Gender Roles In Pan Chao's Lessons For Women

Civilizations are always experimenting with how to create a harmonious and balanced society, and in the process of doing this, they must dictate roles for all members of said society. In the Chinese kinship group, the father is the leader of the household, and the mother is the foundation of their family. The ways women contribute to their households, and the amount of independence they have, fluctuates and changes as time passes and dynasties rise and fall, but there are also consistencies in how society, as a whole, views them. These textual sources officially establish women in roles of obedience and submission, but many biographies illuminate the power women wielded through teaching their sons and daughters, as well as the respect they …show more content…
She purposely dictated she had approval from her respected scholar of a father, the royal dynastic historian, but it is her mother who she claims was her teacher in both her academic education and her cultural, societal learning. The purpose for her writing these guidelines are to teach her daughters, and the daughters of China, how they should ideally act and their specific role in the family dynamic throughout their lives. She is writing it herself, even though she is a woman, because the girls in China at the time did not have the same level of formal education as the boys, and so Chao took it upon herself to teach the women their duties. She questions the consequences of “only to [teaching] men and not [teaching] women—is that not ignoring the essential relationship between them?” The argument presented is that women should be educated just as highly as men, since boy learn their cultural tasks and traditions, while …show more content…
Literarily, the stories of Mulan and Imperial Courtesan Yang also achieve this subversive nature when coming to the normalized version of the ideal woman. And, just like the historical story if Empress Wu, they show how the ordinary woman can be completely in line with the virtues and duties of her gender, but just take them to such a great extreme that they reveal the dissent or extraordinary circumstances for women at the time. In once instance, a woman “took up a mirror and a knife and cut off her nose” in an effort to refuse a roal suitor after her first husband died, and her extreme example of filial piety earned her the “the title of Exalted Conduct.” This was an instance of the author showing what would be exemplary, but not the norm in society at that time. Women most likely remarried after the death of their husbands, either at their parents urging or for themselves, and so the tale of this woman mutilating herself for chastity was spread far and wide. In the poem of Mulan, the young woman states that she has “no adult brother. [She wants]...to take [her] father’s place and join the army” in an attempt to fulfill her duty to her father and her family name. She is an extreme case, and while in the original poem she joins the army in the name of filial piety