In the beginning half of the 20th century, China experienced an intellectual revolution, known as the May Fourth Movement. Among other things, May Fourth thinkers were passionate about women’s rights, and fought for equality between the sexes. Like in any school of thought, ideas about women and their roles evolved over time. In 1925, Lu Xun wrote “Regret for the Past”, a story about Shih Chuan-Sheng and Tzu-chun, a modern couple whose relationship falls apart. Ten years later, in 1935, the film “New Woman” was released. The film follows Wei Ming, a music teacher whose life begins to crumble due to the machinations of a lecherous businessman. Both Tzu-chun and Wei Ming represent a version of the “modern woman, but their similarities and differences illustrate how the idea of the modern woman changed and stayed the same over time. One significant shift between 1925 and 1935 is the expectation of domesticity for women. One of the criteria for being a modern woman is that modern women ought to associate freely with men. When Tzu-chun breaks with convention to live unmarried with her lover, she is filling that criteria. However even as she defies all tradition to do this, she still falls into the role of homemaker. While her husband goes out and works, she spends all day working in the home. “The only pity was she was too busy. Her house— keeping left …show more content…
It is clear in “Regret for the Past” that Tzu-chun draws her strength from her love for Chuan-Sheng, and his for her. “I thought if I told Tzu-chun the truth, she could go forward boldly without scruples...But I was wrong. She was fearless then because of her love.” The source of Tzu-chun’s strength comes from her relationship with Chuan-Sheng, and after he tells her he no longer loves her, she loses that strength. Her empowerment is shown to come not from herself, but from her partner, which contrasts strongly with Wei Ming’s complete independence from
After the success of antislavery movement in the early nineteenth century, activist women in the United States took another step toward claiming themselves a voice in politics. They were known as the suffragists. It took those women a lot of efforts and some decades to seek for the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment. In her essay “The Next Generation of Suffragists: Harriot Stanton Blatch and Grassroots Politics,” Ellen Carol Dubois notes some hardships American suffragists faced in order to achieve the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. Along with that essay, the film Iron-Jawed Angels somehow helps to paint a vivid image of the obstacles in the fight for women’s suffrage. In the essay “Gender at Work: The Sexual Division of Labor during World War II,” Ruth Milkman highlights the segregation between men and women at works during wartime some decades after the success of women suffrage movement. Similarly, women in the Glamour Girls of 1943 were segregated by men that they could only do the jobs temporarily and would not able to go back to work once the war over. In other words, many American women did help to claim themselves a voice by voting and giving hands in World War II but they were not fully great enough to change the public eyes about women.
Chang Yu-I understood woman's liberation as the tool for changing the Chinese culture. It was about a woman becoming her own person rather than the property of a man whom she must cherish under every circumstance. Yu-I believed that a woman's liberation was in finding her own independence and strength in Chinese society.
The U.S is only 5% of the world’s population and houses a quarter of its prison inmates; well over 2 million people. In the past decade the war on drugs has filled many state and federal prisons with a numerous amount of inmates. Building new prisons is not the answer to tackling the prison overcrowding dilemma. The U.S doesn’t have the money due to economic strains, and it will not solve this issue head on as needed. “California may be forced to release up to 33,000 prisoners by 2013” (Shapiro & Wizner, 2011, p.1.). Some women and men do not belong in prison, and should be given other opportunities to sought help. Prison overcrowding is a growing concern in the U.S today. There are many different alternatives to end prison overcrowding versus releasing them into the community. For example by launching a parole support group or treatment or rehabilitation programs for inmates as well as ex-offenders, house arrest or probation are other routes to explore.
Zhu Ying was a member of the military’s theatre troupe, and about to be a member of the party, until she refused to sleep with party members. After that, they transferred and then imprisoned her. While her role in the military could have made Zhu Ying an androgynous figure, an emblem of communist gender equality, the party’s expectation that she have sex with party members makes her a sexual object, which is its own form of feminization. Zhu Ying is allowed to retain her femininity only if she consents to being a sexual object; when she does not, she is sent to be a laborer, and later imprisoned. Moreover, by being separated from her boyfriend, her chance at domestic happiness is taken away. After imprisonment, she has no opportunity to fill the traditional female role of marriage and children (which she may or may not have desired). Thus, the party halts the “natural” order of marriage and
As we look around at our women in today’s era, we might ask how did she become so independent, successful, and confidant? Even when I look at my own my mom, she was hired as the first woman to work as a manager at a fortune 500 business, and then created her own business. As well as my friends’ mom, who also has her own business in psychology; accomplishments like these must have originated from somewhere. The answer lies in the 1920’s. A couple years earlier, World War I was waging havoc, killing many men, while allowing women more freedom. The effects of World War I gave birth to the new women, also known as the Flappers, and inspiration for the 19th amendment. The flappers stirred up traditions and launched a new way of living. It soon became very apparent that the new women of the 1920’s helped redefine the social norms of society.
Women in China were not people. According to traditional China and Confucian culture women are nothing more than objects. Lu Xun wrote the “New Year’s Sacrifice” to criticize the conventional confusions ideals and the traditional Chinese way of life are not fair or just for women. Lu Xun believed in a new china, a china similar to the one the New Culture Movement was striving to achieve. New Culture Movement wanted to create a place of equality for all.
