Taiwan Today

In the academic world in the not too distant past, the field of women’s studies often met with suspicion. Were economics, sociology and history insufficient to tell the story of women? Must the female gender be untangled—liberated, a feminist might say—from the traditional disciplines and made the subject of its own area of study? At universities, as elsewhere, men often reacted to the notion of greater inclusion for women as if it were a conspiracy by their mothers, sisters or wives to rob them of their traditional prerogatives, and they could be slow to see why any change was needed. And therein lay the problem.

It is not so much that the traditional academic disciplines could not address the roles of women, but that they did not because they were dominated by men. In the patriarchy of the university, many men myopically assumed that history was largely the history of male ideas and deeds. When it came to the exploration of human life through the diverse disciplines of the university, women were, in the words of French writer and feminist Simone de Beauvoir, the “second sex,” just as they were in society at large. “A man never begins by presenting himself as an individual of a certain sex; it goes without saying that he is a man,” wrote de Beauvoir in her groundbreaking feminist study The Second Sex. “And women,” she said, “aspire to full membership in the human race.”

For a historian, granting women full membership in the human race means that women’s stories must be told, too. In Women’s Movements in Twentieth-Century Taiwan, author Doris T. Chang sets out to piece together some forgotten narratives from a land where women’s voices were often stifled by tradition, and where women’s struggle for greater autonomy was frequently pushed aside for political reasons. Indeed, Chang, a historian by training and a professor at the Center for Women’s Studies at Wichita State University in the US state of Kansas, is particularly concerned with the story of women’s movements and their relationship to the state. Her narrative of women’s movements in Taiwan, therefore, is woven through the island’s modern political history.

Chang notes from the beginning that her task is revisionist, one that sets out to challenge the orthodox notions of history in Taiwan handed down from Taiwan’s martial law period (1949–1987), during which the government fostered a particular set of historical narratives that would bolster patriotism and temper domestic dissent. The end of martial law released the tremendous pent-up energy of Taiwan’s academic community as scholars began to reevaluate Taiwan’s history from a local perspective.

Under martial law, for example, the authorities sought to downplay Taiwan’s half-century occupation by Japan (1895−1945), viewing it as a humiliation for the Chinese people. Research on Japanese-occupied Taiwan was therefore discouraged. Yet once the taboo was abandoned, the period’s nearness in time and the lack of previous scholarly attention made it a particularly rich era for contemporary historians.

Japan and Early Feminism

In fact, Chang locates the origins of independent feminist movements in a brief liberalization period that occurred during Japanese colonial rule. Taiwan, as Japan’s first colony, was subject to changes in Japanese politics. During the reign of the Taisho Emperor (1912−1926), Japan underwent a brief experiment in democracy and liberalization that eventually affected the nature of colonial rule in Taiwan. In 1919, Japan replaced its military governor on Taiwan with a civilian and also relaxed restrictions on civil society. Suddenly, Taiwan was plugged into the electrifying debates on universal suffrage, equality and self-determination that were challenging traditional assumptions everywhere from the United States and Europe to mainland China and Japan.

Chang capably illustrates the interplay between the rise of feminist movements in the 1920s and the larger political struggle for representation and political equality. She notes that whereas Japanese women were given the right to vote in Japan, Taiwanese women, as colonial subjects, were denied suffrage, just like their male counterparts. To be a feminist at this point was also to be a political reformer. “The goals of women’s movements,” Chang writes, “were the emancipation of Taiwanese women from colonial domination, patriarchal oppression, and capitalist exploitation.” This was a heady mix, indeed, and many male political activists treated the feminist struggle as secondary to the struggle for political independence from Japan. Just as feminists in other countries discovered, men could be fickle allies in the struggle for gender equality.

When women attempted to expand their educational opportunities, for example, they discovered an infuriating mix of ethnic and gender discrimination. Japanese males living in Taiwan had precedence in university placement, followed by Japanese women. When it came to the Taiwanese, gender chauvinism left Taiwanese women scrambling behind their brothers and male friends for admission to educational institutions. Thus, even as women aided the struggle for political independence, they were still second to men.

