Women Lives in East Asia Midterm

Nu Wa

WHO/WHAT: Creation-myth goddess who molded people from yellow clay and mended the broken sky. | WHEN/WHERE: Mythic, pre-dynastic | WHY IT MATTERS: A female creator at the root of Chinese tradition, a contrast to later subordination of women. Check how your lecture framed her. | [CHECK vs lecture]

Confucianism

WHO/WHAT: Ethical system built on hierarchy, ritual (li) and filial piety. Women: obey father, husband, son; the inner (women) vs outer (men) divide. | WHEN/WHERE: Confucius, 6th–5th c. BCE; state ideology for ~2,000 years | WHY IT MATTERS: Frame for marriage, family and women’s status. May Fourth reformers blamed it as the main culprit for women’s plight. | [CHECK vs lecture]

Yin Yang

WHO/WHAT: Daoist idea of complementary opposites. Female = yin (inner, soft, passive), male = yang (outer, active). | WHEN/WHERE: Ancient; hierarchized later | WHY IT MATTERS: Explained gender relations. Complementary in theory, but Confucian use ranked yang above yin. | [CHECK vs lecture]

Analects for Women

WHO/WHAT: Song Ruozhao’s Tang-era conduct manual. Comportment rules: don’t turn your head walking, don’t open your mouth wide, keep knees still, no noisy skirts, no loud laughing. Strict inner/outer divide: no peering over walls, no talking to outside men. | WHEN/WHERE: Tang dynasty. Notes: pp. 1, 3, 4 | WHY IT MATTERS: Daughter-in-law duties (rise before dawn, cook, stand when mother-in-law sits, cook soft food) show filial piety and generational hierarchy in the household.

Emperor (Empress) Wu Zetian

WHO/WHAT: Only woman to rule China as emperor. Tang court, reign 655–705 per your guide. | WHEN/WHERE: 655–705, Tang dynasty | WHY IT MATTERS: Tang women had greater freedom. Foreman: Shangguan Wan’er was a top political advisor writing imperial documents. Later Neo-Confucians struggled to explain such women.

Neo-Confucianism

WHO/WHAT: Revived, stricter Confucianism. Heavier emphasis on chastity, widow non-remarriage, segregation. | WHEN/WHERE: Rose in the 10th century (guide); Song dynasty | WHY IT MATTERS: Foreman: as it took hold with footbinding, Li Qingzhao was criticized for breaking widowhood rules; Liang Hongyu was praised only as loyal service to husband and country.

Foot-binding

WHO/WHAT: Breaking and binding girls’ feet into tiny “golden lotus” feet. Began as a 10th-century court dance trend, then spread across classes. | WHEN/WHERE: ~10th c. to early 20th c. (about 1,000 years) | WHY IT MATTERS: Lasted because small feet signaled wealth (no field work), worked as currency in the marriage market, and unbound women faced judgment. Mothers bound daughters to secure their future (Foreman, pp. 1–2, 4). Attacked later by Chang Mo-chun, Kang Youwei, Qiu Jin.

Imperial feminism (imperialist cultural feminism)

WHO/WHAT: Western claim to be rescuing Chinese women from “backward” customs such as footbinding, used to justify foreign presence. | WHEN/WHERE: 19th c., after the Opium Wars | WHY IT MATTERS: Missionaries and Western writers used women’s oppression to argue for cultural superiority and empire. Confirm the exact wording from lecture. | [CHECK vs lecture]

The “Dowry Complex”

WHO/WHAT: Mid-Qing elite pressure for large dowries. Mann: a big dowry proved a daughter was marrying as a respectable primary wife, not sold as a servant or concubine. | WHEN/WHERE: Mid-Qing. Notes: Mann pp. 204–207 | WHY IT MATTERS: Dowry and female education were really about elite fear of losing class status in a period of economic growth and rising literacy. Education also separated respectable women from entertainers.

