Crystal Huang
2 hours ago
Happy the 100th International Women's Day! (Born on March 8th, 1914) beginning with the struggle against prejudice and reactionary attitudes that denied the basic human rights and full civic rights to women...
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Alex Delgado Ancamil, Angie Lue Lane, 錶仔林 and 9 others like this.
Crystal Huang About the above photo: has been applied to my Diversity, Sociology and Psychology of HR classes very often.
The the poster below : German poster for International Women's Day, March 8th, 1914; English translation: “Give Us Women’s Suffrage. Women’s Day, March 8, 1914. Until now, prejudice and reactionary attitudes have denied full civic rights to women, who as workers, mothers, and citizens wholly fulfill their duty, who must pay their taxes to the state as well as the municipality. Fighting for this natural human right must be the firm, unwavering intention of every woman, every female worker. In this, no pause for rest, no respite is allowed. Come all, you women and girls, to the 9th public women’s assembly on Sunday, March 8, 1914, at 3pm.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Women's_Day
2 hours ago · Like · 2
Al Poirier Happy Women's Day to all my female friends!
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Mahesh Vangala Crystal we have both sides of the coin n happy womens day, thank q.
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Crystal Huang
about an hour ago
Pedagogial recipes- sharing#5 Story telling- 3 Women's Stories to echo 2014 International Women's Day!
Steven Deckelman, Marcie Bakker and Renee Smith like this.
Crystal Huang Thanks, Angie's sharing =^.^= !
Crystal Huang The Lion Daddy says to his first meet kids - Don't bother me- Roar, Roar!!!! I am busy in observing the International Women's Day ! - Per your mom's command =^.^= !!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.../lion-cub-triplets-meet...
WATCH: Lion Cub Triplets Meet Their Dad For The First Timewww.huffingtonpost.com
Meeting one of your children for the first time would be interesting enough. But...See More
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Crystal Huang
46 minutes ago · Like
Crystal Huang Women at the forefront of the struggle. Washington, DC, 1963.
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about an hour ago · Like
Pedagogical recipes- sharing#5... Story telling is one of the effective teaching-learning activities that I use often, in particular, my current Diversity f2f class. Both my Sociology and Diversity courses will cover Gender Stratification and Psychology of Human Relations which will allude to Gender/Sexuality and Expressions. A an unabashed Guinea Pig as usual for my classes, I will start sharing one of my favorite stories (In fact, titled '3 Women's Stories') which was a talk given at an AAUW Conference held at South Dakota (Mrs. Daschle was the keynote, photo attached) of something happening before from my reminiscence and observations to echo 2014 International Women's Day!
Here it goes:
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(From left to right: S.Q Yang, Linda Daschle, Tom Daschle, Xena Crystal LC Huang)
Dear Friends of AAUW,
First of all, I would like to thank you for the fantastic job you have done to open my eyes as a brand new member. Then, I want to thank Kathleen who introduced and encouraged me to join this big family, so I have this opportunity to learn from you. Peg picked us from the airport along the way to the conference that made me feel so welcomed. Cheryl and Rusty, thanks for the email connection and the sincere help to make this trip possible. Finally, I want to show my appreciation to your Mayor who sang a wonderful song for us. I won’t forget his wonderful voice. Please promise to say our thanks to him.
I was amazed to know that AAUW was 121 years young. 121 years is equivalent to my grandma, my mother, me, plus my nieces’ generation together. During that century, when AAUW had accomplished so many great jobs to encourage /help girls and women to reach their potential, what did my grandma, and mother do? And what about my generation and nieces’ are doing? So, I decided to tell three women’s stories from Taiwan.
