Page:Walter Matthew Gallichan - Women under Polygamy (1914).djvu/172

 A Turkish beauty has tender, almond-shaped eyes, with pointed corners to the lids. Her face is often "made up" with various powders and rouge, and the rim of the eyelid is stained. In form the women of Turkey incline to plumpness and roundness, but they are often finely modelled. Their attractions begin to fade before middle-age, in spite of bathing, massage, and constant attention to the preservation of their good looks and their figures.

"About a century ago, Lady Craven wrote:—"I think I never saw a country where women may enjoy as much liberty and fear from all reproach as in Turkey." This opinion is confirmed by almost all the observant travellers whom I have questioned, and in numerous volumes to which I have referred. Several English women have written of the women of Turkey as down-trodden, immured and secluded, but such a view is scarcely just. Certainly, judged from a purely Western standpoint, Turkish women are debarred from specific forms of freedom enjoyed in Christian countries. But when a balance is struck, we shall perhaps realise that the difference between the status of the English woman and her sister in Turkey is not so marked as it appears.

Turkey has solved the problem of involuntary celibacy for women, which is one of the most palpable defects of the monogamous marriage system. We have tens of thousands of spinsters who are actually