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The Writer as Conscience:
Two Perspectives on the Role of Women in Pre-Modern China

In the years between 1919 and 1937, historians in much of the world termed the conflict that had engulfed Europe, parts of Asia, and even dragged the United States out of its isolationism, the Great War. While the war that followed, featuring Tojo, Hitler, Churchill, Stalin, and Roosevelt is much more commonly mentioned in the public consciousness, because of the horrors of the Holocaust and the absolute destruction that is nuclear war, it was the first World War, the Great War, that changed more paradigms in history than the second did. This was the last war that featured cavalry on horseback; this was the first war that featured biological weapons on a large scale. This war saw the toppling, or at least the loosening, of the last vestiges of feudalism and imperialism. The Wilsonian ideal of self-determination of nations began the final crumbling of colonial empires, which would come to a complete halt in the Asian embarrassments in Vietnam in the 1970’s.

One shifting paradigm that is often left out of discussions of the ramifications of World War I is the final end to empire in China. During the age of empire, the status of women was starkly different than it is today, and it is definitely different than writers in the West would have liked for it to be. Confucianism taught such tenets as “Man is to woman as the sun is to the moon. He leads, she follows; thus harmony reigns.” The twin pillars of ancestor worship and the submission of women bolstered the family in this way of thinking (Yanfan). The family concept during this time was also different than it is today: it was common to find three or more generations living together in one home, including not just grandparents, parents and children, but also aunts, uncles and cousins. This way of living was taught by Confucianism and supported by customs and laws. Interestingly, this led to a more complex classification of family in relationships in the Chinese language than is found in Western languages. While “aunt” and “sister” are used to define those relationships in the West, the Chinese language has different words for “elder brother” and “younger brother” as well as for “maternal uncle” as opposed to “paternal uncle” (Yanfan). For peasants, life was somewhat different. Because land was split up into tiny plots, peasant families were often split up and scattered for their entire lives, since they did not have the economic means to live together.

Perhaps the cruelest tactic of keeping women submissive in this culture was the practice of footbinding. Literally intended to keep a woman’s foot growing, this practice was intended to keep women weak, and to ensure that they would need their husbands to perform basic functions. While the exact date that this practice started is unknown, when the Mongols started the Yuan dynasty in 1273, it was a practice that they supported. Bandages were used to keep a woman’s foot from growing past the size of a small child’s. The physical effects included the physical death of the tissues of the foot within three years, which led to a highly unpleasant odor. Infections ran rampant, and the balls of the feet would actually fold into the heels; toes would snap off, or crumble with gangrene. Despite these effects, however, footbinding continued until 1911, when the revolution of Sun Yat-sen officially ended it, but it continued even later in the rural regions of China (Hutchins).

As one can imagine, this sort of repression led to dissent, from a number of sources. The Peony Pavilion, by Tang Hsien-tsu, was written during the sixteenth century, and is a drama about the social limits placed on women as far as their marital choices. The Family was written in the context of the May Fourth Movement, in 1919, by Ba Jin, a noted opponent of the brutal repression associated with the imperialist (and later Communist) governments in China. Despite the fact that these works were written over 300 years apart, their messages about the repression of women are, in many ways the same – in large part because, during that time, the social status of women in China remained basically unchanged.

The Peony Pavilion is the story of Liu Meng-mei (Willow Dreaming Plum), a youthful student, and his beloved, Tu Li-niang, the daughter of a high official in the government. Tu Li-niang falls asleep in a garden behind her home and has an affair with Liu Meng-mei, in her dream, inside the Peony Pavilion. She wakes up pining for this dream lover, and ends up dying of a broken heart in her room – all for a man she has seen only in a dream (The Peony Pavilion). This expresses the severe restrictions placed on the choices of women in this culture, because for a young woman to have such strong emotional attachments to someone she has met in a dream, her prospects of finding and choosing true love in real life must be scant indeed. MORE..