Once upon a time, a little girl was born in Taipei, Taiwan, 19xx. Her name is Amei-a. When she was a young girl, she told her mom that she would like to be an artist, ballerina, poet, and diplomat (a sidebar sharing quite relevant to the stories: an anecdote for how to be nice and encouraging :)! - An elementary teacher Mr. 呂芳德 kindly flattered Amei-a's teacher Ms. 吳隆香 when they were at 螢橋國小 Yin-Chao Elementary School about a 小時了了entertaining message. He said that this girl, Amei-a would be the President of Taiwan in the future!!! Haha, how wonderful and kind of him - both the teacher and Amei-a were quite happy to hear that because the candidates of the future Vice President, the future Secretary of each Department, and the rest of important Rank and File could be found in this class at that time, too :)! :D! :)!). This is the first story of the three.
So, you can see, most of her interests seemed relating to feminine fields. But think about it, such a young girl was hardly qualified to be enlightened as a young "feminist" during 19xxs in Taiwan. The possibility of being a female computer scientist or engineer was equivalent to the cats in “A Room of One’s Own” wanting to go to heaven.
Since talking about cats, which the bishop commented in the Virginia Woolf’s article, Amei-a needed to confess that she had not read it when she was young. If she had known that she needed a room of her own with CASH to be herself, she dared not to tell her mom about her ridiculously daydreaming wannabe. Furthermore, if she had learned earlier about John Adams’ famous remarks, she dared not to have made such “Enormously Unrealistic” wishes within her own social stratum (yes, plainly speaking - a very "challenging social class"). Adams once said “ Because of my father’s hard-working, so I can study military and politics, so my sons can learn law and engineering, thus my grandsons can be artists or poets,” something like that…. You see, what an interesting statement that truly stimulated her brain to tick!
First of all, it is all about men- the father, himself, the sons, and the grandsons. Where were the great-grandma, grandma and the mother, the daughters and daughters-in-law, and the “Shakespeare’s sisters”? Secondly, it lets her think, how wonderful or how lucky it could be if she had had a father similar to the Adams’!
Finally, darn it, she is not a son, but another Shakespeare’s-sister-could-be!
Since she has mentioned "father", let her just quickly and briefly introduce her father (though we are talking about women, without men, women's stories would have been much more different??). She needs to be objective and neutral toward her father who passed away several years ago. Her father was born in 1910 during the Japanese occupation. Putting in this way, let us recall a movie, maybe you have seen it- “The Last Emperor.” It was the last Sino-Japanese war of the last dynasty, the Qing was defeated and gave away Taiwan to Japan. From 1985 to 1945, Taiwanese people were like orphans suddenly tossed away to a foreign regime that strategically ruled her (both repressive and assuaging tactics) for half of a century. Some relevant information can be find in a grad paper of mine: https://ci8395.blogspot.com/2012/08/pedagogy-of-oppressed-vs-oppressors-and.html
Amei-a's father was forced to have 4 years’ Japanese elementary (one of the main reasons was to uproot the culture heritage) education which was all he could attend. Such a "privilege" given to him perhaps, he was born with a desirable gender.
To save time for the key stories, I would skip her father's, and go into the second one. It is about Amei-a's mother. Born during the Japanese’s colonization, like most of the poor women, she was encouraged to have as many children as possible. The "reproductive machines” were highly demanded to produce more workers, and soldiers for Japan’s military expansion needs. Her mother did have 10 children. According to the comparative advantage, and since some education would damage the womb (a popular theory advocated by Edward Clarke, 1873), her mother, and women of her generation were deprived of the opportunities of education. So, she could not read, nor write. Although she was a so-called “illiterate”, she insisted that children should have an education.” “Children should have an education” is equivalent to “people need to breathe, to eat, and to drink” in today’s society. So what’s new about it?
