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Home › Forums › Summer Institutes › Gender And Generation In East Asia, Summer 2019 › Session 2 - August 5, Clayton Dube, USC
Celeste Modster.
cgaoPlease read these materials ahead of class. As you read, please think about if the primary source could be used with your students and how you might use it. Please also watch the videos to see if you might be able to use a portion with students.
Premodern China
Modern China
Premodern Japan
Modern Japan
Optional Films (YouTube, Kanoply):
Marcos RicoShen Yifei talks about the contrast in the media between the traditional image of a Chinese mothers and a new modern Hot mom. It mentions how this hot mom concept started to appear in the media after 2003, and has gained more traction ever since. The traditional image of a Chinese Mother is based on the rural women, while the image of the hot mom is based on the middle class urban women. Chinese media has associated the image of the hot mom with feminism. The speaker mentions how it is mostly on appearence a success of feminism, because the chinese society is still a patriarch society were women are still expected to fullfill the same duties as a traditional “good” chinese mother. But is is now expected that they should look “pretty” as a hot mom.
Diana CoreyI was struck by the incentives to take longer maternity leaves revealed in this chapter. It is the kind of thing I can only dream about as a mom in America. Women were given the option to take 3 years at home while receiving 75% of their salary? Sold! This sounds like such a great deal to me! But to see the institutional reasons for encouraging this is just enraging. It's not about the health of the woman or the baby, but in order to avoid budget lines for nurseries and rooms for nursing or pumping, and ultimately there is no desire to have these women in the workplace and no real job security for them. This is a good reminder to look not just at the face value of opportunities, but examine why they are being offered and ensure that nobody (usually a category of people) is being hurt by it.
clay dubeHi Folks,
Apologies for not getting to the family planning question today. The short story is that the program was, in retrospect, unnecessary and came at great cost. China's population growth was already slowing. With urbanization, industrialization and continuing education of females, that decline would have continued - as it has everywhere else. China's leaders at the time the program was implemented (Deng Xiaoping and others) can be cut some slack, however, since no one could have anticipated the rapidity of China's economic transformation. They literally feared a population catastrophe if they didn't intervene in a drastic way. The best academic studies of this are by Susan Greenhalgh and and Neil Diamont. An excellent journalistic account on the consequences of the policy is Mei Fong's One Child. (Watch the videos on our site of her discussing the book.). The key slide showing that the trend lines in the late 1970s were good is #66.
You're free to use this presentation with your students, but please do not post it to the internet or otherwise distribute it.
I've also attached digital copies of the three handouts from today.
You've got info on the 1950, 1981 marriage laws. Here's a link to the 2001 marriage law: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Marriage_Law_of_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China_(2001)
Diana CoreyBan Zhao presents herself beyond humbly. She makes sure to label herself unworthy, unsophisticated, unintelligent, careless, and stupid in the opening lines of her book alone. I imagine giving herself these labels gave her credibility as a female writer. I am not sure what exactly the purpose of this work was, if not to do what it says and offer girls advice on how to behave, but I believe that being prepared for a difficult situation allows people to bear it better and perhaps even strategize to gain some leverage. I hope that in its day this work gave many young women a more clear idea about the hellish lives they were being groomed for and allowed them to prepare and cope better.
Frederic VialThe Associated Press article published in the Townsville Daily Bulletin on May 13, 1950 discusses a new law passed by the Central People's Government Council of Peiping that essentially forbade the traditional "feudal" marriage system which had supported/accepted for thousands of years "polygamy, the sale of women, and their life long subjugation to men" throughout China. The new marriage laws are specific. For example, a divorce between a pregnant couple cannot occur until 1 year after the child is born. China's Marriage Law of January 1, 1981 breaks it down in 18 Articles. Although many changes on paper suggest an improvement in certain civil liberties, especially for women, the article is vague on the Chinese Communist government's motives. Chinese youth have clearly been promised "freedom from parental dictation" and, although certain individual rights specific to women have been increased, I doubt it was its principle intention and/or motivation. By driving a wedge between the familly (i.e. Chinese women and their relationships to their husbands and in-laws), the state was able to lure them toward the "party line" and indoctrinating practices designed to imprison them in other ways. This is evidenced by historical factors that suggest eventual divisions of the family unit in favor of the state, often coupled with extreme forms of poverty and starvation.
Scott CraigThe video about the book is extremely interesting. It is interesting to hear the tactics the government did to shut down the protests. This would be a good video for my students to watch (at least part of it due to time) and compare with the women's rights' movements in both the fight for the right to vote, as well as the women's rights' movement in the 1960's to the present.
Scott CraigThe homework assignment to read, highlight, and come up with headings is a very effective and interesting way to get students to read and learn the material they are reading. I know I learned a lot doing the assignment. This is an activity I am definitely going to use in teaching my classes with various documents they need to read.
The article itself was very interesting and I was intrigued by some of the customs they practice - especially after the birth of a baby girl. It's interesting that they started teaching women just three days after they were born.
