Is the war that the women's rights movement has declared on the patriarchal family structure a case of "there was peace under heaven until women stirred things up," as many men see it? Or do women really have a reasonable complaint to make?
In the last few years, Taiwan's women's rights movement has gone from the public arena, the political stage, the educational system and the workplace, into the home: Why must a woman turn her property over to her husband after marriage? Why must a woman spend her whole life waiting upon her husband, her husband's parents and their children? Why doesn't a housewife receive a salary or retirement benefits? Why must children take their father's surname? Why must a woman become a member of her husband's family and live with them? Why. . . ?
To the background din of these questions was added the sight of a large group of women pursuing legal reform in the streets, shouting and waving flags. . . . Many men thought "Shrews!" to themselves and changed their route.
"Women in Taiwan are becoming harder and harder to manage!" complained a taxi driver from southern Taiwan, not speaking of the women protesting on the street, but of the women he encounters in his own daily life. Women may or may not "do as their husbands tell them," and may or may not show appropriate filial piety towards their husband's parents. They enjoy working and running around doing things. When looking for a husband, they are looking for one who will help with the housework. "You haven't heard that women are now on top? The earth and sky have traded places!"
When the law enters the home
Has Taiwan really turned on its head?
Two years ago on Women's Day, women's groups including the Awakening Foundation and the Warm Life Association for Women delivered their proposal for revisions to the family provisions of the civil code to the Legislative Yuan. Finally, in September of last year, the Legislative Yuan passed the first portion of the revision: The 1985 New Spousal Unified Property System was made retroactive and a law giving custody of children to the father in the case of a divorce was repealed.
What this means is that for women who married before June 4, 1985, property held in their name can really be considered their own. Also, if they and their husband are divorced, custody of their children will not automatically be granted to the husband. With the children's best interests now being considered, both the mother and father can contest for custody confident that they are doing so on a level playing field.
These two things may seem absolutely natural to the women of advanced democratic nations, but this is the first time that they have been allowed for in Taiwan's legal code.
This is cause for celebration. It is also cause for consideration of the situation of Taiwan's women. While male legislators were unanimously applauding their female compatriots, Dagmar Meinu You, a lawyer and head of the board of directors of the Awakening Foundation, let none of their enthusiasm go to her head; she feels that men and women are still very far from sharing power equally in marriage, though the passage of this law is certainly a first step. Although wives now have actual ownership of property in their own names, how are these moneys, lands, or buildings to be used? Who will use them? Who will receive the earnings from investments? The civil code guarantees that the husband will manage, use, and receive the earnings from property. A divorced woman may win custody of her children, but with laws on the division of property incomplete, if her husband is something less than generous and tries to make things difficult for her, she may be left caring for her children without a penny to her name.
In principle, the legal code is for "people"; there should not be any distinctions made on the basis of sex. "But as soon as the law enters the home, traditional thinking about the family very clearly emerges," points out Dagmar You. Concepts growing out of the traditional family structure such as "patrilineal filiation," "men are superior, women inferior" and "men work and women stay at home" permeate the whole social structure. A legal code established by people cannot escape the framework laid out by those people's family values system. A woman's situation and position in the home are obviously subject to the same limitations.
Hu Youhui, Assistant Professor in the Health and Welfare Policy Institute at Yang Ming University and Assistant Convener of National Taiwan University's (NTU) Women's Research Laboratory says that despite the recent appearance of the so-called "new man," individual examples are not representative of the situation of women in the whole of the society. For example, when a woman marries into her husband's family, she even loses control of her body. Have a child or not? Have a boy or have a girl? Pressures from the husband's family and from society all press down on a woman's shoulders when making these decisions. Whether or not a woman produces a male heir typically determines her position in the traditional Taiwanese family. Not becoming pregnant or not producing a male heir are often excuses for a husband to have a mistress. "In a patriarchal society, the female sex is seen as the passive one, existing to serve and please men and as a tool to produce heirs."
Are women servants?
The influence of stereotypical male and female roles is ubiquitous. In the past, primary school textbooks contained the lines "Mother gets up in the morning and sweeps the floor. . . . Father gets up in the morning and reads the newspaper." After protests by women's groups, the lines were changed to "Mother gets up in the morning and does morning exercises. . . . Father gets up in the morning and reads the newspaper." However, primary school textbooks still show the mothers always bent over the stove or bringing food to the table, and the fathers, while occasionally seen helping with the dishes or turning on the gas, are often portrayed on the sofa reading the paper or a book with a title like Success. "Stereotypical values such as 'men are superior, women inferior' and 'men work and women stay at home' are still being passed on to the next generation through textbooks," says NTU Institute of Building and Planning Director Pi Hungta.
