Week 2 Activity Post

Broadly, women in china face many obstacles stemming from all areas of their lives. For starters, being a women in china means that you are resided-over by centuries old standards of family and gender roles. It was long thought and practiced that women would marry who their father wanted (often for social and familial hierarchy), bear children and raise them (to promote the longevity of the family tree), whilst tending to her husbands every need, and putting her own wants/desires/dreams to rest.

To deeply understand the role of women in Chinese society, I think it is best to take a trip into the past and really breakdown aspects of a women’s life before present times.

The first part of this is the societal hierarchy that prompted men to marry their daughters to sons of similar status or greater. Being the family-oriented society it was, your social hierarchy determined what job the father of the household held, who his friends were, and where he lived (Ebrey 2019). With all of that came fame and money, and as you might expect those are things that a typical person might desire, so men fought belligerently to maintain their social status through marrying their daughters to similar families. These girls never got a say in any of these decisions, they simply sacrificed themselves, whether willingly or not, for the greater good of their family—at their father’s demand.

Another part of this social hierarchy is the idea that once the women was married, she was to have children to preserve the family for generations, and she was expected to raise those children on her own, while her husband went to work. Essentially, a family was thrust upon women, which resulted in them having no choice but to cast their own dreams and desires aside for the sake of raising their children without the help of her husband. This meant that women rarely received a formal education, and as a result, on the rare occasion they did get a job, it was a low-paying, pick of the litter disaster. 

Translating to present times, some of these practices have been cast aside, but still there are some aspects of Chinese society that still invoke ideas of traditional times. For instance, in Chinese society today, women can expect to earn only 69 percent of their male counterpart (Otis 2015). A direct cause for this is that women are frequently forced into lower paying jobs, that still revolve around a patriarchal family, and thus force the more traditional family role of a women onto their workers. 

To answer the question “How are women and girls treated”, simply put, they’re treated okay, and conditions are improving. According to Isabelle Attane, author of Being a Women in China Today: A Demography of Gender, conditions for women in China are steadily improving. From 1990 to 2010, the amount of uneducated women as drastically decreased by about 75%, and as a result, the number of paid men and women as increased, meaning that more women are entering the workforce. 

As Chinese society continues to move away from traditional views of family and gender roles, the overall well-being of women is increasing, granting women greater access to education and work, two things that were frantically taken from them just decades, and centuries before.

Works Cited

Attane, I. (2012). Being A Women in China Today: A Demography of Gender. Retrieved July 12, 2019, from https://journals.openedition.org/chinaperspectives/6013?file=1

Ebrey, P. (2019). Women in Traditional China. Retrieved from https://asiasociety.org/education/women-traditional-china

Otis, E. (2019, July 11). Inequality in China and the impact on women’s rights. Retrieved from http://theconversation.com/inequality-in-china-and-the-impact-on-womens-rights-38744

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