Lin KuangDr. Dube deepened the Chinese familism and the big change of the chinese family structures and relationship. In ancient China, grandparents used to centered with sons and daughters, then grandsons and granddaughters as pyramid bounded together with happiness and sorrors, but in modern China the pyrimid has been flipped over as grandson/granddaughter-centered with their parents and four grandparents, which completely changed the family stucture and foccus " Grandparent became grandson, and women went uo to teh sky" "Super Mom make perfect children" effects. In order to develop a "dragon Son parents sacrifice their lives, their happiness, even their career in order to have their children for the best education with the best outcomes. At the same time, these children are under tremendous pressure becasue they have to satifiy their parents with their grades and achievements. Not just parents are tired, the kids are extremely tired too. They are burdened from theri childhood with heanvy duties, learning English, developeing skills of playing instruemnts. dancing, singing, playing sports, etc. completely lost their childhood in playing, which we believe is an important way to learn. Of course, their parents and grandparents will do all things to make theor dreams come true. This really bothers me a lot as an educator.
Marcos RicoI feel that I could have used this video with my 4th graders during Social Studies, specially the first 10 to 12 minutes of the video. I would have shown this video during the unit about the civil rights movement, to show how people in other countries are still struggling and fighting for their rights.
I showed my students videos about the marches in Washington, the Montgomery bus boycott, Martin Luther King Jr. “I have a dream” speech, etc. Most of them loved it, but saw it as something that happened long ago and is now useless. By watching this video my students would see that people are still organizing to change laws that are unfair.
Deanna WiistReading the article on The Marriage Law of 1950 and exploring the text of China’s Marriage Law of 1981 made me realize that I really wanted to go back and examine marriage laws in the United States in 1950 to get a better sense of how the individual states compared to China. Article 36 of the Chinese Marriage Law of 1981 also gave the people’s congresses of national autonomous regions the ability to adapt the law to their local nationalities is long as those adaptations were in keeping with the principles of the law. I’d be curious to know what those adaptations were and how they differed.
I think that an examination of marriage laws from different countries with different types of governments would be an interesting and valuable exercise for my students. It could spark some great conversation about government regulation, ideology, and the impact on ordinary citizens. The article on The Marriage Law of 1950 would also be a good excercise in language, motivation, and perspective. Nice historical example written at a time of intense anti-communist sentiment.
Petrina JapThe way Ban Zhao describes herself is striking — in the first sentence alone, she refers to herself as “unworthy, unsophisticated, unenlightened, [and] unintelligent.” While her self-depreciation is saddening, I also find it a bit curious, considering that she goes on to write “Lessons for Women.” Writing instructions of how to become a decent human being, much less making claims of how which virtues are the most important, is a task that takes some confidence and a sense of self-assuredness!
This document instructs married women how to live, act, and think. In her introduction, Ban Zhao expresses that following these behavioral guidelines will benefit a woman’s life; following the customs in “Lessons for Women” will ultimately lead a woman to be praised by those around her.
Xiaowei Hunt
The title of this documentary: Small Happiness (1984, rural north China) caught my attention. What wasconsidered "small happiness" in rural north China in 1984? Giving birth to a baby girl!!! Then what was "big happiness"? According to the documentary, it is giving birth to a baby boy. This was simply treating woman as inferior to men (so feudal). I was born as an urban girl in China with one older brother and two older sisters. My parents did not look up to or look down upon any of their male and female children. They gave every child same treatment. I never knew the so-called “small happiness” and “big happiness” in therural area about gender of a newborn baby. The documentary opened my eyes to see another side of China in term of gender difference in the 1980s.
Monica Munguia#4 Filial Examplary Story - This story really resonated when Marcos compared the character to Cinderella except the character in this story is a male. I was able to make connections in the area of gender roles. Because our population is 90% hispanic, there are certain cultural behaviors that students must adhere to, especially if they are second or third generation. I could incorporate the characters' actions and motives into our Moral Compass Unit. Comparing and contrasting a second generation Cuban teenagers' inappropriate actions and attitude toward her first generation grandmother in My Abuela Invented the Zero therefore dividing her family while Min Ziqian's appropriate behavior to advance in his selfless act while humbling his step-mother into acting more appropriately in her role.
Joy ChaoThe document conveys the relationship between man and woman as it specifically relates to marriage. There are two main requirements that Swann states are prerequisite in order for a marriage to sustain itself: the husband must control his wife and the wife must serve her husband. These values represent a broader structure of control that sets to position women as inferior to men. These ideas are instilled at an early age; as Swann highlights, women must be taught at a young age that they are “lowly and weak” and must “practice labor” as her primary duty. Considered “ancient customs,” these three rituals emphasize the duties that women must carry out and ultimately, the essential duties to her husband. The behaviors that result from these values further the subjugation and inferiority of women. Named the “four qualifications,” women must have womanly virtue, words, bearing, and work in order to truly embody what it means to be a “woman.” I think this work was produced to highlight the differences between male/female roles in China and also showcase how women are in charge of more responsibilities compared to men. I think this work is effective in getting the point across: it objectively defines the role that women play in society and in the family while also emphasizing the contrast between husband and wife. This work is still relevant today but to a lesser extent – women are still deemed as inferior compared to their male counterparts, but the four qualifications and rituals aren’t as explicitly expressed.