Organizer and Chair: Murray A. Rubinstein, Baruch College/City University of New York
Discussant: Catherine S. Farris, University of Northern Iowa
As Taiwan has modernized-as a rural society with its gender hierarchies, and its relative isolation of the sexes has been transformed into the contemporary urbanized landscape we find today, as the island's economy has expanded and become ever more technical and sophisticated, and as the demand for two income families increases in an ever more materialistic and consumer oriented culture-women have found themselves gaining greater access to education, and have begun to play larger roles in the occupational market place and in the local and national political arenas. Furthermore, this process of social transformation has led some women to gain a greater awareness of their own gender related concerns and of their consciousness as actors in the home and in the larger society. This, in turn has led many to seek means of gaining greater degrees of their own and their sisters' empowerment, even as they have begun to redefine gender roles. In this panel we focus upon various aspects of the new reality women on Taiwan/ROC have attempted to construct for themselves.
We begin with a study of the career of a woman who has served as an exemplar, Lu Hsiu lien. Murray Rubinstein examines the major stages of her career as a figure in the women's liberation movement, as political activist in the late Meilitao era of the 1970s, and as lobbyist and politician in contemporary Taiwan.
Rubinstein's paper is followed by Ch'en Wen Chien's study of the larger dimensions of the women's movement. Ms Ch'en, an activist as well as scholar of the movement, charts the role women have played in organizations that foster their own gender's concerns during the politically liberating decades of the 1980s and the 1990s.
Rita Gallin, a long time student of Taiwan's social transformation focuses upon women who are making the transition from rural to urban environments. She shows how shifts from far countryside to city have provided women with means of controlling their own economic destinies, but not gain the ability to redefine status relationships.
Robert Marsh's paper completes the panel by changing the perspective from women to men. Comparing survey data collected in the 1960s with that obtained in the 1990s he shows to what degree men's attitudes toward women in the working place have changed over time and in a Taiwan transformed by socio economic modernization.
Catherine Farris will tie the threads together with her commentary. An anthropologist with a long history as a student of the role of women in modern Taiwan, she possesses both the intimate knowledge of contemporary reality with a grasp of the evolving literature on feminism to be able to assess the papers that have been presented.
Chen Wen Chien, The New School for Social Research
This is a study of the larger dimensions of the women's movement in contemporary Taiwan. First as an observer, then as an activist, and now as both student of and a worker for the political opposition and the women's movement for social change, I have witnessed and continue to witness the evolution of Taiwanese women's consciousness, a consciousness which has translated itself into the willingness to struggle for both social change and for a change in society's attitudes toward gender and gender roles. This paper is thus based on both my experiences within these movements and my observations from afar on the role women have come to play in Taiwanese organizations that foster women's demands to participate as equals in contemporary Taiwanese life. I chart and analyze the way women's demands for participation in the political process and their related demands for social justice and gender equality have helped forge a multi faceted struggle for empowerment during the decades of the 1980s and the 1990s.
Robert M. Marsh, Brown University
In Taiwan, as in the United States, even in the same industry and work status there is an earnings gap between men and women. The same question concerning attitudes toward "equal pay for equal work" was asked of two independently-drawn samples of male Taiwanese living in Taipei, the first time in 1963 and again in 1991. While 68% favored equal pay in 1963, this percent did not change significantly in the 1991 sample, despite 28 years of rapid and massive economic development and societal modernization. The respondents used a similar repertory of "reasons why" they supported or opposed equal pay for women in 1963 and 1991. To explain why the majority favored, but a minority opposed, equal pay, this attitude was regressed on three sets of hypothesized causal variables: a person's objective status, subjective life chances, and involvement in the kinship system.
The logistic regression analysis shows that the variables with a significant impact on the log odds of a man favoring equal pay for women were largely different in 1991 as compared with 1963. We discuss the implications of the findings in the light of neoclassical economic theories of gender differences in human capital investment and statistical discrimination, sociological theories of job segregation and the structure of labor markets, and feminist theories of patriarchy.
Rita S. Gallin, Michigan State University
This paper examines married women's ability to control income earned through off farm labor in rural Taiwan. Using ethnographic data collected in a village in central Taiwan, it describes how family structure, age, and class are implicated in women's ability to oversee their wages and the uses to which they are applied. While some women are able to exercise control over their income, such power does not necessarily translate into challenges to authoritarian hierarchies in the family. Rather, the paper argues, the relationship between wages and resistance is mediated by the meaning men as well as women attach to money.
Murray A. Rubinstein, Baruch College/City University of New York
This paper is a study of the career of Lu Hsiu lien, a deservedly famous woman who has served as an exemplar and role model for two generations of Taiwan's women. I provide a narrative and analysis of the major stages of her career. I examine her pioneering efforts as a founder of the women's liberation movement on Taiwan. I then examine her role as political activist in the exiting days of tangwai/KMT confrontation during Meilitao era of the 1970s. Next I study her years in jail as a political prisoner and attempt to assess how this experience affected her. I conclude by examining her career since her return to Taiwan in the late 1980s, a period that saw her become a major figure in the centrist wing of the DPP and a founder of the Taiwan International Alliance, an organization that is working for Taiwan/ROC's re admission to the United Nations. I argue that Ms. Lu's battles for gender equality, for Taiwanese political rights, and for a place in the world for Taiwan can each be seen as elements in her struggle for the deeper sense of Taiwanese self-hood.
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