Germany
Germany, Thursday, 11 March 1886
MISS TRINIDAD RIZAL
MY DEAR SISTER
Since I left our country I have received only four or five lines written by your hand, one or two insignificant news about you and nothing more. I don’t know how you are and I cannot imagine your person. When I left you, you were very small. Now within two months you are going to be 18 years and in four years I suppose that you have grown up and you are becoming a young lady. At your age, German women seem to be 20 or 24 years, as much for their faces as for their ways. The German woman is serious, studious, and diligent, and as their clothes do not have plenty of color, and generally they have only three or four, they do not pay much attention to their clothes nor to jewels. They dress their hair simply, which is thin, but beautiful in their childhood. They go everywhere walking so nimbly or faster than men, carrying their books, their baskets, without minding anyone and only their own business. As I said to Pangoy, they are home-loving and they study cooking with as much diligence as they do music and drawing.
If our sister María had been educated in Germany, she would have been notable, because German women are active and somewhat masculine. They are not afraid of men. They are more concerned with the substance than with appearances. Until now I have not heard women quarreling. which in Madrid is the daily bread.
It is a pity that there in our country the principal adornment of all women almost always consists of clothes and finery rather than of knowledge. In our provinces, women still preserve a virtue that compensates for their little instruction – the virtue of industry and tenderness. In no woman in Europe have I found the latter virtue in such a high degree as among the women there. If these qualities that nature gives to the women there were exalted by intellectual qualities, as it happens in Europe, the Filipino family has nothing to envy the European. For this reason, now that you are still young and you have time to learn, it is necessary that you study by reading and reading attentively. It is a pity that you allow yourself to be dominated by laziness when it takes so little effort to shake it off. It is enough to form only the habit of study and later everything goes by itself.
I hope to receive a letter from you to see whether you are or not; if you can, write me in Spanish.
Your brother,
RIZAL
01-149 [Family]