Women in the New Taiwan

Gender Roles and Gender Consciousness in a Changing Society

Catherine Farris,Lee Anru,Murray A. Rubinstein,An East Gate Book

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000161434
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economia
• Subtopic: Condizioni economiche

Taiwan's rapid socio-economic and political transformation has given rise to a gender-conscious middle class that is attempting to redefine the roles of women in society, to restructure relationship patterns, and to organize in groups outside the family unit. This book examines internal psychological processes and external societal processes as the feminist movement in Taiwan expands and new gender roles are explored. The contributors represent a cross section of different disciplines - history, anthropology, and sociology - and different generations of China/Taiwan scholars. They place the issues facing Taiwan's women's movement in social, political, and economic contexts. The book examines gender relations, the role of women in Chinese society, and issues related to women in China throughout history. Feminism and gender relations are also viewed from the context of film and literature. The authors look at the contemporary roles that women play in Taiwan's work force today, how the sexes perceive each other in the workplace, and more.

Part I

Gender in Historical Perspective

1

What Can Feminist Theory Do for the Study of Chinese History?

A Brief Review of Scholarship in the United States

Susan Mann

Deffamiliarizing the Familiar

In the United States, feminist studies developed over the past two decades have presented new challenges and new opportunities for historians of Chinese women. One such challenge is the prospect of defamiliarizing familiar materials, dislodging them from conventional frameworks and turning them to new uses as texts. These familiar texts include biographies of exemplary women contained in official histories (lieh-nü chuan) and epitaphs (mu-chih-ming) or funeral odes (chi-wen) composed by men to honor the women they loved or admired.

The reason these familiar materials gain new historical meaning when subjected to feminist analysis is that feminist theory attempts explicitly to link structures of kinship, community, class, and state—structures where power is lodged—to the meaning or meanings of gender and sexuality at specific places and points in time. In particular, feminist theory argues that state-sponsored institutions—especially laws defining property relations, inheritance procedures, tax collection, corvée and military service, and criminal conduct—have a coherent historical relationship to the norms, ideologies, or values lodged in other social and cultural systems such as the family, religious organizations, and aesthetic or creative activities. These norms, ideologies, and values invariably include conceptions of what it means to be female or male, masculine or feminine (Ross and Rapp 1981).

Thus feminist theory has special promise for historians of China. We have reams of material about temporal change in China’s imperial institutions and organizations, but we have tended to assume that “virtue” and other norms governing gender and sexuality are somehow timeless and transcendent, disembodied from other aspects of social and cultural change.

1. The author thanks Professor Yip Hon-ming of the Chinese University of Hong Kong for critical comments on an earlier draft.
2. Originally published in Research on Women in Modern Chinese History 1 (1993): 241–60. Used with permission.

For historians of China working in the United States, the path-breaking work exploring the relationship between gender and power in Chinese society has come from outside the discipline of history. The first was anthropologist Margery Wolf’s classic Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (first published in 1972), in which her analysis of what she called the “uterine family” and the women’s community in a Taiwan village permanently complicated and defamiliarized our male-centered view of the so-called patriarchal Chinese family system. The next major breakthrough was sociologist Judith Stacey’s feminist analysis of the Chinese Revolution—Patriarchy and Socialist Revolution in China, published in 1983. Stacey’s analysis of Mao Tse-tung’s New Democracy policy showed, for example, that from a feminist perspective New Democracy actually meant, simply, “a wife for every peasant.”

Both Wolf and Stacey chose subjects about which U.S. historians of China had published widely accepted, well-documented interpretations. But the two authors turned those interpretations upside down, simply by reanalyzing them from a feminist perspective. They simply defamiliarized the familiar.

Familiar Chinese historical materials have continued to yield new insights when gender as a category of analysis is used. One of the most striking areas of research has been female biography. Biographies of women fill the pages of every standard history, whether compiled by the central government or by a county magistrate. Already, numerous studies of female biographies have demonstrated that, far from being timeless, they display both temporal and regional variation. T’ien Ju-k’ang’s (1988) study of women’s suicide, based on biographies from three parts of China, calls attention to the specific cultural and economic conditions that encouraged women in Fukien to commit suicide in extraordinary numbers. Mark Elvin (1984) has analyzed the role of the Ming and Ch’ing Chinese state in promoting the chaste-widow cult as an example of state intrusion into a realm marked as “domestic” or “private” in Western societies. Ann Waltner (1981) and others (e.g., Mann 1987) have used female biography to examine changing attitudes toward women in late imperial times. A recent study by Katherine Carlitz (1991) has focused on readers and publishers of female biographies in Ming times.

Other new studies have dramatized shifts in Confucian values and attitudes affecting women and women’s roles, once again by rereading familiar materials. Joanna Handlin’s (1975) research on Lü K’un revealed changes in late-Ming attitudes toward women’s education. Kang-I Sun Chang’s (1991) recent study of Ch’en Tzu-lung and Liu Ju-shih shows how women came to serve as symbols of “love and loyalism” at a particular point in historical time, under the particular conditions of the late Ming collapse. Statecraft writings of the mid-Ch’ing period can be analyzed to show that promoting women’s work was part of mid-Ch’ing programs to maintain a viable tax base while ensuring the continued prosperity and well-being of the farm population (Mann 1992).