Concubine System

WHO/WHAT: Men could take secondary wives, mainly to produce heirs. Primary wife and concubine had sharply different rank. | WHEN/WHERE: Imperial era to 1950 Marriage Law | WHY IT MATTERS: Mann: Han Learning scholars drew a firm line between wives and concubines. Old Madam Yin used adoption to keep inheritance in the primary line, not a concubine’s branch. Targeted as “feudal” by New Culture.

Opium Wars

WHO/WHAT: Two wars with Britain (and later others). Unequal treaties ceded Hong Kong, opened ports, allowed missionaries. | WHEN/WHERE: 1839–1842; 1856–1860 | WHY IT MATTERS: Start of the foreign pressure that made women’s status a national problem.

Taiping Rebellion

WHO/WHAT: Massive civil war led by Hong Xiuquan with Christian-influenced ideology. | WHEN/WHERE: 1850–1864 | WHY IT MATTERS: Policies on women to remember: banned footbinding, women served in the movement. Confirm lecture details (class/ethnic angle: Hakka). | [CHECK vs lecture]

Spheres of Influence

WHO/WHAT: Foreign powers carving China into zones of exclusive economic privilege. | WHEN/WHERE: Late 19th century | WHY IT MATTERS: Intensified encroachment and humiliating defeats, pushing reform and revolution.

Missionary Influence

WHO/WHAT: Treaties after the Opium Wars let missionaries in. They ran girls’ schools and campaigned against footbinding. | WHEN/WHERE: After 1842/1860 | WHY IT MATTERS: Opened women’s education but is tied to imperial feminism and resentment of foreign presence.

Empress Dowager (Cixi)

WHO/WHAT: Powerful regent who dominated the late Qing court; backed the conservative side in 1898. | WHEN/WHERE: Ruled through the late 19th c., d. 1908 | WHY IT MATTERS: Ended the Hundred Days reforms. Her court later backed the Boxers, then endorsed the 1902 move against footbinding. | [CHECK vs lecture]

Kang Youwei

WHO/WHAT: Leader of the 1898 reform movement. Advocated women’s education and an end to arranged marriages. | WHEN/WHERE: Hundred Days Reform, 1898 | WHY IT MATTERS: Goal: constitutional monarchy and a strong nation. Women’s schools and ending footbinding (proposed 1902) were part of that program.

Liang Qichao

WHO/WHAT: Kang’s collaborator. Argued that educated women were needed for national strength. | WHEN/WHERE: 1890s–1900s | WHY IT MATTERS: Same pairing as Kang: women’s emancipation as a means to national survival. Compare with Qiu Jin.

Red Lantern Soldiers

WHO/WHAT: Women’s units of the Boxer Army. | WHEN/WHERE: Boxer Uprising, 1899–1901 | WHY IT MATTERS: Foreign imperialism triggered one of the largest rebellions in Chinese history. Targets: foreign powers, later the Qing too. Women as active soldiers.

The Republican Revolution

WHO/WHAT: Sun Yat-sen’s revolutionary alliances (Japan, Hong Kong, Honolulu); students went to Japan to learn from Meiji modernization. | WHEN/WHERE: 1912: Qing overthrown, republic founded | WHY IT MATTERS: Qiu Jin was a prominent woman revolutionary in it. The early republic’s failures led to the New Culture diagnosis.

Qiu Jin

WHO/WHAT: Poet-revolutionary. Heroic imagery of swords, blood, breaking out of the “inner quarters”. Attacks footbinding and forced marriage. | WHEN/WHERE: Around 1900–1907 (executed 1907). Poems: pp. 634–656 | WHY IT MATTERS: Women’s liberation and national survival are inseparable. A weak China is the result of paralyzing half its people. Women should educate themselves, unite and fight beside men.

