The young wife of a shoemaker one day lost her temper because her husband said he could not afford to buy her something she wanted. She proceeded to break all the ornaments in the house and to tear her best _chādar_ to rags. Her husband, who was a Christian, went to the English missionary to ask whether it would be allowable under the circumstances to beat her.
Another girl refused to cook her husband any food when he came home from his work, and would not even speak to him. She admitted that he was very kind to her, and that she liked him better than her own brothers, but still continued to sulk in this way. Her own relations said a good beating was what she wanted, but her husband had scruples about wife-beating, and would not do anything. But not many Persian husbands are so forbearing.
Another necessary result of these early marriages is the custom of living with the husband’s parents. A girl of even fourteen is not fit to be given sole charge of a house. So the bridegroom takes his bride home to his father’s house, and puts her under the charge of her mother-in-law. When, however, the mother-in-law becomes a widow, she has to take a secondary place, if her daughter-in-law is at all of an age to manage her own affairs. Then the old lady often prefers to leave her son’s house, and to go and live with a married daughter, and the men are generally very good in taking in their mothers-in-law.
Poor little girl wives! They are taken away from home before they are grown up, and although they are now married women they cannot help behaving as children. There was one young wife of a Government official who received her visitors with the utmost dignity and propriety, and then could not resist the temptation to pinch the old black woman who was handing the tea and make her jump.
And they hardly know what to do with their babies. They love to nurse them and play with them, but they get very tired of them and are often glad to hand them over to the grandmother. I went to condole with one girl on the death of her dear little baby, and she said, “It was just as well it died before the winter. It would have been such cold work getting up in the night to look after it.”
Even when the children grow older their mothers, grown-up children themselves, do not know how to manage them. What do you think of mothers who lose their tempers with their children, and fly at them and bite them? And they are not ashamed of it, and their neighbours do not seem surprised or horrified. One woman bit her little boy’s hand, till it bled badly. He was about seven, and had cried to have his best coat on when he went to see the missionary. Another woman bit the cheek of a poor little consumptive girl of eight or nine, so that there was a great bruise, and the skin was broken. She told a neighbour, with a laugh, that she had got angry with the child because she was tiresome about taking her medicine, which was very nasty.