Follow Up: Responding to Aridelle's Post

Although all the articles we read were very interesting and definitely made me angry that women were so disenfranchised so recently, the Seneca Falls Declaration, which concisely stated all of men's crimes against women, hit home just today in my history class. Coincidentally (or again maybe not), there was a passage in a handout from my War and Violence in East Asia class that had to do with women's role in the early Han Dynasty (and in the rest of the dynasties thereafter). For background, women in China were definitely second-class citizens to men - they were seen as a burden because their parents would have to marry their daughters off by providing an expensive dowry, emperors had hundreds or even thousands of concubines in their royal harems, and many royal women were forced into political marriages to form alliances between the Chinese and other peoples. The passage from Lessons for Women, written by a renowned female adviser Ban Zhao, is a perfect example of the male-female power relations Mott and Stanton were campaigning against: "In ancient times, people put a baby girl on the ground on the third day after her birth...to lay the baby on the ground signifies that she is inferior and weak, and that she should humble herself before others...to be modest, yielding, and respectful; to put others first, and herself last; not to mention it when she does a good deed; not to deny it when she commits a wrong; to bear disgrace and humiliation; and always to have a feeling of fear - there may be said to be the ways she humbles herself before others...[W]eakness is women's good quality. Thus in self-cultivation, nothing equals respect for others; in avoiding confrontation with strength, nothing equals compliance. Therefore it is said that the way of respect and compliance is woman's great li [proper rule of conduct]." Zhao, even though she was well-educated, upheld men's convictions to exclude women from the realm of politics, prohibit them from getting jobs, and paint them as inferior, immoral beings that need constant guidance. In some classic girl-on-girl crime, Zhao also "created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of moral for men and women (Mott and Stanton)" by delineating what women should be like - humble, aware of their inferiority, capable of accepting their inferiority gracefully, quiet, moral, obedient to and respectful of men, and able to accept criticism. Men have always decided what are "good" qualities and "bad" qualities in women, thereby establishing control over them - and these qualities were corroborated by the few women who had some power, namely empresses, artists, and historians. Since men, especially back in ancient China, wanted power to stay between them (and not be influenced by their wives, mistresses, and their families), they drummed a message of objectification and obedience into Chinese women to keep them down. I was struck by the similarity between Ban Zhao's message (who lived in from 45-116 AD) and the message Stanton and Mott were fighting in 1848 - not much had changed at all.