The Legacy of Confucius

While the Taisho period allowed the ideological reassessment of political and social roles to reach Taiwan, feminists still ran into traditional gender bias rooted in Confucianism. Above all, Confucianism was a template for orthodoxy and submission to authority. It was a philosophical creed that functioned largely to ensure social stability. Making things even more difficult for feminists, Confucianism idealized the patriarchal family as the optimal social unit; women were not only supposed to be subservient to their husbands, but even their sons. “Confucian patriarchy and gender equality,” Chang notes, “were mutually incompatible ideologies.”

To improve women’s opportunities in this chauvinistic environment, women often had to expose the contradictions in Confucian thought. Chang retells the story of how one early Taiwanese feminist, Chen Ying, argued that the great Confucian scholar Mencius (372–289 B.C.) would not have succeeded without the intellectual guidance of his mother.

According to traditional Confucian values, it was the mother who was responsible for the education of her sons, and yet women themselves were denied opportunities to study. “She [Chen] argued that it was illogical,” Chang writes, “to expect women to be effective educators of children without availing them of the same educational opportunities as their male counterparts.”

This line of reasoning eventually won for women some very real advances in society, for if education was the starting point, it gradually led to employment, which was a vehicle for independence from male-dominated society. A simple example can be seen in the story of Tsai A-hsin (1899−1990), Taiwan’s first female physician under Japanese colonial rule. In a male-dominated society in which only men became doctors, what must it have been like for women to go to the hospital? Tsai set out to remedy this situation by opening a clinic for women in Taichung, central Taiwan, and began to train women in obstetrics and general medical care. The significance of such pioneering work was twofold—women could take care of their own healthcare needs, and they could also acquire professional skills that could lead to economic self-reliance.

Yet were economic self-reliance and independence from men the goals? Tsai’s struggle in the 1920s touched on a crucial distinction that has riven feminist discourse for generations. Should a woman strive for equality within the family or should she seek complete economic independence that would allow her to pursue a life without hindrance or direction from men? Chang notes that the distinction in feminist terminology is one between relational feminists, who seek a higher position within the family and society, and liberal feminists, who seek total equality in every realm of society so that they may live on equal terms.

Decades Ahead

In some regards, Tsai and her independent medical clinic were decades ahead of where most feminists were in Taiwan in the 1920s. Chang notes that the emphasis on family in Taiwan caused many feminists to moderate their aspirations. Tsai was certainly more akin to a liberal feminist, and her brand of progressiveness would have to wait for a half-century before feminists once again began to challenge social roles and pursue some of the more radical implications of feminist discourse.

Before arriving at the birth of contemporary feminism in Taiwan, Chang first treats the reader to a history of women’s movements during the run-up to World War II—when the Japanese put a lid on all dissent and quickly snuffed out any meaningful feminist activity—and the immediate postwar martial law period under the Kuomintang government. It is here that the structure of Chang’s monograph becomes its greatest weakness. The subject of the study, at least according to the title, is not a history of feminist discourse in Taiwan, but the history of women’s movements. And this is a shame, for it requires Chang to explore what she calls “government-affiliated” women’s groups.

Suffice it to say that these groups, as do all groups affiliated with governments of any stripe, seek to bolster the legitimacy of the government they represent. This is not to say that they are negative; indeed governments can quite effectively propel women in society through government-sponsored activities. But it goes without saying that this was not the case with the Japanese military regime that replaced the Taisho government in Japan and then laid waste to half of Asia. Nor was it the case under the martial law provisions of the Kuomintang government. Indeed, the postwar years in Taiwan were anything but liberal. The government was on a war footing because the Chinese communists were threatening invasion, with the result that the Kuomintang leadership had become so preoccupied with security issues that it was hardly suited to the task of bringing about a radical rethinking of gender roles.

