Women in China

Women, Gender and Social Life in Chinese History

Background

Since early times in China, men have been the dominant core of the family and society. The roles of women were limited to the kinship roles within the boundary of daughter, sister, wife, mother, daughter-in-law and mother-in-law. It has been required by the women to fulfill the wishes and do accordingly to the wishes and needs of men of household. The women of China have their closely-related men as father, and then husbands and then sons after getting widowed. It has been very important in the Chinese social and economic life that there is a clear difference between the world of men and women, a physical separation. This was important so that the women could not dominate men at all. These were Confucian times (bridgew.edu).

Even in a classic book called 'Book of Rites', in the times of Confucian, imposed the value of separation within the home, where the homes were partitioned as inner and outer part and women were supposed to stay inside the home. Women did not have any dominant say and were not allowed to take part in any form of public affair. They were believed to devote themselves to tend weaving and silkworms. It was the end of the Han period that the Confucian vocabulary was established related to the women's nature, roles, weaknesses and virtues. The status of women further declined in the Song period when the Neo-Confucianism was achieving influence. The main reasons for the decline of women status were specifically two. Firstly, there was pressure on widows not to do remarriage, and second was practice of binding young girl's feet so that they can prevent to grow more than a few inches. Elimination has been made for the practices of widow chastity, concubinage, foot binding and parental control of marriage. Even under the old system, many women were able to live satisfactorily (Judd, 1990).

Discussion

Formally, the People's Republic of China was established on October 1st, 1949. Since 1949, the People's Republic of China's government actively promoted the women liberation in China and improved it through political, social, cultural and economic roles of women. Since 1949, the women's issues faced effective public structures where the links were made with state, party and Women's federations. Basically Women's Federation was a huge organization from the party to a certain number of women. In the terms of Marxist-Leninist it was called the transmission belt. The majority of the work of the organization included the women mobilization for the support of existing party policies, whether the concern is related directly to the women or not (Skeldon, 2011).

The Women's Federations was not considered effective on the universal scale. The organization didn't have any political count, material and human resources and relate broadly to the interests of all the women that they are feminist unrecognizable. After the Women Federation, Marriage Law was imposed in 1950. This law and its related campaign for the propaganda were directly addressed to the women's needs specifically ...