Even women working outside the home cannot escape the division of labor delineated by stereotypical roles. According to the "Report on the Usage of Time in the Taiwan Region" published by the Executive Yuan's DirectorateGeneral of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) in 1990, on average, women in Taiwan spend 8.8 times more time on household chores than men. Professional women spend 5.2 times the amount of time that men do on household chores, taking care of children and shopping. Su Yingmin, lecturer in the Department of Architecture at Taipei Technical College, compared these numbers to the situation in other countries for the same time period. She found that with the exception of Japan, where the "women do the housework" phenomenon was even more prevalent than in Taiwan and the ratio for working women hit 6.7 times, in countries such as the United States, Britain and Canada, the ratio of time spent by women on household chores to that spent by men was under 2:1.
Moreover, the raising of women's consciousness that has taken place in recent years has done almost nothing to alter this imbalance. Quite the contrary. In new numbers from 1994, the difference in the amount of time Taiwan's women and men spent on household chores had grown to a shocking 10 times. The amount of time spent on household chores by working women had risen to 6.2 times that spent by men.
"For men, coming home means resting. For working women, it is the start of another job," writes Pi Hungta in his book Women Looking for Space.
A woman working in the news media said that between her job, housework, and raising her children she was often utterly exhausted. Her husband, who also works in the news media, having been cared for by his mother since childhood, from an early age was accustomed to the kettle always being full and his underclothes always being clean. "After eight years of marriage, I can still count the number of times he has done the laundry or cleaned the bathroom." The woman above has nearly exploded a few times after coming home to find her home a mess. But encountering an equally exhausted husband, "Bringing up the division of the housework again, what are you going to get besides a fight?"
"Getting married means becoming someone's handmaiden," her mother told her when she married.
Going home to take care of the kids
In spite of the fact that women are more and more highly educated, and that they have more ability to enter the workplace and share with men the economic burden of maintaining a household, the numbers obviously indicate that their burden inside the home is very heavy.
According to DGBAS figures on the percentage of people employed in Taiwan, 66% of Taiwan's women between the ages of 25 and 29 work. This rate falls sharply for women past these prime marrying years. Sun Yatsen University Department of Sociology Professor Wu Ningyuan, in the "Report on the Survey on Trends among Taiwanese Men," pointed out that for men between the ages of 25 and 49, the rate of employment was 95.3%, while for women of the same age the rate was 60.4%. The major reason for the much lower rate of employment of women in this age range is that they are taking care of the home.
Academia Sinica president Lee Yuan-tzeh's feelings are strong: "The difficulty of taking care of both home and research demands is the biggest problem keeping women out of the sciences." He gives an example from his own life. Both he and his wife, Wu Chinli, possessed the abilities to enter academia, but it was his wife who decided to stay at home and take care of the children. "In fact, my wife is more intelligent than I am. Although she doesn't regret the decision, to this day, I feel it was unfair," he told the media.
The raising of children is thought to be a key factor in married women's decisions to give up their jobs. Traditional thinking holds that having babies and raising children is "women's work" as mandated by heaven. Given biological constraints, a woman's role childbearing is unavoidable. But are women more suited to raising children than men just because they must bear them? This is a question on which there is no agreement at all.
"It's easier for women to get along with children for long periods of time. Men aren't unwilling, they're just not as kind and thoughtful as women," thinks one 30-something father. The division of labor whereby men work outside the home and women take care of the house and children may be based on severalthousandyearold cultural teaching. It also may be a biological differences between men and women at the genetic level. "If you want to change it, you can, but at the outset, it will be the children who suffer."
In spite of feminists' vehement opposition to the genetic view, it remains an open question. And nobody is willing to use their own children to experiment. Also, given that women's salaries average about 70% of men's, when one spouse must give up his or her work to care of the family, it is usually the wife who does so.
"Men and women derive their feelings of achievement from different sources. Women are more likely to feel achievement from taking care of the house and children. Men's feelings of achievement come more from competition in the workplace," thinks one man working in the literary world.