In fact, Taiwan’s feminist struggles did not fully reemerge until the 1970s, and the modern women’s movement really came into its own after martial law was lifted in 1987. Chang even makes something of a thesis of this. “During periods of soft authoritarianism, autonomous women’s movements emerged and operated within the political parameters set by the authoritarian regimes,” she writes. “In contrast, during periods of hard authoritarianism, the autonomous women’s movement collapsed and was not given the political space to reemerge.”

Is this surprising? A political scientist will almost always start a project with a puzzle, a trend that does not meet expectations, and then attempt to uncover the factors that result in the surprise. Chang seems to turn this process on its head. She sets out to prove a given and succeeds in convincing the reader of something that no one would find surprising. One senses that she fell into this trap because of her good instincts as a historian. She wants to retell the narrative step-by-step in a march from her starting point to the present, reclaiming this tract of history in chronological order.

The instinct is admirable, but the result is a history of feminism interrupted by five decades of government-affiliated women’s movements that appealed to women who were often more interested in their position in society and proximity to authority than in any social change for women. Madame Chiang Kai-shek, the wife of the Republic of China’s president throughout most of the martial law period, might have held great power in her own right, but the women’s groups that she fostered in the postwar years were better suited to ladies who lunch and nurses willing to mend the glorious soldiers of the state. These groups allowed for women to participate in public life, but led more to the desire to protect class privilege than to propel feminism.

Indeed, the most lasting contribution to the advancement of women during the martial law period was the government’s effective development strategy that allowed for rapid economic growth. Postwar land reform, for example, helped disperse money to farmers and small landowners, thus diffusing capital throughout Taiwan and allowing for a boom in small businesses. This eventually led to a rise in manufacturing and the creation of a prosperous middle-class society. It is odd that in a book so determined to link women’s movements with governance, Chang does not examine the role of the government’s economic policy.

Taiwan’s New Feminism

Yet, when Chang returns to the feminist discourse in the 1970s, she picks up with the widespread reassessment of social and political changes that were a direct result of Taiwan’s growing prosperity, such as increased access to education and the desire for social and political liberalization. If the Kuomintang laid the groundwork for prosperity, opposition groups pressed the cause of social change. Chang nicely interweaves the feminist currents and the rise of opposition parties in Taiwan by exploring the work of such pioneers as former Vice President Lu Hsiu-lien, a lifelong feminist and political activist.

Unlike some later feminists, Lu advocated greater political participation for women within the current system. Like the relational feminists, she advocated full participation in a family-oriented society and more widespread economic security through employment opportunities. Lu, who went on to become Taiwan’s first female vice president, chose never to marry. Her individual struggle for success in the public realm is a poignant reminder of the twin burdens that ambitious women face. Must they choose between family and position? This is a choice that men rarely encounter, yet it is a sacrifice still made by many successful women.

Lu’s pioneering role in modern feminist discourse helped direct middle-class women clamoring for change into vibrant women’s groups that are a regular part of life in Taiwan today. These groups have succeeded in lobbying a male-dominated legislature to pass a host of legal protections. The political activism also pushed both major political parties to compete for women’s votes by supporting their agendas and ensuring places for them in the party structures and in government.

The extent of the success of feminism in Taiwan can be seen by the debates encountered in Taiwan today. Groups such as X-Centric have sought to examine what a new society could look like by removing not just the male-dominated center, but also heterosexuality as the norm. These trends tap into current feminist discourse in the West and include support for lesbians and sexual liberation. While the activities of such groups may result in some form of legislative activity, such as the legalization of gay marriage, they deal more generally with questions of social theory and individual fulfillment. If these voices are seen as representing feminism in Taiwan today, Chang has helped restore a record of how the women’s movements have grown into such a hothouse of progressive thought. She has used her skills as a scholar to tell the story of the struggle of Taiwan’s women for—in the words of Simone de Beauvoir—“full membership” in society at large.
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Robert Green is a regular contributor to Economist Intelligence Unit publications on Taiwan.

Copyright © 2010 by Robert Green