Turkey is due largely to the pains that men take in learning the art of love.

There is no rending sex-antagonism in Turkey, as in England at the present day. Men and women accept one another joyfully as gifts from the gods. They fulfil their sex-lives naturally, without concern as to which sex is the more virtuous or superior. I am not assuming that all is wrong with our own marriage system and that everything is right with wedlock in Turkey.

There are, however, certain sane and beneficial customs in Turkey that other nations might imitate. English and American women, who have seen the inner home-life of the Turks, frequently assert that the women are, on the whole, in a better position than in any other country of Europe; indeed, one American lady has declared that women in Turkey are more esteemed, and have higher privileges, than in the United States.^[1]

Lady Mary Wortley Montague gives several pictures of Turkish harem life in her time. At Adrianople, she paid a visit to a serai containing about two hundred women. She was received with the utmost courtesy.

 

"The first sofas were covered with cushions and rich carpets, on which sat the ladies, and on the second their slaves, behind them, but without any distinction of rank by their dress,

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1. See "Palaces of the Sultan," Anna Bowman Dodd, and Mrs. Garnett's "Women of Turkey."