New Youth Magazine

WHO/WHAT: Journal of the New Culture Movement, founded by Chen Duxiu. Attacked Confucianism and promoted science, democracy, free marriage. | WHEN/WHERE: Founded 1915; New Culture 1917–1923 | WHY IT MATTERS: Its generation’s feminism differs from Qiu Jin’s (cultural revolution and individual rights vs armed nationalism). | [CHECK vs lecture]

May Fourth Movement

WHO/WHAT: Student protest and cultural movement. Women organized student unions, published journals, gave speeches, joined boycotts of foreign goods. Parents and male students resisted. | WHEN/WHERE: 1919. Notes: Teng pp. 145–154 | WHY IT MATTERS: Trigger: Versailles gave Germany’s Chinese holdings to Japan. Outcome for women: refusal of arranged betrothals, free-choice marriage, higher education, careers in teaching, journalism, social work.

Teng Ying-chao

WHO/WHAT: May Fourth woman activist who wrote Remembrances of the May Fourth Movement. Later a CCP leader. | WHEN/WHERE: Student in 1919; later Long March and women’s federation work | WHY IT MATTERS: Her account is your main primary source for what female students did and the obstacles they faced.

New Life Movement

WHO/WHAT: Nationalist campaign to rebuild urban infrastructure and restore the traditional value system. | WHEN/WHERE: Guide: 1927–1937 | WHY IT MATTERS: Led by Song Meiling. Contrast with the CCP’s approach and with Linglong’s consumer “New Woman”.

Song Meiling (Madame Chiang Kai-shek)

WHO/WHAT: Led the New Life Movement. | WHEN/WHERE: 1927–1937 Nationalist decade | WHY IT MATTERS: A modern, educated woman promoting restored traditional values: one example of the “facing two ways” tension.

“Calendar Girls”

WHO/WHAT: Commercial calendar and ad posters of glamorous modern women in 1920s–30s Shanghai. | WHEN/WHERE: 1920s–1930s | WHY IT MATTERS: Consumer culture turning the modern woman into an image. Pair with Linglong. Confirm lecture framing. | [CHECK vs lecture]

Linglong Magazine

WHO/WHAT: Shanghai women’s magazine of the 1930s: movie stars, photography, health, style, imported soaps and cosmetics, plus household advice. Marriage called “the tomb of dating”. | WHEN/WHERE: 1930s Shanghai | WHY IT MATTERS: Shows the “New Woman” torn between modern liberation, national responsibility and commercial temptation. Cartoons mocked excessive consumption.

Old Madam Yin

WHO/WHAT: Elite matriarch. Runs the household, finances, servants, daughters-in-law, ancestral rites. Invests in property to fund modern education. | WHEN/WHERE: Notes: pp. 12–41 (authority); pp. 110–124 (decline) | WHY IT MATTERS: Informal power but no public or legal authority. Family decline mirrors collapse of the traditional gentry. Contrast with Ning Lao T’ai-t’ai (poor, working woman, pp. 125–138).

The Long March

WHO/WHAT: Communists’ 6,000-mile retreat from Nationalist extermination campaigns, ending at Yenan. | WHEN/WHERE: 1934–1935 | WHY IT MATTERS: Communists had gone underground to organize peasants. Very few women took part.

Women in Yan’an

WHO/WHAT: CCP organized rural women into Women’s Associations: spinning, weaving, shoes for soldiers, farming, literacy and health classes. | WHEN/WHERE: Late 1930s–1940s. Notes: Sheridan pp. 32–44 | WHY IT MATTERS: Early push for divorce and challenging husbands alienated conservative peasant men, so by early 1940s the CCP shifted to production and family harmony.

The Sino-Japanese War

WHO/WHAT: Full-scale war between China and Japan; start of WWII in Asia. | WHEN/WHERE: 1937 (onward) | WHY IT MATTERS: Women’s liberation became identified with the national cause. Women joined both Nationalist and Communist anti-Japanese efforts.