Depression in the home
Is it really this way? The data from the Minister of the Interior's 1993 "Survey on the Situation of Women" indicates that only about 11% of Taiwan's women felt that taking care of the family filled them with honor, satisfaction and achievement. Another survey, on women's thoughts about child-rearing, indicated that 80% thought that it should be a shared responsibility. Moreover, only 15% felt satisfaction and achievement from bringing up children.
Forty years ago, literary giant Liang Shih-chiu said of women doing housework, "They don't aim for perfection, but they try to avoid mistakes." Among women who have been doing housework for many years, how does honor weigh in against dissatisfaction? What the numbers reveal ought to cause concern.
"In fact, the incidence of anxiety and depression among women is high. All research, both domestic and foreign, indicates that marriage and family are a primary cause of depression among women," says Hu You-hui.
Up to the present day, television dramas in Taiwan daily air tragic stories of women who undergo every possible hardship, stoically accepting it all. These women give up themselves for their families. The plots are tension filled, but also subconsciously reinforce the phenomenon of the traditional "good woman, good wife"- a woman's sacrifice becomes the family's good fortune. However, today's feminists are looking at this in a different way: Why is a family's good fortune always built upon a woman's sacrifice?
"Women resist sacrificing themselves for the family, but what about men? Isn't all that hard work away from the home to make money to support the family?" Many men have real problems with feminist emphasis on the sacrifices women have to make.
But is "the men support the family, the women care for it" really seen as a fair division of labor in the domestic duties of a husband and wife? Hu Youhui has deep suspicions about it. She says that the part about the man supporting the family already is an obvious underestimation of the economic value of the labor of housekeeping and raising children, very unfairly relegating women to being "dependents."
Traditional Chinese agricultural society depended on copious amounts of labor, and the men carried out the major part of the farm work; this was the major resource of the household economy. For thousands of years the cooperative arrangement of "men on the outside, women on the inside" persisted in such a background without problems. However, with the decline of agriculture, Taiwan has gradually gone from the blue-collar labor of the industrial age to the white-collar labor of a service-industry-based postindustrial era; gradually, traditional roles in the division of labor have become no longer suited to the times. The rate of change of ideas evidently still lags behind that of social transformation.
Rewards for domestic work
With the heightening of feminist self-awareness, women's roles which have never before been questioned now have new interpretations. This has occasioned a re-estimation of the value and status of the housewife. In recent years women's groups have called for legal amendments so that "housewives have a paid post." This is an earthshaking demand.
They point out that the premise which allows men to devote themselves whole-heartedly to their work away from the home, so that they can function competitively at work without worring about anything else, is that the woman at home takes on the responsibilities of child-rearing, care of the elderly, and household management. Yet the social value of the housewife is far below the reputation of the man in terms of acclaim and achievement. "A woman's socially recognized worth is only that she is Mrs. Soandso, the mother of Soandso," states Dagmar You, so that the spirit of "housewives have a paid post" is to allow the value of "staying home" to be seen.
However, this is a blind spot which many men can not understand. They agree that a housewife ought to set her own value, yet commonly do not support the part about the "paid post." "When you take the mutual love-life between the sexes within the home and make it into a paid service, what does that do to the 'affection' between man and wife?" one man strongly dissented, "So could I draw up my wife's 'severance pay' and fire her on the grounds that 'she wasn't performing adequately'?"
"Of course you can't. Relations between husband and wife aren't conducted in terms of employer and employee. They're a partnership." Dagmar You opens her eyes wide, "Of course marriage partners have a relationship in which 'affection' takes first place. The problem is when the husband doesn't have these feelings, where is the wife's value then? The possibilities of a wife without an income are limited even when it comes to expressing her love for her husband." Take, for example, a wife who enthusiastically rushes out to buy winter clothing for her husband to show her affections, but the husband thinks, "this was purchased with my own money." In such a situation, the value of "feelings" is greatly discounted.
Men hold that the feminist movement's proposal that "housewives should have a paid post" is much ado about nothing. And what do contemporary housewives say about it? When the issue of "housewives should have a paid post" was aired for debate in the media the year before last, a volunteer worker from the Awakening Foundation went around extensively canvassing the opinion of women. When she heard about this proposal, one woman, getting on in years, most of which were spent as a housewife, gave a joyful response: "Ah! If I had my own money, I'd go out and buy some sexy black underwear; I'd be happy just to keep it around even if I didn't wear it." Her money came from what was given to her by her husband and children; she never wanted for money, but, "It's not the same. They complain about how I spend the money. I'm not free to do with it what I want."
