Unequal Social Status of Women in Ancient China - Coursework Example

Women in Ancient China Humans have the propensity to alter their behavior, beliefs, morals and ethics based upon real or perceived societal pressures because of the fundamental and universal need for acceptance by social peers. The failure to comply with conventional ‘norms’ of society often results in serious consequences; the most disconcerting is the segregation from and vilification of a desired group. People will go as far as to alter their deepest belief system and innermost values to be accepted by their friends, neighbors, community and those considered to be superiors. A person may often comply when prompted to act in a certain way by another whether or not they believe it is the correct course to take because the outcome of non-compliance may be or lead with undesirable social consequences. Obedience differs from compliance. A person will obey a directive from a person accepted as an authoritative figure because they do not believe that they have a choice whereas complying is more of a choice. The women of ancient China had little choice but to obey their male counterparts regardless of whether they were fathers, brothers, husbands or even sons and had few options as to how their life was going to turn out. Although their lives were often miserable and completely constrained within the boundaries set by them by the men in their family, few women had the courage or even the idea to try to make things better. Those who did try to make a difference were often silenced by cruel or deadly means and were unable to make much headway in a culture so completely ingrained in both the male and female mind. In many ways, the living conditions for women in China remained fundamentally the same for thousands of years reaching even into the 1900s as the country resisted the effects of globalization felt elsewhere. The purpose of this paper is to explore the various ways in which women were treated unequal to men beginning with the writings of Confucius and extending into fictional literature that presents an image of what this sort of life might have looked like. The basic fabric of Chinese society was formed upon the foundations set by Confucius (551-479 BC). During his lifetime, Confucius worked as a political leader and was one of history’s great early philosophers. “His teachings … form the foundation of much of subsequent Chinese speculation on the education and comportment of the ideal man, how such an individual should live his life and interact with others, and the forms of society and government in which he should participate.”1 Within his religious philosophy, Confucius felt that every individual had a responsibility to honor the spirits, serve the family and treat others with love and concern. He also brought forward a great deal of thought regarding the proper role of government and the importance of education. This education was offered freely to any who wanted it, “I only instruct the eager and enlighten the fervent. If I hold up one corner and a student cannot come back to me with the other three, I do not go on with the lesson,”2 but, in his emphasis on the importance of people fulfilling their proper roles in society, he inadvertently introduced an element of sexism into his society. An important part of Confucius’ political ideas were based on the concept that people should perform their proper roles – a king should act like a king, a businessman should concern himself with business, a husband should be a provider for his family and a wife should be a nurturer of the family. These ideas rather quickly developed into an understanding of social class and standing, with women standing on an obvious rung below that of the men. For two thousand years in ancient China women lived under the rules set by Confucius in his analects as they became interpreted under the Han dynasty. By the Han Dynasty, Confucius doctrine instructed women weren’t equal to men, and were unworthy or incapable of a literary education. “Women were to remain ignorant and to obey – first, their fathers; after marriage, their husbands; during widowhood, their sons. Marriages were arranged, and a woman’s responsibility was to remain married, no matter how undesirable the match. Divorce was not allowed or remarriage by widows. Chastity archways were built for women who killed themselves when their husbands died. The major role of women, considered the private property of men, was to please their husbands and to bear children.”3 Far from being the revered mothers and keepers of home and hearth of the idealized vision, women were more commonly considered unwelcome baggage or convenient servants or sources of pleasure. “In ancient China, a man could have as many concubines as possible after the first wife. It was possible that the youngest concubine would be a teenager while the husband could be an ancient old man. Poor families sold their young daughters to rich families just because they could get some money from the rich family and also get rid of a useless female in the family.”4 This illustrates the degree to which the majority of women were truly envisioned as property or specialized livestock. Perhaps nothing illustrates the low status of women in ancient China than an investigation of one of the more common birth customs. While the birth of boy children warranted the placement of a bow on the left, or honored, side of the doorframe to the house, the birth of a girl was marked by the lowly signifier