Lecture: Patriarchy and Gender

In traditional China, even more than in most pre-industrial

societies, family life was the indisputable nexus of the social system.
Further, the Chinese family was a virtual citadel to patriarchy. Few
family systems can compete with the Confucian for degradation and
brutality toward women. From female infanticide to cripple feet to
child-bride sale, wife beating, polygyny and more, Chinese women
tasted no end of bitterness in their short, mostly poverty ridden lives.

The traditional Chinese family, according to Western

mythology, was an incomparably noble and genteel institution. Large
multi-generational groupings of extended kin graced the chambers
and courtyards of spacious mansions where they spent their time
worshipping ancestors, venerating elders and generally enjoying the
harmonious, filial, and temperate relationships prescribed by
Confucian scripture. So runs the myth

Although only the most affluent could approximate it, for

two thousand years Chinese of all social classes and geographic
regions aspired to attain the idealized virtues of Confucian familism.
The term familism means a form of social organization in which all
values are determined by reference to the maintenance, continuity
and function of the family groups. Though relevant, the definition is
a bit abstract. For practical purposes, it seems advisable in describing
the term familism to in clued the following five essential features.
First, Emphasis on the father/son relationship although the
family as a social organization always involves parent-child or

husband-wife relationships, unless the relationship between the

father and son is stressed there never would be familism, in some
cases not even a stable relationship. This relationship establishes the
conditions for patriarchy, patrilocal residence after marriage,
patrilineal descent, agnatic clan organization and the inheritance of
property by one or all legal male heirs. Second, Family Pride the
familys standing is important in that any members high status is
taken to be the high status of the family and her or his disgrace is
taken to be the disgrace of the family. Third, Encouragement of the
large family Traditional values persistently and invariably
encourages the living together of blood relatives and regard with
shame any division of the household. It is unimportant what the
actual size of the average family may be; whenever economic
circumstances permit the family membership will continue to grow.

Fourth, The cult of ancestor worship The father-and-son

relationship, being a link of unending chain between generations
leads upward to ancestor worship and downward to the sin of no
posterity. A natural result of this emphasis is demonstrated in the
keeping of elaborate pedigrees and the building of splendid ancestral
halls. Fifth, Common Ownership of property besides the
ideological reinforcement, the economic basis of familism is its
common ownership of property. Perhaps no family could achieve
unity unless the destinies of its members were bond together by a
mutual sharing of prosperity and disaster.

Confucius and other ruling elite ideologies had consciously

conceived of the patriarchal lineage, with its emphasis on the
legitimacy of paternal authority, as an affective institutional
guarantor of social stability. The patriarchal, patrilineal, patrilocal
family was the center and most important institution in the
traditional Chinese social structure. This is illustrated by the Family
Lim. Even more than in most traditional societies, it was the matter
of Confucian principle that the needs and interests of the individual
be subordinated to that of the family group.

The interests of the entire patriarchal household (as well as its

past and future lineage) were intimately affected by the selection of
brides. A man was not acquiring a mate; the lineage was receiving a
social, economic and biological contribution to its destiny.
Temperament, fertility and virtue were high on the list of bridal
selection criteria. Conversely, because a married daughter was
irrevocably lost to her parental home, the matter of her betrothal was
of correspondingly lesser significance. For most poor peasants,
economic considerations of bride price and gifts and future lucrative
connections were likely to dominate, although sympathetic parents
generally gave some consideration to the personalities of the family to
whom they delivered their daughter. Even so, it was the
temperament of the family rather than that of the groom that was of
great concerned to them.

Individual identity was so minimized that individuals were

properly address by kin terms that designated the status role in the
familyi.e., first daughter, second son and sixth uncle. Indeed even
friendship came to be expressed in kinship terms. Decisions
concerning how and where an individual would be educated or
employed were also determined with the fate, fortune, and necessities
of the family in mind.

Sex, age and generation were the basic coordinates that

defined an individuals status, roles, functions, privileges, and
liabilities within the extremely authoritarian hierarchical structure.
As patriarch, the eldest male was head of the household and the ideal
dictated that all his sons or brothers should remain under his
authority and in the same household with their wives and offspring.
However, in practice this was rarely feasible economically for the 85
per cent of the population classified as peasants or poor, and it
demanded highly sophisticated interpersonal skills from those
sufficiently affluent to make the attempt.

Therefore the more typical arrangement was the stem

family, in which only the eldest married son remained in the parental
home while his younger brothers established independent households
when they wed. The high mortality rate among peasants meant that
households of only two generations were as common as those with
three or more, and the estimated size of the typical traditional
Chinese household was only four to sex persons among the peasantry
and other poor classes, and perhaps six to nine among the gentry.

