Summary Of Ban Zhao's 'Lessons For Women'

The passage Lesson for Women is a work done by Ban Zhao that goes into detail on the proper ways a lady should act. Not only does the author explain the ways but she also goes into detail to help others understand what it’s like for a woman of that time period. When writing the author provides us with detailed sentences and a lot of informative material. Over the course of this essay we will be breaking down the key elements of this passage to fully understand it.

Furthermore, instead of arranged marriages that only benefited the patriarchal head, intellectuals pushed for marriages based on love which would create happy and productive citizens . In addition, based on her mother’s experience, Bao Qin rejects arranged marriages and intends to only marry for love . After hearing of two concubines who drug Cousin Hu’s mother to feign adultery and gain the favour of her husband, Bao Qin is enraged by the historic “powerlessness of women, [the] barbarity of age-old customs, cloaked in tradition .” With the broad shift from tradition as well as her own personal experience, Bao Qin rejects traditional gender roles and seeks to create her own. Furthermore, as China became divided into separate spheres of influence and opened to international markets, British and American industrialization brought new ideas of opportunities for women, challenging established gender relations . With new economic opportunities and education, women could become self-reliant, broadening their choices and their role in society. Consequently, after disobeying her parents’ command to attend Mr. Liu’s funeral, Bao Qin was able to support herself by enrolling in a new teacher training department . Reducing patriarchal control, industrialization allowed children to head to schools and factories, no longer needing to rely on their parents for education and work . As a result, while foreign

Foraging for wild plants and hunting wild animals is the most ancient of human subsistence patterns. Prior to 10,000 years ago, all people lived in this way. Hunting and gathering continues to be the subsistence pattern of some societies around the world including the !Kung. The !Kung population is located in the Kalahari Desert, in isolated parts of Botswana, Angola, and Namibia. The !Kung live in a harsh environment with temperatures during the winter frequently below freezing, but during the summer well above 100F. The !Kung, like most hunter-gatherer societies, have a division of labor based mainly on gender and age.

The Death of Woman Wang, by Jonathan Spence is an educational historical novel of northeastern China during the seventeenth century. The author's focus was to enlighten a reader on the Chinese people, culture, and traditions. Spence's use of the provoking stories of the Chinese county T'an-ch'eng, in the province of Shantung, brings the reader directly into the course of Chinese history. The use of the sources available to Spence, such as the Local History of T'an-ch'eng, the scholar-official Huang Liu-hung's handbook and stories of the writer P'u Sung-Ling convey the reader directly into the lives of poor farmers, their workers and wives. The intriguing structure of The Death of Woman Wang consists on observing these people working on

During the time of Ban Zhao, women were expected to be very subservient to their husbands, as Ban Zhao explains on page S9-10. Ban Zhao was a very educated woman for her time (S9-9), so she probably was taught to be subservient in her education. Most likely woman were taught this when they were raised. They were also expected to be very obedient to their parents-in-law regardless of the command. (S9-10) Women were not allowed to have personal opinions about the commands of their in-laws. Women in this society were probably not warriors or political officials, at least not in many cases. They were probably less active in social life than their male counterparts, although they may have been more social with each other. Men seem to have advantages

Based on Lessons for Women, women in the China were taught that they were unworthy, unsophisticated, unenlightened and by nature unintelligent. (Strayer

The idea of feminism has not always been common. The term “feminism” wasn’t introduced until the 1970s. This shows how society didn’t allow anything that had to due with everyone being equal because of the standards that society constructed. In all the versions of Mulan, I think that Disney’s Mulan was the most strict on her having Ancient China’s role of being a woman. This would be having kids, helping clean around the house and not working for money, but working for her husband and kids. In Disney’s Mulan, her family is more hard on her to be a lady and for her to be the proper role of a women. This is because they went to a “matchmaker” to find her husband, and after saving everyone several times, she was still looked down upon because she was a woman.

“A woman has a head almost too small for intellect but just big enough for love.”—Venus de Medici.

In Confucianism, it was expected that a woman should always be correct in manner and upright in character, and that by following these traits, she could bring honor to her family. One of the first scenes in the beginning of the film has Mulan preparing to impress the matchmaker. During this process, the servants sing of the right traits a proper woman should possess, such as “calm” and “obedient”. For followers of Confucianism, woman must always speak appropriately and with respect, especially towards elders and men. In the movie, Mulan’s father walks outside of his home and is commanded by the emperor’s soldiers to join the war effort against the Huns. Concerned for the wellbeing of her father, Mulan talks back to the presumably older male soldiers, begging them to allow her father not to fight. Although Mulan does the exact opposite of what a Confucian follower should do, Chi-fu’s scolding towards Mulan’s father, as well as the latter’s disappointed reaction provides the movie with historical accuracy concerning the expectation of womanly behavior. A final example of the expectation of womanly behavior is the scene in the alps, when it is revealed to the soldiers that “Ping” has secretly been a woman all along. The reaction from the men is one of disgust and anger, which is a fit reaction because, according to Confucian values, women are supposed to work at

In traditional Chinese culture, women were inferior to men. They were not allowed to make any decisions concerning their families. Their only purpose in life was to stay home and take care of the households. "A woman's duties are to cook the five grains, heat the wine, look after her parents-in-law, make clothes, and that's all! ...she must follow the `three submissions.' When she is young, she must submit to her parents. After her marriage, she must submit to her husband. When she is widowed, she must submit to her son. These are the rules of propriety." ("The Mother Of Mencius", p.34) That's the principle that was followed in traditional China. Some of the examples of this are discussed in this

The Death of Woman Wang, by Jonathan D. Spence, paints a vivid picture of provincial China in the seventeenth century. Manly the life in the northeastern country of T’an-ch’eng. T’an-ch’eng has been through a lot including: an endless cycle of floods, plagues, crop failures, banditry, and heavy taxation. Chinese society in Confucian terms was a patriarchal society with strict rules of conduct. The role at this time of women, however, has historically been one of repression. The traditional ideal woman was a dependent being whose behavior was governed by the "three obedience’s and four virtues". The three obedience’s were obedience to

Although Ban Zhao was a woman, she was behind a sexist piece of literature meant for instruction towards women. It isn't too hard to see this at face value, but there is more going on here than just that in "Lessons for Women". Ban Zhao was a woman who embraced the sexism and strict gender roles in ancient China who also wrote for and taught women how to be like her in this way, her style and perspective were certainly telling of this, and so was her word choice, intentions, and audience.

“See’s emotional themes are powerful...the bonds of sisterhood and the psychological journey of becoming an American” - (The Washington Post)

“For Colored Girls” involves seven women who represents a different shade of the rainbow. The colors are brown, red, yellow, white, green, orange and blue. Their costumes and make-up transformed each of them and were significant of the color their character embodied. As a group their acting made all of their roles of equal importance, without one dominating the other. These women together formed a bond through their various adversities, gradually taking them from strangers to companion. From an objective view, the audience is allowed to simply observe the events as they take place chronologically. Throughout the movie during some of the conflicting and traumatic scenes, one of the women recites a poem to signify and release the emotion being felt at that time.

The germ of the novel lay in the medieval romance of fantastic tale of the love and adventure, itself derived from the ballads and fragments of epic poems sung by the wandering minstrel. In 1350 Boccaccio wrote a world famous collection of love stories in prose, entitled Decameron. Such short stories are called in Italian ‘novella’. .