ASIA 288 - Women and the Family in Chinese Culture

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

(Same as CHIN 288) It is often said that, more than in any other culture, the family provided the basic sociopolitical model and the most important social and ethical values in traditional Chinese society. In China’s tumultuous transition into its modern period (1911—), the family institution and all that it represented constituted a major front on which the battle against tradition was waged. Even in contemporary United States, the different family values embraced by Chinese immigrants and their descendants still often become an important source of friction between them and mainstream American society (a prominent recent example being the controversy over Yale Law Professor Amy Chua’s 2011 book The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother).

This course engages students in a historical and ethical inquiry into the traditional Chinese family as a collection of social relations, a space for moral practice, and a microcosm for the polity. Besides modern scholarship (and one movie,) in this course we read biographies, memoirs, letters, poems, drama, short stories, selected chapters from classic chapter novel, and didactic writings from the classical period through the nineteenth century about the traditional Chinese family. Topics of discussion include: the economic, ritual, and emotive aspects of the family, the relationships among individual, family, society, and the state, and the family seen through the perspectives of gender, religion, and social change. Students read English translations of the primary resources, therefore Chinese language is not a requirement.

Women’s role in the family structure is a deceptively familiar topic, significant yet comparatively underrepresented and under studied. Through a survey of research in a variety of issues related to pre-modern Chinese family, we encounter important questions about the lives of women in the thousands of years of Chinese history.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS