The Treatment of Women in China

Paper Summary:

This research paper looks at the continued oppression of Chinese women throughout the culture's history. It refers specifically to the ancient times of the dynasties and looks at the traditions and practices on which this culture was based in an attempt to understand their treatment and attitude towards their female population. It looks at how this image developed over time and how finally with the emergence of Communism, relative equality was granted to women.

From the Paper:

"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)."

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