Gender roles in China
I. Confucianism and Gender Roles
In our first China unit, we concentrated on the role that the Communist government played in creating and ultimately in erasing cultural tradition, a point that is fascinating from an intellectual perspective and heartbreaking from a personal level. There are certain ironies that must be emphasized at this point. For all the mistakes that the Communist government made (from the Great Famine to the Cultural Revolution), on many levels, they provided unprecedented gender and class equality. I want to pick up this theme of gender inequality in this lesson. We will explore how the combination of patrilineage and patrilocality create patriarchy or male domination. In pre-Communist China, family ties determined who you would marry, what career path you would take, where you would live, and in effect, almost every aspect of your identity. Remember Confucian values are not intrinsic to a Chinese character. Nor are they passed blindly down from one generation to another. As the last lesson indicated, the gender and age hierarchies that make up the Confucian family model endured only in the historical and social contexts for which they suited institutional and relational needs. That is to say, Confucian values prevailed only when they met the needs of those in power in a particular socio-cultural climate
Confucian based values have been exalted and scapegoated through Chinese/Taiwanese history. In certain periods such as the 12 th century with State Confucianism (origins of civil service exam and bureaucracy) and in present day Taiwan and even post-Mao China, Confucian based philosophies and notions of family have been idealized, but during the height of communist China, the hierarchical relationships and emphasis on family ties were demonized. Mao used Confucian based institutions and family structures as a platform against which to launch his campaign. It represented the old way for better or worse.
II. Culture as Tradition
You can see through this brief discussion of the ups and downs of Confucian thought in Chinese culture that traditions are selected intentionally to serve certain State and political means. At certain periods, traditions are reinvented as a way to link the present to the past (Many presidential speeches make reference to certain key points in history to emphasize the endurance of those key issues that they want associated with them: freedom, equality). Chiang Kai Shek when he fled to Taiwan reinvented Confucian thought as a way to make his shift towards democracy resonate with familiar symbols. So when we try to isolate or salvage certain long-standing traditions in culture, we need to recognize that these so-called traditions are often new or stand in new form or serve new purposes in their contemporary context. They have not been preserved in their entirety from the past.
III. Kinship Models
Each family model prescribes/naturalizes certain social relationships/inequalities.
Today I want to talk about what are the implications or ramifications of this Confucian based family structure for its participants and we will then implicitly understand the ways in which communism created an unprecedented gender equality in China. What sort of social relationships and inequalities are produced in this Confucian-based system? To value hard work, to insist on hierarchies based on age, gender, and position, and to demand filial piety is not universal characteristics of the family. They may not be unique to Chinese culture but they are certainly distinct. Remember, of course, that to speak of an ideal in this context does not mean that it is the best way, but rather that it is the dominant way—the most accepted, natural way of seeing things. These idealized family models are often taken for granted, most people raised in China do not necessarily question the model—they may resist it, find it unfair, but they do not necessarily question its validity or try to take it apart.
IV. Patrilocal + Patrilineal = Patriarchy
To begin to understand these social relationships, we need to take a broader look at the specifics of this family model, which revolve around patrilocal residence and patrilineal lines of inheritance. What do these terms mean? What are the consequences for parent, children relationships and relationships between men and women and finally, how do these forms differ from those practiced in the US, those which we may view as natural?
A. Patterns of Residence:
1. Neolocal Residence: (The married couple moves away from both sets of parents to live in a new location)
In the United States, we are socialized to move away from our parents at marriage or earlier. Some North American parents even send their kids off to boarding schools or sleepaway camps as a way to build independence. The important point is that children are not expected (and may even be criticized) for living with their parents after adulthood. Although this may seem natural to us, only about 5% of the world’s societies follow this practice. So what is happening in the rest of the world?
Children in all societies are required to marry outside of the nuclear family because of the incest taboo and, with few exceptions, couples in almost all societies live together after they are married. Therefore some children have to leave home when they marry. But which married children remain at home and which reside elsewhere? Does Chinese culture also practice neolocality?