of a napkin laid on the floor at the right side of the door.5 This was a custom that was observed even into the 19th century. Other customs, much more ancient, revealed an even lower opinion of baby girls. According to Pan Cho6, three days after the birth of a daughter, the daughter would be placed on the floor under the bed to signify her unworthiness and the necessity for her to continuously humble herself before others. This, too, seemed to be a custom continued into relatively recent times as Wood suggests girls were still expected to sleep on the floor during his visit to China.7 In addition to placing the baby on the floor, parents would give the baby girl pieces of pottery to play with to signify the need for her to become accustomed to working with these materials and to understand that her primary duty in life was to always remain productive and industrious for the welfare of the family. The third custom was to announce the girl’s name to the ancestors as a means of establishing her as the individual of the future responsible for maintaining the spiritual well-being within the household. For unknown reasons, the tradition of foot binding spread from northern China throughout the country around the year 1000 AD. Because of the severe disability it caused and time involved in the process, foot-binding emerged as a signal of wealth and prosperity and eventually, after the Mongol occupation, became a means of further controlling the Chinese population. The process began when girls were somewhere between 4 and 6 years of age with the deliberate breaking of the four smallest toes on the foot. Then, silk or cotton bandages, “ten feet long and two inches wide, were wrapped around the smallest toes and pulled tightly to the heel. Every two days, the binding was removed and rebound. This part of the process went on for two years. By this time, her feet were three to four inches long. To assure the feet stayed small, the ritual continued for at least ten more years.”8 As might be imagined, this process made the feet very painful to walk on, frequently requiring external assistance and occasionally even caused toes to fall off from the lack of blood. However, binding feet became necessary among the elite classes because women with large, or non-deformed, feet were not capable of making a good match. This, too, was a practice that started in ancient days that continued to be practiced even into the modern age. One of the greatest rallying cries for feminism in China in the beginning of the 20th century was a general protest against the common practice of foot binding, which was still widely observed throughout much of the country. That women still retained a very low place in Chinese society even at this late date was expressed by the ‘shockingly’ outspoken authoress, Jin Qui as she discusses the problems faced by wives attempting to improve their lives and the lives of their daughters. “If the man is bad or he ill-treats her, she is told that her marriage is retribution for some sin committed in her previous existence. If she complains at all or tries to reason with her husband, he may get angry and beat her. When other people find out they will criticize, saying, ‘That woman is bad; she doesn’t know how to behave like a wife’.”9 Thus, women were still seen as little more than slaves within the Chinese society. As is suggested by the ‘modern’ writer Qiu, in ancient China, conditions for women remained much the same kind of degradation, hard work and pain they had known as children even after marriage. Regardless of the woman’s personal feelings toward her husband, she was obliged to obey him and serve him in every way and his treatment of her had no bearing on whether she would be expected to continue honoring these duties. As has been demonstrated previously, when possible men would take several wives, sometimes as a means of apportioning them – one to be his servant, one to be a favorite concubine, one to be her servant, etc. Although husbands were permitted and even expected to get married if his wife should die, women were not permitted to remarry, becoming the property of sons or other male relatives or, if she was unable to find a means of support, she was expected to die rather than dishonor her husband’s memory. To avoid such issues, some women made spectacles of themselves as they committed dramatic suicide on the death of her husband, earning in the process a great deal of respect and admiration from the community for perhaps the first time. Because traditions in China changed so recently, a great deal of the issues faced by women in ancient China were still being experienced by women even into the 20th century. As a result, this kind of lifestyle has been captured in some of the fiction written in modern times that provides readers with a kind of snapshot of what life as a woman might have actually been like in ancient China. Pearl S. Buck’s novel The Good Earth10 chronicles the life of a poor farmer of China beginning from the day he attains a wife through to his old age and descent into senility. Wang Lung’s first wife is the slave of a wealthy and powerful house in the village and is purposefully homely and course as a fitting wife for a poor farmer such as he. She had been sold to the family as a child in keeping with many poor families of the age when it was realized the girl would be difficult to marry off. With a great deal of help from O-Lan, his woman, the farmer is able to make a success of his fields enough to purchase some