The entire Chinese family system was linked to an agrarian

economy. Most families were nearly self-sufficient economically, and
only slightly less so socially. Division of labor by sex was extreme,
with women relegated almost exclusively to internal domestic chores.
In times of abject poverty and below subsistence level agriculture, it
has been estimated that women supplied only 16 percent of agrarian
labor power. In China, in the wheat regions of the north where
farming was exclusively male and womens labor rigidly restricted,
womens feet were bound and their status was miserably low, Only in
the southern rice cultures were peasant women were allowed to play
a noticeable role in productive activity, and, not surprisingly, there
they were far more likely to retain their use of their feet as well as
some degree of movement and influence.

Although the Western fantasy depicts relations of highly

cultivated tenderness among Chinese relatives, in fact Chinese family
life was marked by a shocking degree of brutality. The Confucian
emphasis on filial piety and loyalty was a euphemistic prescription
for absolute subordination of young to old and, more important for
our purposes, female to male. Indeed, as Margery Wolf points out, the
structure of the Chinese family looks very different depending on
which genders perspective you choose to view it from. The dominant
male perspective conjures and unbroken lineage with power,
property, and esteem passing in orderly and gradual fashion from
generation to generation. From the female perspective, family life
appears dramatically opposite. During her lifetime a Chinese woman
lived in two distinctly different familiesher natal and marital
homes. Instead of an unbroken lineage, the woman was never in her
lifetime fully a member of any family. Her name was not even

recorded in her fathers genealogy, and when she died only her family
name surname was entered in the genealogy charts of her husbands
family.
Even then her remains have to wait the death of her husband
before they could be granted their final resting place. Wolf has
described the womans family as the uterine family a
contemporary group that comes into existence out of a womans need
and is held together insofar as she has the strength to do soThe
uterine family has no ideology, no formal structure, and no public
existence, It is built out of sentiments and loyalties that die with its
members but it is no less real for all that.

In countless other ways womans low status in the

traditional family was brought home to her. Inheritance patterns
barred her from any control over rights to property. After her
marriage, she discarded her given name. She played a subordinate
role in public ceremonies and was generally secluded from social life.
In a system characterized by filial piety, womans life was described
by the three obediencesto her father during childhood, to her
husband during marriage and to her son during widowhood.
Marriages were arranged with neither the participation nor the
knowledge of the principals. At marriage the bride was abruptly torn
from the relatively sympathetic, possibly loving environment of her
natal home and given over to the position of slave like obedience and
often terror among total strangers that awaited her in her husbands
household. Because females were allowed to contribute so little to the
economic survival of a generally impoverished group, and even that
small contribution was irretrievably lost upon her marriage, female
children were an economic liability many families could ill afford.

Female infanticide was by no means uncommon. More frequently,

female children were sold or adopted as child brides by their future
in-laws.
Although only the most prosperous men could afford to
indulge in it, polygyny, through the taking of concubines or second
wives, was a legitimate male privilege. In part this was a response to
the enormous pressure ot produce male progeny which the system of
patrilineal descent and ancestor worship exerted abd in part it was
the blatant expression of the pernicious double sexual standard
which pervades patriarchal societies. Premarital (as well as post
marital) chastity was demanded of all women; female adultery was
punishable by death; divorce which was rare in any case, was almost
exclusively a male prerogative; widows were expected to remain
single. Wife-beating, as well as child beating, were everyday
occurrences. Suicides were reported to have been particularly
commonplace during the womans newlywed years, clearly the most
traumatic, lonely, and difficult period in a Chinese womans none-toocarefree life.

What is fairly certain for both sexes and all social classes, however,
is that sexual life, except as instrumental for reproduction was deemphasized for the married couple. Love and marriage were kept in
quite separate compartments

Powerful contradictions and tensions were built into the ,

Confucian family system. Although the patrilineage was expected
was expected to foster loyal obedience to the empire, it is easy to see
how the doctrine of filial piety could turn around on itself to set up
the family as conflicting center of loyal to the state. Out of the clans
grew the notorious secret fraternal societies which economic and
political distress left ripe for warlordism, banditry and rebellion.
Internal to the family there were ulcerous contradictions as well.
Although the joint family was culturally prescribed, primogeniture
was exclusively ceremonial while land and property were divided
equally among sons. Hence there was enormous pressure to divide
the household upon the death of the patriarch.

Relationships in the typical extended household were

anything but peaceful. Tension and conflict were structured into
every familial relationship. In every case I which emotional intimacy
was at all likely to develop, social obligations dictated conflicting
allegiances. As previously stated last week, while a womans entire
emotional security was focused on her children, the children owed
their primary allegiances to people like their father who might be her
chief antagonists. Even if a husband was emotionally inclined to favor
his wife, filial piety demanded that he honor the wishes of her most
frequent tormentorshis parents, especially his mother. Conflict was
also latent in the fact that the patriarchal system structured an
inverse relationship between an individuals power and his/her
obligations. Duties and obligations were owed from young to old and
from female to male, but power lines were exactly reversed.

