History of Women in China
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It is difficult for Westerners to understand China. While there are always analogies to be drawn between different civilizations, Europe has few parallels to Chinese history. The unbroken continuity of culture, the unique socio-political structures, and the amazing revolutionary experiment of the 20th century set the Chinese into a category by themselves, especially from the Western perspective. While our Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian, scientific-industrial, imperialist-capitalist heritage has transformed the entire world, we have nothing resembling Taoism, Buddhism, Confucianism, or communism. Our nuclear families and weak kinship contrasts with their extended families and clans, while their collectivism and our individualism are polar opposites. Western women have only recently emancipated themselves from the yoke of male domination and achieved equality, yet nothing in the long history of sexism can compare with the oppression of Chinese women, unless it be the Indian civilization from which some of its worst features were derived. "Few societies in history have prescribed for women a more lowly status, or treated them in a more routinely brutal way, than traditional Confucian China" (Johnson, 1983, 1).The historical facts are overwhelming. Along with economic, legal, and sociological discrimination, one must consider the psychological and the spiritual. It is as if the traditional Confucian Chinese male was threatened by the female, and could not accept her personhood or
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rbarians who threatened her people. There were women who flew, who had superhuman strength, and who were invulnerable to pain. The realities, however, were much grimmer. Kay Ann Johnson has searched Chinese historical documents to glean what few statistics are available about the conditions of women in the past. She found "a female suicide profile that exceeded men at all ages and bulged during the painful years of betrothal and early marriage, relatively high rates of female infanticide in times of economic hardship and significantly higher mortality rates among the numerous young girls who were 'adopted' in childhood for marriage (2).
By the 19th and 20th centuries "a consciousness of the blatant abuses of women began to surface among a segment of the population" - chiefly among the urban intelligensia (2). Imperialist encroachments by Western nations brought both radical foreign ideas and a sense of Chinese impotence to the forefront of popular awareness. Both reformist and revolutionary movements sprang up. In this national soul-searching, the oppression of Chinese women could no longer be ignored. In the late teens and early 20s of the last century Confucianism itself, the very moral basis of Chinese civilization, came under
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Approximate Word count = 2632
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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