The treatment of the prison system has become a form of relax for prisoners. Some criminals commit crimes just to get into prison. Prison offers a nice warm bed for convicts to sleep and most of the time they are treated even with a pillow. Criminals in prison are fed three times a day, some may say,“but yes it 's nothing like the comfort of a suburban home”, but most don 't realize that criminals outside of prison don 't have a place to sleep and food to eat. Prison offers a type of safe haven from the outside, giving them shelter, food, and a comfortable place to sleep won’t change a criminal, it just gives them more incentive to keep committing the same
“It is said that no one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones” (Nelson Mandela, 1994). The United States of America has more people behind bars than any other country on the planet. The prisons are at over double capacity. It cost a lot of money to house prisoners each year. A large number of the prisoners are there because of drug related offenses. There are prisoners who have been sent to prison for life for marijuana related drug offenses. Many prisoners have been exonerated after spending many years behind bars due to the corruption in our legal system. 32 States in United States of America still execute prisoners even though there is no evidence to suggest that capital punishment is a deterrent. Prison reform is needed in America starting at the legal system and then ending the death penalty.
The prison system currently in use, primarily focuses on punishing the inmates. With the idea of making prisoners pay for their crime, the system deprives them of opportunities to fix certain problems that placed the in prison. When the law approaches inmates with the intent to only punish, they can become very resistant against the whole system. Therefore no rehabilitation or improvement is occurring, but only anger and disobedience building within the prisoners. Making it dangerous for the inmates to be released back into society. The prison system should work with prisoners instead of working against
According to Stevens (2003), two female figures, namely the New Women and the Modern Girl, appeared in Republican China as the gender-specific images in the reformation of Chinese women. While the New Women represents a positive view towards modernity who is therefore the primal figure in the modern nation project, her counterpart the Modern Girl is in deep anxieties and confusions of forming a woman’s subjectivity. As the Modern Girl begins to gain an increasing importance in recent research, she becomes a revealing and insightful figure in terms of the Chinese women’s gender roles in change (Hershatter, 2007; Yen, 2005; Stevens, 2003; Shih, 2001). Stevens (2003: 83) offers a succinct depiction of her:
Maybe if I saw more reports on how prison has improved our society and the criminals who live among us, I would see why we should work on reforming our prisons. Until then, it does not seem to be working. We trust in the government to provide for our safety, but we must take responsibility among ourselves. To understand that the current system does work and that its intent is not to provide a safe society. History has shown us that. What we have done or continue to do will not make this a safer place to live. The problem is not to reform our prison system, for this won't stop criminals to commit crimes, but to find ways and means to deteriorate them from doing the crime.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a massive amount of inmates began fillin up the United States prison systems. This huge rate of growth in this short amount of time, has greatly contributed to the prison overcrowding that the United States faces today. In fact, the prisons are still filled to the seams. This enormous flood of inmates has made it practically impossible for prison officials to keep up with their facilities and supervise their inmates. One of the main reasons why many prisons have become overcrowded is because of states’ harsh criminal laws and parole practices (Cohen). “One in every 100 American adults is behind bars, the highest incarceration rate in the world” (Cohen). The amount of inmates in corrections systems, throughout the nation, sky-rocketed to 708 percent between 1972 and 2008. Today, there are about 145,000 inmates occupying areas only designed for 80,000 (Posner). Peter Mosko, “an assistant professor of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice at New York’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice” (Frazier) stated, “America, with 2.3 million people behind bars, has more prisoners than soldiers” (Frazier). There have been studies that have shown “there are more men and women in prison than ever before. The number of inmates grew by an average of 1,600 a week. The U. S. has the highest rate of crime in the world” (Clark). Because of this influx in inmates, many prisoners’ rights groups have filed lawsuits charging that “overcrowded prisons violate the Constitution’s 8th Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment” (Clark). It is clear that the United States corrections system needs to be reformed in order to eliminate this problem. Prison overcrowding is a serious issue in society due to the fact it affects prison ...
Ding Ling’s short story, “Miss Sophia’s Diary,” published in 1927, aroused waves of controversy because of its bold depiction of a women indulging in her own world and trivial things like love affairs in her life against the backdrop of China’s domestic turbulence. However, this response paper argues that the protagonist, Sophia, represents the type of new women in the new China since May Fourth as opposed to those under the violence of traditional patriarchal society. The decadence self-contradictions, and narcissism in the diary actually evince Sophia’s subjectivity in deciding her own objects of life, death, love, and desire.
Although it may not seem like a major problem to most people in the United States, prisons are becoming overcrowded, expensive to maintain and have little to no effect on the moral discipline of inmates. The current prison system is extremely inefficient and the purpose of prisons has been completely forgotten. According to Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, the primary purpose of prisons is to punish, to protect, and to rehabilitate. Not only is there an increase in prisoners, but there is a rise in the number of repeat offenders. Alternatives such as counseling, drug rehabilitation, education, job training and victim restitution must be better enforced and organized. People do not understand the severity of the problem mainly because
Prison was designed to house and isolate criminals away from the society in order for our society and the people within it to function without the fears of the outlaws. The purpose of prison is to deter and prevent people from committing a crime using the ideas of incarceration by taking away freedom and liberty from those individuals committed of crimes. Prisons in America are run either by the federal, states or even private contractors. There are many challenges and issues that our correctional system is facing today due to the nature of prisons being the place to house various types of criminals. In this paper, I will address and identify three major issues that I believe our correctional system is facing today using my own ideas along with the researches from three reputable outside academic sources.