"'Housewives should have a paid post' is to affirm that housewives have the value and dignity of a 'career.'" Dagmar You's words are spoken in a serious and considered manner.
She washed dishes until she cried
Actually, when academics research the structure of husbands' and wives' rights, "personal resources" is always an important item for observation. Academia Sinica Sun Yat-sen Institute for Social Sciences and Philosophy researcher Yi Chingchun, after long years of study of rights in the relations of spouses, discovered that usually, the higher the income of the husband, and the older he is, the greater his role in decision-making about how the money is to be used within the family. Also, a higher level of education of the wife, whether or not she worked outside the home before marriage, or whether or not she presently has a paying job, are factors which result in giving her a greater voice in deciding the allocation of important resources for children's education or for major household expenditures.
However, this does not imply absolutely that a woman with a high level of education and economic power will necessarily have greater "spousal rights" in the houeshold. Research also shows that the degree of urbanization in the couple's place of residence, the size of the husband's family, as well as the duration of the marriage are all important variables which influence the relative rights of spouses.
"Generally speaking, wives in urban areas have more rights than those in rural areas; wives in smaller families have more rights than those in larger ones; and the longer a marriage has lasted, the more rights the wife has in the family," says Yi Ching-chun.
In this time of rapid social transformation, Taiwan's traditional family structure is facing disintegration. In the cities and suburbs, small families, large families, middle-sized families, and all sorts of families exist alongside of one another. Perhaps many of the adult children who have moved to the city still maintain close contact with their parents and older people in the countryside. Under all sorts of different circumstances, contemporary relations between spouses not only face the conflict between influences from traditional ideas and from new, urban concepts, but also elders in the family sometimes intervene between the spouses. Because the tradition of Chinese marriage practices is for the women to be "married over" to the husband's household, there are even deeper contradictions for women brought about by the hidden influences of new and old cultures.
A woman who held a master's degree married a husband who came from the rural south. On the first day of the marriage, in the kitchen of her motherinlaw's rustic house, she faced a mountain of dirty dishes left behind by the visiting guests and relatives. She washed dishes until she cried. Her husband, who had been so attentive to her before the wedding, didn't lift a finger to help; the two of them maintained total separation, one in the kitchen and one in the living room, because they were afraid the parents would be angry.
Upon getting married, an elementary school teacher planned to train her husband to help wash dishes, but once a visiting sisterinlaw reported back to the old country home about this, her fatherinlaw soon made a trip to Taipei to scold her. He said it clearly: "Household chores are your duty; you can't be helped by others."
Changing patriarchy through the laws
As Hu Youhui points out in Three Generations in the Family, patriarchy, patrilocal residence, and patrilineality are the basic characteristics of the Chinese family. In the family system with the "father" (the older generation's male), the father's authority is the greatest, so the younger wife marrying in is naturally at the bottommost rank. Because of patrilocal residence, the wife "marries out" to the husband's family, and as a result all sorts of sisterinlaw and mother-in-law/daughterinlaw relationships come about. The "paternal line" signifies ancestor worship and continuity of ritual offerings, so that obtaining male offspring becomes a woman's most important goal.
In this sort of cultural tradition, even if many contemporary women and their husbands enjoy a substantial level of educational achievement and income, when these women return to their motherinlaw's house, they still come down a notch, afraid of offending at every turn, making their inlaws unhappy and causing trouble for their husbands. One woman, who works as a highlevel manager in a company in Taipei, is never pleased with having to go to her husband's large family in the south to spend the holidays; she wonders, "My father fathered and raised me; my sisters are all married and away, why can't I go back home for the New Year's holidays and get together with him?" Bringing this question up for argument, she was given this response by her husband: "Go stage a revolution!"
One woman submitted an article to a newspaper narrating how, when her own mother was ill, she was caught between her mother and her motherinlaw, and had to run back and forth taking care of them. Her husband and motherinlaw had no sympathy for her, and just blamed her for not fulfilling her responsibilities as mother and as daughterinlaw. Finally, the story of how she was overwhelmed by tears at her mother's funeral service, and how she exchanged this for the fate of divorce, is very moving to read; it's the actual story of blood and tears of a daughterinlaw.
