[I added a few paragraph breaks for easier reading.]Bardesag, Aug. 17. 1876.
My dear sister.
Would you like to know how you would live if you had been born in Bardesag, instead of "that beautiful and patriotic town" as the papers have it, "that raised the first money to support the Revolutionary Government"?
You would be apt to dye your hair red, for one thing, braid it in a dozen braids or so, to hang down your back, and wear a thin cloth headdress. You would wear a gold coin in each ear, and a string of them, more or less according to your wealth, about your neck. You would disguise yourself in those "shelvake" they wear, or great baggy trousers, and you would not be particular about fastenings to your waists. In the whole of your life you might dispense with collars and cuffs, and ribbons and gloves and hats and bonnets, and in summer time, at least, with shoes and stockings.
You would be married young, and call your husband your "head" and, if you belonged to the last generation, you would not presume to mention his name, nor for years speak aloud in the presence of his mother. But if you belonged to this generation, and had caught a breath of the penetrating nineteenth century atmosphere, you might openly refuse obedience to that same mother-in-law, and cause no end of trouble. You might even call your husband by his first name, or go to the hazardous extreme of flatly refusing to marry the man ordained for you.
But whatever else were true, you would work. Whether or not your head sat all day in the house, without a sign of any occupation. You would work. You would dig the ground in the mulberry gardens; you would pound the wheat; you would bring the water from the fountains; you would do all the harvesting; you would scrub the floors, and keep them scrubbed as white as sand ever made a New England kitchen; you would take the clothes off to some running stream to wash them; - you might work in the silk factory and earn from twelve to eighteen cents in a long day that begins at three o'clock in the winter mornings and ends at seven or eight in the evenings.
And you would have fifty children, fortynine always of the same apparent age & size. When you were young I could promise you beautiful teeth, and you might be very strong; but again you might be sickly, and when you were old, what a miserable looking object you would be. You would bury ever so many children, because you did not know how to take care of them, and perhaps two or three of them would die fright!
You would never learn to read or write, if you were of the older generation, and it was scarcely possible you ever would, if the missionary had not come to set up the standard of christian education. You would never see or handle book or paper, never receive a letter. Who knows what you would think about from years end to years end? Never taught to sing, never touching refined culture any where, with what kind of a voice would you speak? Perhaps nature would give you a pleasant contralto voice, but the the [sic] chances are many that you would shout on some surprising key, and go through life shouting. Never reading books what grammar will you use, & how will you pronounce words? (So as to puzzle me to despiration [sic] the words that I know are twisted out of shape.)
But it is time, my ear native, to take you to your "house," Since observing how completely a house may be emptied of what we call furnishings, and what with us are considered inseperable [sic] from ordinary family uses and needs, and life yet go[es] on from generation to generation, I have had some deep speculations on the subject. Who can tell what a strictly normal development is? Or who knows, how much that we think necessary is sheer superfluity?
But interior Turkey is the standard, I am sure, for teach your village girls to read, start the latent power into activity ever so little, and her wants multiply, she craves more means and creates them, and has use for them.
I never used to take to those S. S. hymns, about being thankful I was not born a "heathen child.["] I used to look on it as on Marjorie Flemings being "thankful we are not beggars," both out of the line of my reasonabl[e] occasions, for thanksgiving. But I take it all back now. I beg God will not let me be less than utterly thankful for that happy, happy lot that gave me to breath[e] the air of dear favored America, from my birth, instead of poor backward, suppressed, unblessed Turkey.
And the human heart here is the human heart all around the world. If women here would be blunt to our griefs, theirs are keen. If we had begun here, instead of in our happy home, sickness would be sickness to us, and oppression and grinding want, and the shadows of death. And the heart would cry out in its darkness, for rest and hope and comfort.
I spent this afterno[o]n making my second tour about the village with Soupri Hanum, the Bible woman. We go into the houses, or we talk with the women people in the streets. Sometimes I sit on a basket turned upside down, or on a wooden bowl, or a cloth spread on the stones. Yesterday in one of the narrow stony streets we sat, (I was on a bundle of shavings) and an old woman, a stranger in the village, told Soupri Hanum how death had lately taken away her child. The Bible woman told her what a record of death the world had seen, how Adam died, and Seth died, and Methusaleh died, but at last One died that all may live forever.
As she went on with her story of comfort for the mourner, tears filled the woman[']s eyes. "But I can't read," she said; ["]how shall I know these things? If I ask my children to pray or read or make the cross, they don't know how, and then I tell them to go to work." Such sights before our own eyes are milling.
With love yr. aff. sister Ellen C. Parsons.
Letter from Miss Parsons, of the Constantinople Home - written at Bardezag, a mission station of the Am. Board - S.E. from Constantinople.