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Challenges of gender roles
Challenges of gender roles
Understanding gender roles
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Recommended: Challenges of gender roles
In Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony, a major topic explored is the strict use of gender roles. In the novel, the theme of cultural identity explores how the characters are oppressed by gender roles through cultural tradition. The novel creates a window into the lives of a Chinese-Canadian family, as everyone is trying to find their place in a country that doesn’t accept them and a culture that is never truly theirs, each family member goes through a struggle wherein they have to figure out where they can stand on the side of that dash. Chinese – (or) – Canadian, each side holding its own unique challenges within its “hyphenated reality.” (Philip Gambone (The New York Times)).While they will never be accepted as truly Canadian, their Chinese culture …show more content…
Step Mother (second wife of fathers and mother to the youngest children) was only a young girl when her parents were killed. After a series of unfortunate events she was bought from a village clan and sold to become someone’s “companion”. None of this was her choice. “She was taken to a mission house, then taken away again, reclaimed by the village clan, and eventually sold into fathers canton merchant family” (13). Objectified and forced to be what someone else wants, stepmother is told to be exactly how the father wants her. She is forced to be submissive, and acts as a mother to the children, a wife to the husband, and a servant to the grandmother, or Poh-Poh. Throughout the novel her life is not hers to live, and her children are taught to treat her differently because of it. She is father’s second wife and not his first and because of this the children-even those who are biological- are expected to call her stepmother: “Poh-oh insisted we simplify our kinship terms in Canada, so my mother became “step mother.”… What the sons called my mother, my mother became… Father did not protest. Nor did the slim, pretty woman that was my mother seem to protest, though she must have cast a glance at the old one and decided to buy her time” (15). Stepmother is forced to be a third party in the raising of her children. She is only able to step out of …show more content…
Before her first words she is already considered a disappointment, “a girl child is Mo Yung- useless” (32). From the time she is born, her grandmother, “the old one” (choy), relentlessly tells her how the world will treat her as a girl. She explains to Jook-Liang, ‘“If you want a place in this world… ‘do not be born a girl child’”(31). She is cast aside before she is given a chance and is never given the same opportunities as her brothers. Instead she is forced to help take care of her little brother (insert quote). The excitement surrounding a baby is always extreme, and it doubles in Chinese culture when that baby is a boy. When her little brother is born, she is truly considered to be nothing in the family. “ I recalled how Sekky had received twice the number of jade and gold bracelets that I had got as a baby, and how everyone at the baby banquet toasted his arrival and how only the woman noticed me in my new dress, and then only for a few minutes to compare Poh Poh and step mother’s embroidery”(32). She is a ghost in her own family, and treated as nothing from the moment she is born. It is because of her gender that she is looked upon as a burden and never given the same opportunities as her brothers so that she may excel in life. Through the shadowed life of Jook Liang one can see how gender roles are enforced by cultural
Yan Zhitui states that, "women take charge of family affairs, entering into lawsuits, straightening out disagreements, and paying calls to seek favor...the government offices are filled with their fancy silks." (Differences between north and south, 111). Yet, even in the Qing dynasty women were still restricted by and expected to uphold more traditional ideals, especially in the public eye. So, in the end, through her virtue, Hsi-Liu’s two children we able to become upright. Here, there is a split between what a woman is supposed to be according to old Chinese tradition, and the realities facing women in Tancheng. The loss of her husband, and economic hardship had forced His-Liu to behave in a different way, as if she were usurping the power from the eldest son so she could teach the two boys a lesson about being good family members. While she still maintains the ideals of bearing children, and being loyal to her husband, even after he dies, out of necessity she is forced to break from Confucian ideals of being only concerned with the domestic issues. This too put her at odds with the more traditional society around her, as the villagers pitied her sons, but vilified the Hsi-Liu for being so strict with them (Woman Wang, 65). Had she remarried, she would have been looked down upon even more because she would had broken her duty to remain faithful to her deceased
She even married at one point, a man from a circus-- but one day he just never came back. Anyways, Poh-Poh is always telling Liang that she is a useless girlchild.
Ban Zhao wrote Lessons for a Woman around the end of the first century C.E. as social guide for (her daughters and other) women of Han society (Bulliet 167). Because Zhao aimed to educate women on their responsibilities and required attributes, one is left questioning what the existing attitudes and roles of women were to start with. Surprisingly, their positions were not automatically fixed at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Ban Zhao’s own status as an educated woman of high social rank exemplifies the “reality [that] a woman’s status depended on her “location” within various social institutions’ (167). This meant that women had different privileges and opportunities depending on their economic, social, or political background. Wealthier noble women would likely have access to an education and may have even been able to wield certain political power (167). Nevertheless, women relinquished this power within the family hierarchy to their fathers, husbands, and sons. Despite her own elevated social status, Ban Zhao still considered herself an “unworthy writer”, “unsophisticated”, “unenlightened’, “unintelligent”, and a frequent disgrace to her and her husband’s family (Zhao). Social custom was not, however, the only driving force behind Zhao’s desire to guide women towards proper behavior.
“Small Happiness” is a documentary about women of a Chinese village. The title derived from the quote, “To give birth to a boy is considered a big happiness, to give birth to a girl is a small happiness.” It covered a variety of topics such as how women view their bodies, marriages, and families. From the documentary’s interviews of women of different ages, we can see although the tradition of male dominance in the Chinese society remains, the lives of rural Chinese women have changed significantly in the last half century.
The united States Declaration of independence states that all men are equal, but aren’t all women as well? Nowadays, the numbers for the population are at an increase for the support in gender equality, with the capture of feminist labels. The seek for equality between men and women, and criticize the privileges that arouse by gender differences. However in Old China, males control almost everything due to a patriarchal society. At that time, not only men, but also women are influenced by male chauvinism. In the Jade Peony, written by Wayson Choy, female characters are affected by an unequal perspective despite their age group.