Now, again the story needs to be situated in the historical context (for detailed conditions, refer to my thesis: A Multi-Level Analysis of 228 Social Movement (A Massacre) of 1947 in Taiwan, deposited in the General Library of UW-Madison, 1993). Among her peers, education to women is like a camel wanting to go through the needle’s eye. Just taking a look at her contemporaries dealing with their daughters, you can imagine how noble an idea Amei-a's mother had! Among
Amei-A's mother loved her children very much. Those young girls’ horrifying nightmares had never happened to Amei-A's female siblings. However, her eldest sister (Akiko 秋子- a name with the "legacy" of Imperial Japan's occupation on Taiwan) had to sacrifice herself to help out the family. Right after graduating from elementary school, at that young age, she worked at textile factories as a weaver- a very popular and booming industry at that time during the Second Wave of Globalization marching through Taiwan. She worked till the day she had to marry according to the social norm with a chronic occupational lung-disease (I guess, the horrible working condition that she endured). As to Amei-a, she realized how important money was to her family. She always had a strong desire to please her mom to soothe mother's constant anxiety of family financial stress. She worked many tiny jobs starting from elementary school days. Two bigger and significant jobs she had among them were the multinational corporate company’s branches in Taipei. One was the Max Factor Cosmetic Inc., (this was where she got her watery-pinky eyes from those power particles when she hand-made the cosmetic compacts as an elementary school kid), and the other one was an International Traveling Bags Manufacturing Company. She recalled taking with her younger sister Lei-gin working at those difficult working conditions to earn 3-8 cents per hour. No such a word -"child laborers” existed at that time, not to mention the Child Labor Laws ever been heard off, because children were assets, not liabilities when a time deemed the carefree childhood being an unimaginable luxury! Kathleen just now mentioned the positive and negative sides of Globalization (not Internationalization), I think her female siblings are good witnesses to those-days of sweet-bitterness!
Definitely, Amei-a's female siblings did contribute efforts to the stage of the for-better-and-for-worse Globalization processes (yes, the Rampant Free Trade in love with the Dominated Free Markets :)! And they were those little Free Souls with the ABSOLUTE FREE CHOICE UNDER THE FREE WILL to enjoy THE tiny $ents happily earned to lift up the global big boats :D!) in Taiwan, and were also part of the legend in establishing the famous MIT Kingdom (Made In Taiwan-yup, still remember that??? - the buzzword of 亞洲四曉龍- the four Far-Eastern Burgeoning Dragons???) with unimaginable joy (tiny yet significant money) and sacrifice (terrible working conditions). Male siblings even born in a humble background still could get enough attention and protection from the mother and nurturing from sisters. For example, Amei-a reminisced that she received many kinds of nowadays' TV Survivors or early gender-bootcamp (油蔴菜籽) training unconsciously, such as doing all family laundry by hands, working in the factory, bringing money home, keeping brothers’ rooms tidy, being a hard-working and obedient nice girl...and so on so forth when she was a very little girl who was cultural, ideologically, and genderly socialized to stay put (認命). She and her sisters took turns to do cooking and cleaning. But, the most terrible nightmare of hers at that time was when she was in high school which was a very competitive one (the Taipei Municipal First Girls’ Senior High School). Every day, she anxiously saw her classmates (indeed, some of them were her strong competitors :) ), going to expensive cramming schools after class for another 2-3 hours' extra home assignment drills and preparation, so they could do well on next day’s quizzes/exams and kept very competitive in class, while she had to go to families hiring her to tutor their children so she could bring some money home. You can imagine, after family chores, tutoring jobs, school works, there was not so much time to prepare for the next day’s challenges in school. But fortunately, thanks to gods, buddhas, Allah, and all sorts of almighty powers' blessings, through those events, she got the chances to keep her head above the water :)! Who says that “Things that cannot break you, make you stronger,” indeed! WHO could deny the fact that Amei-a is A luckily CHOSEN ONE - to survive pretty well - so far :D!
Now, recalling those proper challenges that Amei-a had, she realizes how fortunate she has been and how much the blessing and privileges that she had compared to her eldest siblings' (merely by the random birth order- because her eldest brother and sister had to bear much of family responsibility and took care of the younger siblings- She could not imagine if she were born into her eldest brother and sisters' situations, and how lucky she was that she escaped that birth-order-Ascribed-trap, and witnessed some of her early childhood female classmates who had to drop out of the elementary school to help out their families.
