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Women in Modern China

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1. In different periods of change in the 20th and 21st centuries in China, the Chinese government or reformers seeking societal change redefined women’s roles to achieve their own purposes. Choos ... e three periods of change and describe the image of the ideal woman promulgated by the government or reformers. Do not spend time describing what women’s lives were like in each time period. Instead, focus on the ideas about women the reformers or government made public. • Describe the ideal woman (not how women actually lived) that reformers in each time period hoped to see in society. • What were the reformers’ motives for wanting to see these new women emerge? Did they only want to improve women’s lives, or were there other motives? • Be sure to point out the differences and similarities. 2. This course has made distinctions between rural women (still the majority) and urban women. The Chinese Communist Party under Mao Zedong tried to dictate major changes in marriage practices, family relationships, and sexuality. Did rural and urban women benefit equally from Mao’s changes? If so, how? If not, why not? 3. This course ended with the book, Factory Girls, which described young rural women moving into the city to do factory work. May Fourth reformers in the early 20th century believed that Chinese women could only achieve “personhood” if they were educated and worked outside the home. Yet the reformers were ambivalent about women working in a male-dominated work place because they feared women would lose their inherently gentle and gracious nature and men would sexually exploit them. Mao Zedong also believed that women could only achieve equality through work outside the home and essentially tried to destroy traditional Chinese family life and the home. If the May 4th Reformers, Mao Zedong, and Leslie Chang, the author of Factory Girls, could debate their perspectives on the best way women might achieve equality in Chinese society, would each one say? Would each defend paid work outside the [Show More]

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