Rape of Nanking

WHO/WHAT: Mass killing and sexual violence by the Japanese army in the Nationalist capital. | WHEN/WHERE: Dec 1937–Jan 1938 | WHY IT MATTERS: Marks the war’s brutality toward women. Check what your lecture emphasized. | [CHECK vs lecture]

All-China Federation of Women

WHO/WHAT: Party-led national women’s organization. | WHEN/WHERE: Founded 1949 | WHY IT MATTERS: Carried out state policy on women, including the Marriage Law. Top-down rather than independent. | [CHECK vs lecture]

New Marriage Law (1950)

WHO/WHAT: Early PRC reform of marriage and family; part of folding women’s liberation into socialist construction. | WHEN/WHERE: 1950 | WHY IT MATTERS: Banned practices categorized as “feudal” (arranged marriage, concubinage) and promoted free choice.

Great Leap Forward Movement

WHO/WHAT: Mass mobilization campaign putting women’s labor into collective production. | WHEN/WHERE: 1958–1962 | WHY IT MATTERS: Part of the 1949–76 pattern: women’s issues politicized and tied to socialist construction. Double burden of work and household.

The Cultural Revolution

WHO/WHAT: Political campaign with “masculinization” of women as a national and local phenomenon. | WHEN/WHERE: 1966–1976 | WHY IT MATTERS: Gender difference downplayed in dress and image. Model plays and Iron Girls are its images of women.

Red Guards

WHO/WHAT: Young militant activists mobilized during the Cultural Revolution. | WHEN/WHERE: From 1966 | WHY IT MATTERS: Women took part too. Examples of politicized youth identity. | [CHECK vs lecture]

“Iron Girls”

WHO/WHAT: Model women doing heavy “men’s” work in industry and agriculture. | WHEN/WHERE: 1960s–1970s | WHY IT MATTERS: Equality defined as matching male standards (Jiang Jin pp. 100–115): women entered factories, construction, engineering, but kept the housework (double burden).

“Holding Half the Sky”

WHO/WHAT: Slogan casting women as half of socialist construction. | WHEN/WHERE: Mao era | WHY IT MATTERS: Women’s labor needed by the state. Slogan: “Times have changed, men and women are the same”: public equality, little change at home.

Model Plays

WHO/WHAT: Revolutionary stage works promoted during the Cultural Revolution with heroic, desexualized women. | WHEN/WHERE: 1966–1976 | WHY IT MATTERS: The visual and cultural side of masculinization. Evans contrasts it with post-Mao femininity. | [CHECK vs lecture]

The Four Modernizations

WHO/WHAT: Economic reform program with privatization, removal of wage control, mechanized farming, western learning. | WHEN/WHERE: 1978 | WHY IT MATTERS: New opportunities and new challenges for women: both positive and negative changes.

“Marketing Femininity”

WHO/WHAT: Harriet Evans: media shift from the “Iron Woman” to commercialized, hyper-feminine images (beauty, domesticity, attractiveness). | WHEN/WHERE: 1980s–90s. Notes: pp. 217–227 | WHY IT MATTERS: Double-edged: more room for self-expression and consumption, but women valued for looks, youth and marriageability.

Floating Population

WHO/WHAT: Rural people, many young women, who migrate to cities for factory and service work (Tan Shen). | WHEN/WHERE: Post-reform. Notes: pp. 249–254 | WHY IT MATTERS: Earn their own income and independence; remit money home. On return they negotiate marriage choice, spending, sometimes start small businesses.

“Left-over” Women

WHO/WHAT: Label for urban, educated, unmarried women in their late 20s and older. | WHEN/WHERE: 2000s onward | WHY IT MATTERS: Shows how traditional marriage expectations persist alongside new opportunities. Confirm lecture/reading details. | [CHECK vs lecture]

The “Shifting Sex Landscape”

WHO/WHAT: I could not tell the source from your materials. Likely about changing sexuality and sexual norms in reform-era China. | WHEN/WHERE: Reform era | WHY IT MATTERS: Check your lecture slides or reading list for this one before relying on anything here. | [CHECK vs lecture]

The “Feminist Five”

WHO/WHAT: Young activists detained in China in 2015 for planning an anti-sexual-harassment action. | WHEN/WHERE: 2015 | WHY IT MATTERS: Shows limits on independent feminist activism under state-led women’s policy. Confirm details from lecture. | [CHECK vs lecture]