The current civil laws in this country include rules about "patrilocal residence": "The wife takes the husband's legal place of residence as her legal place of residence." Now, this rule is very often used by husbands who are having affairs as grounds for divorce. Dagmar You has handled too many of these cases: The husband has an affair, secretly changes his household registration from its original location in common with the wife, and then, after the legal time limit passes, submits a complaint to the court that the wife is not carrying out the duty of common residence. Because the court issues the summons to the wife at the husband's new address on the household registration, naturally the wife doesn't get it. Ultimately the divorce is granted, and sometimes the wife never catches on at all.
In even worse cases, in many cases of domestic violence, the eyewitnesses are all from the husband's family; for the daughter-inlaw, who has come from elsewhere and who thus plays the part of an "outsider," even finding one fair witness in the court room is very difficult.
"Patrilocal residence" brings lots of hardship and injustice for a woman. Naturally, this is one of the major points which the "Woman's Legal Amendment Team" is strongly demanding be abolished from civil law. Dagmar You states that women's rights and welfare in the family are justly guaranteed only when the married couple live in a residence which they jointly agree upon.
The millennial tradition of patrilineal filiation is being recognized by women's groups as the source of two thousand years of Chinese preferential gender treatment, "valuing the male and devaluing the female," and "ennobling the male and debasing the female." Dagmar You says, "Patri-lineal filiation makes the male into the orthodox carrier of the lineage bloodline in perpetuity, and the females are removed from the genealogical records." Accordingly, in the distribution of the family property, in the parents' allocation of resources for education, upbringing and so on, the sons always come first, whereas the rights and welfare of the daughters are placed in second place.
In order to radically correct the concept of "valuing the male and devaluing the female," some women's groups recommend that family names for children can be agreed upon by the parties concerned. However, this suggestion has met with quite a strong wave of resistance, due to fears that within three generations the various bloodlines would no longer be clearly recognizable. However, "to differentiate bloodlines clearly, the most important thing isn't the 'family names,' but rather is to keep clear records of the marriages and branching lines of descent of the sons and daughters in the genealogies," declares Dagmar You.
The struggle for male recognition
"Men are heaven, women are the earth": this is a saying that has been passed down from generation to generation over the ages in Chinese popular tradition. In its background, how much unequal treatment of men and women is hidden, and how it has turned into the family ethics, legal articles, and details of married life of every household, probably will never fully be realized.
Actually, at the same time as women struggle for their rights, the situation as seen through men's eyes seems quite peculiar. "Women fight about equality in dividing up household work. But when the man's income is high enough to support the expenses of the entire family, why do so many women choose not to go off to work? Do men have the right to choose 'not to work'?" a man in middle level management in a wellknown enterprise said. "Women want equality, and also often like to behave delicately, in an infantile way, so that men will dote on them." "The man is strong, the woman is weak" isn't just the men's idea, sometimes women "are more 'male chauvinist' in their thinking than men."
"Of course, there are many men who would love for their wives to take over the financial responsibilities, but themselves wouldn't want to help with the housework. Both sides of the gender story sometimes try to take shortcuts and not play fair."
In this age when new and old values intersect and cross, women stand at an overall structural weak point. Through marches and demonstrations, legal amendments and discussion, various movements promote the struggle for "equality of rights between the genders." However, founded on the principle of differentiation between men and women, what are equal rights? Now that the feminist movement is developing irresistibly, how can men be attracted into a dialogue? It seems that women need to struggle for recognition, and common effort, from the other half of the population.
p.22
Under the banner of "Legislation for Women," a mother takes her child along to struggle for women's rights in the streets. After renouncing the traditional image of women contributing through sacrifice, the women of this generation have their own, new ideas about the future.
(photo by Hsueh Chi-kuang)
p.24
Ceremonial offerings are the most important spiritual activity in the traditional Chinese family. Males play the important role of maintaining the continuity of the ritual offerings.
p.26
The level of education and economic power of modern women is much higher than previously, but how much has their situation within the family changed?
p.29
In the midst of social change, families with three generations living together are becoming fewer and fewer. The traditional forms of authority vested in the head of the family, and in the relations between the
motherinlaw and the daughterinlaw, are facing new challenges.
(photo by Pu Hua-chih)
p.30
Although the value of the family remains beyond doubt, the roles of men and women are gradually tending towards balance. In the future,
how will gender roles be functionally distributed in marriage and the family? Both parties will have to consider this question together.
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