WOMEN'S RIGHTS A GLOBAL VIEW Edited by Lynn Walter A World View of Social Issues Andrew L.

Cherry, Series Adviser Greenwood Press Westport, Connecticut • London

„Chinese women's economic activity rate is among the highest in the world”-p29

„ In traditional China, women's lives were determined by arranged marriages, marked by marital abuse
and violence, and deformed by social practices such as footbinding and the sale of child brides, and their
status was defined as property, as slave labor, and as producers of sons. As early as the first century A.D.,
Chinese women were expected to conform to an ideal defined within a cosmological view of the
oppositional duality of yin/yang and male/female. The Nu Jie (Precepts for Women) states that women
should be obedient, unassuming, yielding, timid, respectful, and reticent (Croll 1980, 13).” P31

„ In addition to the economic constraints of a poor agrarian country, the literature consistently points to
the misogyny and authoritarianism of tra- ditional Confucian ideology and its primary institution of
social control, the family, as key factors responsible for the centuries of suffering and oppression of
Chinese women.” P31-32

„ This tradition of Chinese law clearly reflects a role for law as social control. In a society where men
(although with different class advantages) are privileged by birth, education, and cultural values, and
women are devalued and silenced, law is not only a method of social control available to the emperor
and the bureaucratic elite over the majority of the common people, but is also a method of social
control by men over women.” P32