additional land and begin a family. However, when drought strikes the land, the couple must give up all but the land and flee south with their three young children and Wang Lung’s old father to remain alive. Again, with the practical help of his wife, and a little help from a social revolution, the family is able to survive and return to their farm wealthier than they had been before. This enables the farmer to not only purchase the necessary seed and equipment to restart his farm, but also to add to his landholdings, eventually launching him into the realm of a prosperous businessman. Yet the wealth does not ease Wang Lung’s life as he had thought it might, bringing with it strange passions that lead to the purchase of a second wife and troubles among his sons as they struggle to pursue their own desires. As Wang Lung prepares to collect his first wife, the methods and beliefs by which this marriage was arranged is discussed, indicating the complete absence of the Western idea of romance in favor of practical reality. Wang Lung has every reason to believe he will always be a poor man and so his elders insist he must choose a wife who will not only be faithful and frugal, but also who will be able to withstand hard work and who will not disgrace him by having been passed among the lords of the great house prior to their wedding. Indeed, this turns out to have been a wise decision on the part of his elders as O-Lan soon joins Wang Lung in the fields and together they are able to harvest a crop twice again as profitable as Wang Lung had been able to gather in the past. She also quickly bears him sons and is instrumental in the family’s survival during the drought year as well as in the rebuilding of the family fortune. She is, in every respect, the dutiful Chinese wife, yet, because she is not beautiful by the standards of Chinese tradition, Wang Lung finds himself, upon his eventual success, becoming weary of her ugliness and utilitarian nature. The relationship that springs up between Wang Lung and Lotus is thus used as a method of both depicting what the traditional definition of beauty is in China as well as illustrating some of the ill effects of this concept and how possession of such beauty could be considered a sign of prosperity. Because of the need to provide additional housing and food to support his new wife and her servant, it becomes obvious to the rest of the town that Wang Lung has achieved some measure of success. Additionally, for a poor lowly farmer such as himself to have won a prize such as Lotus, despite her somewhat sordid past, indicates a degree of wealth in simply persuading her to accept him. Rather than depicting Lotus as a powerless slave girl forced to work in a brothel, Buck paints her as a girl who made the best of her situation in life and had some measure of control over what she did and who she went with. This same degree of decision had also been shown in O-Lan’s acceptance of Wang Lung several years earlier. However, this time, Wang Lung’s new wife is anything but the serviceable woman he brought home as a young man. Thanks to the practice of binding feet to keep them at an agreeably dainty size, Lotus is not capable of walking far on her own and must be carried to Wang Lung’s home by litter, further proving her strictly aesthetic value. While the status of women may have fluctuated from one period to another and from one class to another, the majority of women in ancient China were subjects to relatively miserable lives as a result of the strictly patriarchal system established by Confucius. While he didn’t necessarily intend things to work out the way they did, often instructing his followers to have respect for their fellow man and to love one another above all else, interpreters of Confucius’ teachings often focused upon the hierarchy structure he established that placed women lower than men in the pyramid. This translated into a reduction of value associated with the feminine, a profound lack of concern for female babies and a relatively unconcerned apportionment of daughters out through whatever channels presented themselves. Women often became little more than specialized livestock denoting wealth and prosperity or simply existed as serviceable tools. This was further emphasized through such detrimental practices as foot binding. These customs were so prevalent and deep-reaching that they continued to exist even into modern times, prompting women within and without the society to write about their experiences and their treatment within the country’s customs. Bibliography Buck, Pearl. (1994). The Good Earth. New York: Pocket Books. “Chinese Culture: Chinese Marriage.” (November 27, 2005). Chinese Culture. Available March 16, 2008 from Dykeman, Therese Boos. (1999). The Neglected Canon: First to the Twentieth Century. New York: Springer, 1999. Heng, Xie. (1990). “The Changing Role and Status of Women in China.” The 1990 Institute. Available March 16, 2008 from Hutchins, Candace. (2000). “Chinese Foot Binding.” Charlotte, NC: CCDS. Available March 16, 2008 from Riegel, Jeffrey. (2006). “Confucius.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available March 16, 2008 from < http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/confucius/> Qiu, Jin. “An Address to Two Hundred Million Fellow Countrywomen.” The World in an Era of Transformation and Western Dominance. Wood, W.W. (1830). Sketches of China. New York: Carey & Lee. Yang, Bojun. (1958). Lunyu yizhu, Beijing: Zhonghua shuju, 7.8. Read More