That for 2000 years women were successfully prevailed upon to

acquiesce in a system that ruthlessly sacrificed their bodies, minds,
and spirits to the patriarchal family system is an unhappy
treatment both to the forces of coercion and to the effectiveness of
patriarchal socialization. It is true that a few women of the largest,
wealthiest families were apt to wield significant influence through
their management of enormous household funds and their control
over a large segregated community of female relatives and
servants. But here it is important to note an important distinction
between power and authority. Whatever power these Chinese
women wielded were not theirs by right but were delegated to
them by men.

Conceding this distinction, Wolf has recently argued that it was

the very merciless structural position of women which was the
source of an unexpected degree of female power. Rudely thrust into
a foreign, hostile environment at marriage and provided with no
structural supports, the Chinese woman had recourse to none but
her own resources in her struggle for survival. It is Wolfs
contention that these served her admirably.

Wolf claims that one of the more useful resources available

to a woman was her anger (an emotion for whose development she
must have needed little encouragement). Angry women were a threat
because to quarrel with an unrelated woman was considered a bad
omen, and semi-mystical powers were attributed to women, who used
them to good advantage, not infrequently achieving domestic control.
Because the Chinese family was a miniature government and because
a girls position within it was so precarious, girls learned early the

skills of diplomacy and politics, particularly through their

responsibility for the care of their younger siblings. Furthermore,
unlike upper class women who lived in virtual seclusion, peasant
women were forced to participate more actively in work and the
neighborhood, where they established a community of women who
effectively shaped village opinion on all manner of issues, and most
particularly worked to reform undesirable domestic behavior.
Moreover, Wolf points out that there were two traditionally female
occupations in which womens highly developed diplomatic acuity
were put to good usethose of marriage-go-between and of soul
raiser.
Of the traditional 4Ps in China and Taiwanpatriarchy,
patriliny, patrimony, and patrilocality) one remains an index and buttress
of male supremacy. The majority of marriages continue to be patrilocal. At
least in the rural areas which contain over 60 percent of the population, it
is customary for the bride to move to her husbands village. This
immediately places women at a social, political, economic and
psychological disadvantage. They lack the local relations and experience to
win them positions of responsibility and power. They lose seniority at
work. They must build from scratch the loyalties and friendships which
they will need to support them in their domestic and public life.
Patrilocality reflects a deeply embedded cultural subordination of women.

Contemporary Taiwan is a society in transition. In response to rapid

industrialization, under and emerging capitalist economy, the traditional
Taiwanese family life is finding it difficult to maintain its supremacy.
Taiwan kinship patterns are gradually joining the trend to the conjugal
family. Industrialization, with its norms, job specialization, and mobility
demands is placing stress on the extended family in rural as well as urban

areas. Through out Taiwan, the family is still the nexus of social existence
and most importantly, the Confucian familism is still the cultural ideal.
Despite the intrusion of industrialization, social life remains embedded in
kinship networks and the interests of the individual take a poor second
place to the requirements and face of the familyface signifies honor or
shame as in allowing a person to save faceexample of Taiwan boss and
banquet for employer of honor who is allowed to resigned rather than be
fired.
The emphasis on face and appearances continues to underlie much
of the fiercely competitive behavior.
As usual it is the women who are expected to subordinate their
interests to the success and requirements of their husbands and children.
According to one Chinese scholar, the Chinese self has traditionally found
its meaning in terms of well-defined sets of relationships rather than in
terms of the individual.
Also, in the literature on Taiwan, one is struck by the stong
repression of sexuality. At the same time that female sexuality is
repressed, women are sexual objects, Sexual exploitation has been
virtually eliminated in the new China but not so on Taiwan, were sex is a
growth industry. However, in both the new China and Taiwan sexuality is
de-emphasized during adolescence and young adulthood. Sex education is
absent from the curriculum in both societies
Finally, patrilocality is common in both cultures. In Taiwan it takes
on an extreme form. Not only are rural brides expected to be imported from
different villages, but marriage with appropriate mates from mothers
relatives is considered a social disgrace.
As we see in the House of Lim, in countless ways womans extreme
low status in the traditional family was brought home to her. In a system

characterizes by filial piety, a womans life was described by the three

obediencesto her father during childhood, to her husband during
marriage and to her son during widowhood. As Margery shows us
marriages were arranged with neither the participation nor knowledge of
the principals. The primary role of the wife was to produce male heirs for
he patrilineage. At marriage the bride was abruptly torm from the relative
sympathetic, possibly loving environment of her natal home and given over
to a family where obedience and often terror among total strangers
awaited her in her husbands household.