2. Patrilocal: The son stays and the daughter leaves, so that the married couple lives with or near the husband’s parents (Chinese culture—even in communist China). What are the consequences of patrilocality?
3. Ok, why does it matter with whom people live? Well, think about it. In the United States, by living apart from our parents we are advocating a certain degree of distance and independence from our relatives. These boundaries can be extreme, such as living long distances away and seeing each other only on holidays or more moderate, where parents and children may have keys to one another’s home. Neolocal residence patterns tend to forge stronger ties between the married couple that must rely exclusively on one another, for better or worst. On the other hand, if a married couple lives with or near the parents of the husband, the wife is completely isolated from her own family and dependent on her husband’s. Consequently, a wife’s status is considerably lower because she is a relative outsider. In the exercise included in your coursepack, we can see this situation quite clearly. The household is run by the “great father”, who is clearly the head of the household that consists of his sons, their wives and all unmarried children. He determines future goals, responsibilities, punishments and arranged marriages. In this scenario, the older take precedence over the younger and the men over the women. Women in patrilocal societies are placed in unequal and biased situations. Remember that patrilocal residence counts for far and away the majority of arrangements.
What might change if China became neolocal or if the United States was suddenly patrilocal?
C. Rules of Descent: Descent rules connect individuals with particular sets of kin because of known or presumed common ancestry. Because of the particular rule of descent operating in a society, individuals can know more or less which set of kin to turn to for support or help. How is descent traced in China and what are the implications of this descent pattern?
1. Patrilineal: A patrilineage is the most frequent descent pattern that affiliates an individual with kin of both sexes related to him or her through men only. Each child in each generation belongs to the kin group of their father, who in turn belongs to the kin group of his father. Although a man’s sons and daughters are all members of the same descent group, affiliation with that group is transmitted only by sons to their children. Lines of descent are traced through the males. When a girl is adopted, she becomes part of the adopted father’s line of descent. If she merely married in, then she would be of another lineage of her birth father.
2. The question on everyone’s mind, who are still awake that is, is what about our society? There are many societies, including our own, that do not have lineal descent groups—sets of kin who believe they descend from a common ancestor. We, for example, have bilateral kinship (two-sided)—one’s relatives on both mother’s and father’s sides are equal in importance or, more usually, in unimportance. Bilateral kinship does not refer to common descent, but rather is more horizontal, moving outward from close to more distant relatives, rather than upward to common ancestors.
D. Consequences for Women’s Status:
I wrote at the beginning of the lesson that patrilocal + patrilineal = patriarchy or male dominance. Even after the Communist revolution in China abolished the landholding estates of patrilineages and gave women access to education as well as jobs outside the home, male dominance continued. The mode of production and labor changed, but patrilocality did not (except in communes). Women were still usually the in-marrying strangers and members of the patrilineage became a work team on the collective farm. Those few women who became local leaders were likely to have atypical marriages that allowed them to live in the villages of their birth.
Patrilineal societies have several sexual and reproductive dilemmas. First is the contradiction between the importance of males in kinship and descent, but at the same time the reliance on women for reproduction of sons in particular. If patrilineal societies denigrate women too much, women may try to decrease their reproduction, but if they exalt women too much, that exaltation may detract from the value of men. A second problem has to do with paternity (a la Jerry Springer). Although the mother of the baby is easy to determine, in order to be sure of patrilineal descent, one must be certain of the father’s identity. Therefore, in the societies that trace descent through males, there tends to be far more restrictions about women’s’ sexuality. They are more likely to prohibit premarital and extramarital sex for women and to make it more difficult for women to get a divorce.
LET’S RECAP: Living with the husband’s family and tracing lines of inheritance and descent along the male line places women in an unequal and subordinate position. Without property rights, removed from the support of her family, under tremendous pressures to produce a son, deriving all her help and support from her husband’s family, being an outsider to the community all place these women who marry in, in an inferior position.
