Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan

Margery Wolf's anthropological case study of women in a rural Taiwanese farm village reexamines the traditional patriarchal view of women roles with a closer look at the ways women manipulate the Confucian family by their uterine family connections and by networking within the women's community. Wolfsets forth a revisionist dynamic: the Uterine family and how mothers bond with sons as opposed to the traditional Confucian family values. Wolf claims there is a women's community and a the support system it can provide underlaying the traditional patrilineal values. To make her point, Wolf describes the socialization of female children in the natal family from birth through young womanhood and within the marital family from engagement and marriage to the time they take over the domestic duties of the mothers-in-law. Kingroups and various women's social groups are juxtaposed against village locales. The close relationship between a mother and her sons is compared to the harsher treatment of daughters. Also depicted is entrance into the women's community and the ways the women's community can apply pressure through gossip and loss of face. She also explains non-normative situations: the simpua child, uxorilocal marriages, prostitution. These show examples of women on the outside of the traditional family roles. Adopting a wife for a son as an economic savings and to eliminate stress by training the daughter-in-law, and the difficulties of marrying a brother. Husbands who take their wives family name to provide sons for the lineage, and the stresses of the uxorilocal marriage. Prostitution as a lucrative alternative for some families.Wolf has clearly demonstrated a different dynamic employed by women which overlays the traditional male power structure of the Confucian family, within which women create for themselves a position of security and limited control over their lives and their children's lives and can thus make bearable and even improve family life within the limits of the patriarchal patrilineal society of rural Taiwan.

I was assigned this book as part of an introductory anthropology course, however, once I started reading it, I had no problem finishing (unlike most other assigned college reading.) The book details and defines all aspects of women in rural Taiwan shedding light on a culture very misunderstood and stereotyped by Americans. A very interesting and even exciting read as the culture of rural Taiwan enfolds. A truly exceptional anthropological field study by Margery Wolf.