WOMEN UNDER POLYGAMY
the veritable belle who lacks humour and intelligence. The favourite wife is often unattractive in features and ungainly in body.
Bathing is an elaborate ritual and an ancient institution of the country. Prolonged and constant ablutions are, as we have seen, a common practice in most Mohammedan communities. In Persia women are as much addicted to hot bathing as the Turkish women. The bath-house is like a club, a place of social resort; and women spend several hours, or the greater part of the day, steeping themselves in hot water, undergoing massage and friction, and lounging on divans in warm chambers. The bath is a principal rendezvous for the women of fashion in the higher classes.
Bathing is an almost painful process in Persia and Afghanistan, and foreigners shrink from the immersion in scalding water, the hot douches, and the drastic pounding and pinching of the flesh. The operation leaves those unaccustomed to it in a state of limp enervation.
Persian ladies demand of their husbands sufficient pin-money to pay for frequent baths, and a refusal to comply would be regarded as unkindness.[1] In the bathing-houses women associate freely; they gossip,
- ↑ If the husband refuses to make the wife a fair allowance for baths and entertainments, she may take what money she can find in the house, and it is proper if she bites and scratches her spouse till he pays the pocket-money.
219