Rediscovering Neglected Sources

Feminist theory produces not only startling new discoveries when applied to familiar sources. It also stimulates a quest for new or neglected sources. Studies of familiar works about women written by men have provoked interest in writings by women themselves. This in turn has inspired a search for lost or neglected women’s writings, especially since the publication of Hu Wen-k’ai’s (1985) survey of writings by women in Chinese history. In the United States, a new field of literary studies is exploring changes in women’s writings and identifying the differences between the male and the female voice in Chinese literary works.¹ Dorothy Ko (1994) has just completed a new history of women in the late Ming and early Ch’ing that is based almost exclusively on writings by women themselves. Kang-I Sun Chang is compiling a mammoth three-volume set of translations of poetry by Chinese women.² In art history, interest in female painters and calligraphers is growing rapidly, together with related research on women’s clothing, fashion, hairstyles, and the representation of the female body in art.³ Charlotte Furth (1987, 1988) is completing a systematic study of medical practice and conceptions of the female body represented in medical texts. These new interests are increasingly evident in exhibits and conference papers.⁴

Still, as Patricia Ebrey commented at a recent academic meeting, gender as a category of analysis has yet to make a broad impact on historical studies of China, especially for earlier periods.⁵ In the field of China studies in the United States, research placing women at the center has yet to realize its potential to reshape the historical record.

Reconceptualizing the Organization of Chinese Society in Historical Time

The first wave of historical research on Chinese women in both the United States and China was devoted to documenting and criticizing women’s oppression by men. A major target of criticism was patriarchy. Feminist scholarship on Chinese women by historians in the United States, which exploded during the 1970s, followed leads established decades earlier by Chinese historians—Chinese historians in turn were influenced by China’s own early feminist movement, especially by the May Fourth critique of Confucianism and the patriarchal family system. Ch’en Tung-yuan 1977 [1928] and others wrote the classic secondary works on which U.S. historians have relied to pursue their research on the place of women in Chinese history.

In the United States recent feminist research on Chinese women’s history has now moved in different, although related, directions. The aim is not to document women’s oppression but rather to illuminate the connections between gender relations and other larger structures of power lodged in economic organizations, political structures, and so forth. For example, the first English-language historical study of prostitution in China, Sue Gronewold’s (1982) “Beautiful Merchandise: Prostitution in China, 1860–1936,” focused on the Chinese patriarchal system and the ways in which it facilitated a traffic in women’s bodies. But her evidence may be pushed beyond a critique of oppression and toward a new understanding of the broad systems and structures that organize gender relations in Chinese history.

To do this, scholars might start by asking the same questions that have been asked about the history of prostitution in the West:

1. How do the structural conditions expressing and articulating certain conceptions of gender self-reproduce?
2. How are these conditions connected to larger structures of kinship, community, class, and state formation in history?
3. How do they change over time?

Asking those questions enables us to identify two complementary, but discrete, structures of female sexuality in late imperial China. The first was a structure of marriage and reproduction; the second, a structure of prostitution and procurement.

These two structures of traffic in women, to borrow a phrase from Gayle Rubin (1975), were separate. The first of these built family systems and reproductive systems through the exchange of brides. The second replicated itself through a cycle in which young girls were sold or forced into prostitution, then, compelled by aging to abandon their profession for the role of procuress, obtained other girls to serve as prostitutes, and so forth. With those two structures in mind, we could then divide all Chinese families with daughters in late imperial times into two groups: those who married their daughters into the structures of sexual reproduction within the family; and those who sold their daughters into the structures providing sexual gratification outside the family.

Of course, the two structures were not entirely discrete. In times of political upheaval, respectable married women could be forced into prostitution. Among certain classes and certain ethnic or subethnic groups, prostitution by female family members (including wives and marriageable daughters) served as a legitimate means of supporting the family or earning a dowry. Even respectable widows and divorcees, if impoverished, might turn to prostitution. By the same token, a prostitute or courtesan favored by a rich patron might be purchased to join his family as a concubine. In addition, some might argue that the line separating “sale” of daughters from “marriage” of daughters was not entirely clear because of the customary bride’s price required in many parts of the empire. Finally, we know that a very few women seceded entirely from both of these systems, either as spiritual adepts devoted to solitary meditation or as members of sisterhoods or convents. Ann Waltner’s studies of T’an Yang-tzu (1987) explore this side of women’s spirituality. Marjorie Topley (1975), Janice Stockard (1989), Maria Jaschok (1988), and others have studied the sisterhoods and delayed-transfer marriage patterns unique to the Canton delta region.

For the sake of argument, however, suppose we treat these two structures as separate worlds, produced and reproduced in the everyday lives of women and their families. If we look to the systems that upheld, stabilized, and protected the binary structure of traffic in women in the late empire, we find three levels where crucial decisions were made or policies implemented to maintain them: the household, the community, and the state. At the household level the most basic decisions began the process that determined which structure a woman would enter. Poor families were the first to sell or pawn their women, though not necessarily with the intention of sending a daughter into prostitution. Poor families also lacked the resources and the networks to verify the credentials that distinguished prospective buyers from bona fide marriage partners. At the household level, then, the dividing line between the two structures was the line separating those families who could protect their women from sale, and everybody else. This definition of “class” in late imperial Chinese society becomes visible only through the lens of feminist analysis.

A second critical decision-making level was the community. Mores in some communities may have sanctioned the participation of member households in both structures...