Education decides feminism

General

To clarify the relationship between a country’s feminism and general education, we need to import a significant term: the female consciousness. The female consciousness is a kind of voluntary awareness about female status, influence, and value. It is the exploration of the characteristics of women’s self-existence. The female consciousness is not men’s perspective toward women; it is the way that women recognize themselves. It is not only a positive denial toward the patriarchal system, but also a self-criticism of women themselves. In a nutshell, the female consciousness is more than a philosophy or ideology. It is a “vocabulary of motives” maintained by strong group support. The female consciousness is multivariate, changing with the flow of time; it is both international and culturally specific, sharing similar goals around the world, while differing within each individual culture. It is abstract, but it could also be applied to some realistic political practice.

Feminism is well-discussed in Western society. One of the biggest topics in the United States, for example, is human rights, especially female rights. Everyone is talking about it, trying to take part in the feminist movement, and being sensitive to sexism. While in Eastern cultures, sexism is always being acquiesced to. For example, ancient China has a history of male dominance for 4000 years. Women in Japan also still need to use the honorific, which means to speak with inordinate respect, to their husbands. Many Indian females continue suffering from sexual violence, even within their family.

We may want to ask, how did the difference between males and females form, and how can we eliminate such inequality? First of all, Asia has very limited space for NGO building and social forces are very dispersed. Secondly, gender and feminist perspectives are almost invisible in the mainstream media. Compared to the Americans who were told to focus on sexual equality since youth, people in the Eastern world are not sensitive toward this complex issue. The problem boils down to one thing—lack of education. Human rights, as a key issue taught in Western schools, was clearly overlooked in most Eastern schools in the past few years.

The One-Child Policy

We may take China’s “One-child” policy as an example to explore how feminism in China developed. The One-child policy was a family planning policy in order to control the boosting population in China. Beginning in 1979, the fertility rate began to decline significantly: By early 1993, those in charge realized that fertility had fallen below the “replacement level” of 2.1 children per woman, exceeding their most optimistic expectations. But with the decreasing birth rate, a big sexual bias appeared.

In the 1970s, over 70 percent of the citizens were farmers and the biggest industry in China was agriculture. The education rate was very low. Only less than 10 percent of the high school graduates were admitted by colleges. Most of the families just gave up on their kids getting a proper education. Since each family was only allowed to have one baby, parents in China preferred to let their child take over the farm after he or she grew up. Physiologically, farmers in China thought that females are not as good as males in doing field work, so a lot of people who desired a son but had a daughter often failed to report or delayed reporting female births to the government, and even gave up female infants after birth. Such behavior made the number of newborns who were girls decrease over time. The government tried several practices, including advertisements on TV, flyers, and public lectures, but nothing really worked. The sex ratio rose to 111 males to 100 females in 1990, which is at the boundary of the natural baseline. This situation was not solved for nearly two decades, until the next generation was born. In the 1990s, people were more educated than their parents and the college admission rate increased sharply—it was approximately four times higher than before. Under the tendency of globalization, all the industries, including agriculture, were on the edge of evolution, so that the government needed more well-educated people. They put more budget on advanced education; therefore, more and more people decided to go to college. Undergraduates in China were no longer like their parents, pursuing material advantage. The new generation in China began to seek more information and most of them had their first time knowing the term, ‘Feminism’. The Feminism theory from Western society attracts many scholars to study abroad and brought back latest ideologies (“Why does China need feminism” ). One of the members of these scholars is Li Xiaojiang. Li Xiaojiang is a distinguished professor at Northeastern University and she is the founder and pioneer of women’s studies in China. Her feminism theory melts the Western thinking and Eastern philosophy together, denying the idea that the world is binary. “Li Xiaojiang, who, unlike the great majority of Chinese feminists, now rejects key aspects of Western feminism as irrelevant, in some ways even harmful, in the Chinese context.” (Greenhalgh 857). She published Let Female Talked by Themselves in 2003, which affected many graduates devoting themselves to feminism study. Li Xiaojiang also organized hundreds of discussion forums, helping other scholars to start their own academic research. With the development of domestic feminism, citizens’ female consciousness grows higher and higher, thus the bias was eliminated and now the sex ratio was controlled around 1 man to 1 woman.

Education's Personal Effect

The import of Western feminism thought changed contemporary China. Not only for a country, advanced education could individually change each person. The famous Japanese poet Mitsuye Yamada, was born in Japan and moved to the U.S. at her age of three. Dr.Yamada’s parents, as first-generation immigrants, were educated in Japan and believed that men are superior to women. Such extremely patriarchal thinking didn’t affect Dr.Yamada’s idea toward females and males. She was educated in the United States so that her ideology was milder rather than being as radical as her parents’. “The writings of Mitsuye Yamada offered one way of engaging the issues raised in an ethnically diverse society while sidestepping platitudes about multiculturalism. Yamada promotes understanding between various segments of the population”. In Dr.Yamada’s poems, she always has people from different ethnic backgrounds interact, which could reveal both similarities and differences among those who have experienced oppression.

Summary

In sum, both Li Xiaojiang and Mitsuye Yamada changed something, no matter for the country or for herself. We can know from these examples that women’s education level decided their social status, their wealth, moreover, their perspective. A well-educated female is always more open-minded than the ordinary one, and the ability to quickly accept new ideology could inspire an individual’s own thinking. With more knowledge, consequently, women could distinguish whether an idea is right or not; thus they can protect the idea when it is right, or argue against the idea when it is wrong, revealing the core of feminism theory—to think by themselves and to fight for their own rights. Like Atwood mentioned in her famous novel, the Handmaid’s Tale, “I wait. I compose myself. ”

References

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