Western academics consider the female condition in Taiwan in a book that occasionally misses its mark.
The title of this volume is somewhat misleading, since several of the chapters have nothing to do with Taiwan and a few are only peripherally concerned with women. A more accurate, though far less catchy, description might be "gender relationships in the mainland and Taiwan from antiquity to the almost present." Several of the book's 15 chapters were previously published elsewhere, one as long ago as 1988. While each is inherently worthy as a research project, one wonders how, and sometimes why, the decision was made to include them in this work.
An introductory chapter is entitled "what can feminist theory do for the study of Chinese history?" Taiwan is mentioned only by allusion to the title of a single book. The second chapter analyzes the relationships between sons and mothers in traditional China as conditioned by the Confucian concept of filial piety. No attempt is made to relate this to Taiwan, and in fact the word Taiwan appears not at all. The third chapter discusses gender in Qing Dynasty travel accounts of Taiwan in which we learn that visitors, observing the natives' reversal of the Confucian maxim that men should be valued over women, conclude that they are fan or savages. The savage woman then became an object of mainland male sexual desire. In a brief epilogue, the author notes that the hypersexualization of indigenous women resonates with their commodification in the tourism and sex industry of the present day. A fourth chapter concerns the fate of a missionary enterprise, Door of Hope, which moved to Taipei after Chiang Kai-shek's government lost control of Shanghai, where it had been founded. The girls and young women that the transplanted Door of Hope served were exclusively mainlanders who, despite their low status, were sought after as brides since so many males were otherwise unable to find mainland mates (p. 69). That the institution never sought to put down roots in Taiwan was apparently an important factor in its being closed in the 1970s. Its relevance to women in Taiwan is therefore obscure.
Two other chapters concern men in Taiwan. One entitled "carousing and masculinity" details the drinking rituals that are intended to create male bonding. Women appear only peripherally, as hostesses and occasional purveyors of sexual favor. The second, on the Viagra craze in Taiwan, contains much on the reaction of men but little on that of their partners. A final sentence notes that the craze's ramifications and range of implications for gender relations and sexuality are still being worked out.
Several standout chapters do directly address the topic of women in contemporary Taiwan. Co-editor Anru Lee contributes the poignant story of Mei-ling, the youngest daughter of a relatively prosperous family of weavers. Mei-ling's father rejected her plans to go to college, since he needed her labor. Eight years later, without seeking her parents' permission, she simply enrolled in junior college, but arranged her classes for the evening so she could work a full day on the looms. When her father decided to retire, Mei-ling's brother, his only son, was put in charge of the business, and she was expected to work for him. The resentful Mei-ling began to quarrel with her family and, though continuing to live at home, spent as little time there as possible. She refused her parents' admonitions to find a husband. When last we meet her, the 30-year-old Mei-ling has graduated from junior college and is preparing to take the civil service examination. Lee notes that, for all the difficulties Mei-ling has suffered and the uncertainty of her future, very few daughters of the generations prior to hers had the luxury of dreaming of a future beyond that of making money for the family and marrying afterward, at which point their labor would belong to the husband's family.
Hsiung Ping-chun's study of the relationship between female factory workers and their male bosses found a climate of pervasive degradation that highlights the unusual nature of Mei-ling's rebellion. At lunchtime, women set up a folding table in the corner of the kitchen for their food after men had taken the main dining table. When men and women interacted socially, women were expected to tolerate pornographic jokes and not to take offense at mild sexual harassment. Hsiung does not set up an East-West dichotomy here, and indeed it would be false to do so. This sort of behavior was common in the United States until perhaps 20 years ago--Hsiung's field research was done 15 years ago, in 1989. Until that time, American women who objected were stigmatized as, at best, too sensitive and at worst described in words unsuitable for use in this magazine. One definite East-West difference emerged when Hsiung visited her married colleagues at home. Whereas they had been articulate on the shop floor, they fell silent at home and allowed their husbands to dominate the conversation.
Yang Fang-chih Irene's study focuses on a very different kind of "new female." She notes that the internationalization of women's magazines in Taiwan occurred in tandem with the emergence of the working woman as an individual who cares mainly about her image, her work, her romances, and her sexuality. These new magazines direct their articles to issues of self-care, including the maintenance of a certain body image, thereby promoting the beauty products of the advertisers whose revenue is crucial to their continued existence. They sharply contrast with the women's magazines of the 1970s and 1980s, which had been centered on the family woman. The magazines of the 1990s and beyond lack their predecessors' concern with a moral mission to better society by devoting themselves to the family and other social causes, concentrating instead on their readers' individual pleasure and personal growth. Yang believes that so many of the new magazines are sold in book shops and convenience stores rather than, as before, by subscription may indicate a shift in their identities from domestic to public entertainment.
Robert Marsh's research asked Taiwan's men whether men and women should get equal pay for doing the same job in the same workplace. In 1963, 67.6 percent said that they should; this figure had risen to 70.4 by 1991. It would have been interesting to contrast this with women's views on the same question, and also to have a follow-up study done in early 2000.
Another enlightening contribution is Lu Hwei-syin's inquiry into what feminism means to women in Taiwan. She examines three women's self-growth groups in Taipei: the New Environmental Homemakers' Association, which is composed of housewives, the Taipei Women's Development Center, and the Warm Life Association, both of whose members are divorced women, widows, and women who have endured familial and marital adversity. These groups help women recover their sense of self-esteem. Their establishment constitutes an important contrast to the isolation of Taipei housewives and their confinement to nuclear family activities that had characterized the 1970s. Another change Lu found was that many of those who had been involved in painful divorces received support from their natal families. They were no longer "spilled water," to use the traditional phrase for women leaving their birth families for their husband's family. Returning not in disgrace but with honor, many of these women not only reincorporated themselves into their original families but also achieved high domestic status, albeit as daughters rather than wives. Lu notes that, paradoxically, although the traditional patriarchal system confines women in some contexts, it leaves them room to maneuver for power and autonomy in other contexts. Even among married women, more than a few showed little concern with their husbands or their conjugal relations. Lu characterizes their observation of wifely roles as symbolic: designed to give the impression of compliance without its substance.
Lu also addresses the question of why Taiwanese women have been unable to mobilize, and answers that their web of relation ships always includes their intimate male kin, such as fathers and brothers. Hence their criticism of men is directed toward their husbands rather than toward all men. This reviewer finds Lu's explanation unsatisfactory, since western women's relationships also include warm relationships with male kin; often an American woman involved in a painful marital relationship will find support from a father or brothers. Similarly, the uneasiness with being labeled a feminist (p. 223) that Lu finds with many women in Taiwan is not an East versus West dichotomy: many American women who believe strongly in such feminist issues as equal pay for equal work and shared household responsibilities fear that if they allow themselves to be identified as feminists people will believe that they are aggressive, anti-male and lacking compassion.
Richard Kagan's study of feminist art in Taiwan takes off from a painting that hung on the living room wall of now-President Chen Shui-bian when Chen was mayor of Taipei. Entitled Under Martial Law, it depicts a naked teenager kneeling over a small western book that is concealed inside a larger traditional Chinese text. Watched from a red imperial or colonial chair, symbolizing the mainland government and its policies of subordinating and sinifying the Taiwanese, the young woman cannot get up. Although she was unable to stand up for her own views, the teenager is nonetheless willing to engage in subversive activity. Kagan uses this metaphor brilliantly to tease apart the intertwined threads of the growth of democracy and the emancipation of women from the quasi-Confucian tenets imposed by the autocratic mainlander government. Although the female artists who are the focus of his study are creating a new, uniquely Taiwanese art, Kagan notes that they primarily received their training from male Chinese artists in studios that still featured the classics of Chinese traditions, or abroad in Europe and the Americas. The next generation will have studied from their female mentors, and can be expected to produce a very different type of Taiwanese art that is more distant from both China and the West.
Co-author Murray Rubinstein's study of Annette Lu and the origins of Taiwanese feminism from 1944 to 1977 provides an illuminating and generally sympathetic view of this fascinating woman. Born, perhaps significantly, on D-Day, Lu was, by her own account, raised as if she were a boy. Imbued with the idea that she could be all that she wanted to be, and an outstanding student, Lu discovered Western feminist theory while she was attending an American university and began to apply it to Taiwanese society. The Taiwan she returned to in 1971 was a very different one than she had left only a few years before, since the process of Taiwanization had begun to gather momentum. Lu's efforts at consciousness-raising included promoting lectures and debates, setting up a hotline for abused women, enlisting high-school student volunteers to collect data on women's attitudes, and founding a feminist coffee shop. At the same time, she took an active part in the quest for democratization and human rights.
Rubinstein's decision to end his chapter in 1977 is unfortunate, since it excludes the development and culmination of Lu's earlier efforts. Her arrest and imprisonment in 1979 is briefly mentioned in the concluding section but, unaccountably, Lu's election to Taiwan's vice-presidency in 2000 is not mentioned at all. While the chapter was written in 1996, a bit of updating could have been expected for a book published in 2004. It would have been helpful for the author to examine in what ways Lu's conviction and incarceration affected her views on both feminism and the construction of a more just and equitable society.
A concluding chapter by the book's third co-author, Catherine Farris, contrasts women's liberation in China and Taiwan. While it contains much interesting information, Farris's decision to contrast China and Taiwan in a succession of chronologically organized sections--e.g. "women in the PRC during the Maoist Era (1949-1976)" and "women in the 'economic miracle' of Taiwan"--is unnecessarily confusing to the reader, particularly since events on one side of the Taiwan Strait did not interact with or otherwise influence women's liberation on the other. Farris cautions that we should not assume that the evolution of women's liberation on either China or Taiwan will resemble that of North America.
Several excellent chapters notwithstanding, this is a disappointing book. It is to be hoped that the contributors, with their impressive research backgrounds and writing skills, will consider a future book whose chapters are more centrally linked to the theme of women in the new Taiwan, draw on up-to-date information, and are specifically written for inclusion in this volume. A study of how the residual legacy of Confucian values affects gender relations in present-day Taiwan would be useful, as would an update of the difference between male and female salaries. Women were never totally excluded from power on Taiwan--consider, for example, the totally different types of influence exercised by Madame Chiang Kai-shek and by the eminent economist Dr. Shirley Kuo. But there has been a sharp increase in the number of prominent women since the lifting of martial law in 1987. Women hold 22 percent of the seats in the Legislative Yuan. Taiwan not only has a female vice-president, but a female vice-premier and, until recently, a female head of the Mainland Affairs Council. There are also several other female Cabinet members, including at least one whose life story could serve as the archetype for the evolution from dutiful wife and mother to successful, and equally dedicated, public servant. Women now serve as military officers, several of them having graduated with honors from prestigious foreign military academies including West Point and the Virginia Military Institute. Taiwan now has female airline pilots, albeit still very few, and women surgeons are not unusual. Hewlett Packard Taiwan's managing director is female. Forty-six percent of the country's work force is now female. Their stories are waiting to be told.
June Teufel Dreyer is professor of political science at the University of Miami.
Copyright (c) 2004 by June Teufel Dreyer.