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The role of women in Japan 1750 1914
The role of women in Japan 1750 1914
The tale of genji analysis
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The Tale of Genji is believed to be have been mostly written by Murasaki Shikibu (973-1014 or 1075) in the year 1021 during the Heian Period (794-1184). It is considered to be one of the greatest works of fiction and it talks about the ideal roles of a man and woman during the Heian period. It also allows the modern audience to see the culture differences between what was considered the norm during the Heian Period and what is considered the norm during the 21th Century. The Tale of Genji tells the story of Prince Hikaru Genji, son of the current Emperor at the time and Lady Kiritsubo, and how he matures from a young boy that has multiple affairs with women to a wise Emperor that begins to take responsibility for the actions that he made when he was younger. It is a critique of early Japanese literature and shows how women are treated as “objects” that serve men and men are the more authoritative gender that can have multiple affairs with women and can change a woman into his ideal image of a woman.
According to Tō no Chūjō, Chief Left Equerry, Genji, and the Fujiwara Aide of Ceremonial in chapter two, there are three types of women. The highborn, the middle birth, and the low born. The highborn are born into royalty and are constantly cared for by the people that surround her. Unfortunately because girls that are born into royalty are constantly surrounded by their peers, a lot about those types of girls remain unknown and the girls that are born into royalty may not deserve their rank. The middle class are born from governors or men that are not high enough to be considered royalty but not low enough to be considered a commoner. Girls that are born in the middle class must distinguish themselves from other women that were born...
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...erfectionist and she did not seem to show any interest in Genji until her final moments of life before giving birth to their child and then dying at the end of chapter nine. It was not until Aoi’s death that Genji finally begin to appreciate Aoi and started to treat women as more than just objects of sex and power. When Genji finally became Emperor at the beginning of chapter seventeen, Genji is concerned about the future of his country and only focuses on taking care of the current wives that he has in life. In return his wives do their best to take care of him.
Works Cited
Heian Period (794-1184 AD). Timeline of Japanese History. Timeline of Japanese History. 2011.
Web. 27 February, 2011.
Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of Genji. New York: Toronto, 2006. Print
“Summary of the Tale of Genji.” Taleofgenji.org. Taleofgenji.org. 2001. Web. 27 February,
2011.
The upper middle-class parents believe in teaching their daughters to be competitive, so they can build their leadership skills. As young girls they want to teach their daughters to look at the bigger picture, not just wanting them to look pretty and get there way around with basic job skills; they want them to go climb the ladder and exceed to higher levels. They do not want their daughter to be defined as “girly girls.” I Personally agree with Sheryl Sandberg because she experienced teaching her own daughter, “unprecedented set of educational and professional opportunities.”
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.
hierarchy of women in relation to their nobility and social class, so Elizabeth When a Princess,
Even though, wealth is a major factor in an individual’s status, but it is not the only defining feature (p.117) since the accomplished women of Murdoch Mysteries express their status through their luxurious gowns, hats, gloves and other expensive accessories, but are still not fully respected as equals by all the men they encounter, such as the government official, Mr. Foster, or assistant prosecutor, Mr. Garland, or crown attorney (Henslin, 2014, p. 117). To determine social class, prestige and power must also be taken into account (Henslin, 2014, p. 117). An occupation with a greater degree of education, autonomy, reasoning and salary should give an individual like Dr. Ogden, Dr. Grace or Ms. Martin a great amount of respect or prestige (Henslin, 2014, p. 122), yet they still faced degrading speech that belittled women as a whole when they protested in the streets of Toronto. Basically, there is a status inconsistency or difference in ranking for the three factors, which the accomplished women of the series score very high in ranking for prestige and wealth, but are given a very low rank in terms of power (Henslin, 2014, p.123). According to C. Wright Mills, power is the ability to execute one’s own choices despite obstruction (Henslin, 2014, p. 121). Evidently, the power given to the women of the Suffrage Society, or the city of Toronto as a whole, is very minute since
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Being a student interested in the field of biology, one knows that studying life in the past plays an important role in the history of organisms that lived on this earth. Similarly, being Japanese, studying the past of how Japanese were plays an important role in Japanese history. Despite all the general aspects of life that have changed from the Heian period, the one idea that has definitely not changed is the romantic relationships between a man and woman. Though the general concept is the same, from reading The Tale of Genji, it is what was considered the ideal woman and ideal man that were both surprising and thus worth discussing.
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