Duxiu Gender Roles

Gender roles, it seems, have always been binary. Men and women across the world have internalized masculine and feminine roles that have been attached to their assigned sex from birth. Men have always been expected to be the head of the household and breadwinner while women are subservient to the men in their lives. The new 20th century brought about political systems such as capitalism and communism that were beginning manifest in Asian countries as well as the beginning of women’s suffrage that began to spread throughout the world. These events set off a chain reaction of change in the roles of men and women. Using textual evidence, this essay attempts to examine the methods of which the people of each of these countries tried to change their

The inclusion of women in political roles as opposed to the exclusion is a push towards changing the dynamics of men and women. As the founder of the Chinese Communist Party, Chen Duxiu speaks on the importance of individualism among men, specifically women and the remarkable nature of how their place in China needs to be more progressive as compared to the ideas Confucius’ teachings have controlled their way of life in society. In Chen Duxiu’s The Way of Confucius, the author invalidates Confucius’ teachings concerning the roles that men and women should partake in as the idea of individualism is vital. The

He Zhen’s What Women Should Know About Communism focuses on the independence of the Chinese woman and how it is beneficial that she is in comparison to communism while debasing a greedy capitalist system. Zhen first illustrates how women are always looking towards men in order to ‘eat’. She uses the word ‘eat’ multiple times to stress how dependent women are to men when they can be individuals who fend for themselves. She eventually goes on to blame the practice of capitalism as the root of this problem as she believes it affects both sexes. The author makes it known the capitalism is the root of all their problems. She writes, “By practicing communism, think of all the things in the world. They were either produced by nature or by individual labor. Why can rich people buy them but the poor cannot? It is because the world trades with money. It is because people seize things they have bought with money for their exclusive use? If every single woman understands that nothing is more evil than money, and they all unite together to cooperate with men to utterly overthrow the rich and the powerful and then abolish money...” (Zhen 723). The author has proposed here a way for women to be self-involved by joining forces with the opposite sex to achieve a common goal of overthrowing a political system that allegedly victimize both sexes. Zhen’s method of