(Note- sociology jargon: an ascribed status is a social position obtained by birth, such as race, sex, birth order, family background/social class, cultural capitals endowed...and so on, or involuntarily acquired later in life- mainly, statues without choices, compared to the achieved status which is based on birth and later efforts by choice. Both can go positive and negative ways.)
Now I had better quickly jump to the third woman’s story. I am running out of time. She was a wet-nanny. A wet-nanny, mainly, a woman living in poverty, who saved her milk to nurture other families’ babies for whose mother could not or did not want to nurse/raise them. Thus the nanny would be called in to breast-feed/nurse the baby and earned the service fees. The third story was also relating to Amei-a's mother. Her biological grandma died right after giving birth to her mom. You know at that time, woman’s partition was similar to put one of her legs into the casket (just recalling the horrifying and ordeal that Mary Wollstonecraft had been through for such a tragedy!) It was a 50-50 % chance to survive for most of the babies and the mothers (and most of us focusing on how high the infant mortality rate could be. What about the life-risking mothers' ??) . The grandpa had to marry a widow with 4 children of her own. He witnessed the abusive behaviors of the step-mom toward the little baby – Amei-a's mom, thus he decided to save the baby’s life by sending her to the wet-nanny’s house and paid her some meager fees. In the long run, Amei-a's mother decided not to go back to the step-mother's and stayed with the nanny's family.
The nanny (she called grandma at that time) had 7 surviving children, three boys, and four girls. Each time she gave birth a baby, if boy, she kept him, if not, she would arrange to sell or give away the female infants (named with gender derogation, such as 罔腰, 招弟, 一招, 再招 - frequently seen at that time. For more details, refer to my thesis: Social Ideology and Gender roles- Contemporary Women's Issues in Taiwan (社會意識型態與性別角色-論臺灣社會變遷中婦女問題, 1986 ) deposited in the Grad Library of National Taiwan University). Thus, the milk could be saved to nurture other families’ babies. She only kept one girl for family chores and for taking care of other family members. Two of her daughters were sold, and one of them almost ended up in a brothel, whom Amei-a's mother (she became the eldest one in the nanny's family whom the nanny dared not to touch) used all the possible methods to rescue her out of the misery. As to the money the nanny earned, she used to support the whole family. Remember, during Japanese imperialism, Taiwanese men were oppressed, just in a different fashion from women's - no better than the later retreating Nationalist government's domination on Taiwan after War World II, which was another tragically long story.
Now, I hope you won’t be misled by my anecdotal stories about the true face of women in Taiwan during the early 20th century. I wish I would have presented more accurate data about the social condition during those days. But, now, the misery of women has been replaced with a new vitality through a tremendous socio-economic transformation via the availability of educational and occupational opportunities to most of the female citizens: just comparing my current academic and career conditions to my mother’s would be evidence.
So, regarding the generation next to mine, are you curious about it?
Yes, let me tell you, each time I go back to Taiwan, I just could not tell whether my nieces are American girls or Japanese young ladies (Via Global Media penetration and hegemonic hierarchy??)! They enjoyed the tremendous economic affluence in Taiwan. They dyed/highlighted their hair, changed their contact lens by colors, and dressed up like post-Modern girls or Westerners with all sorts of fancy stuff and electronic gadgets that make their auntie Crystal look like a modern pumpkin. They just want everything that the affluent societies have and enjoy! They are experiencing the fourth stage of Rostow’s economic development model- the “high consumption era.”
The trajectory of women’s development in many societies has striking similarities reflecting her specific socio-economic conditions and the cultural ideology. That's why it is important for women from different cultures, nations, races, and classes to get together to share our female experiences.
Taiwan presents a wonderful case study for women striving for justice among developing countries in the 20th and 21st centuries. The history of the development of women in Taiwan was young but impressive. The female grass-roots movements have generated more than 50 NGOs (non-government organizations) to fight for women's rights. Via 30 years’ empowerment of education, women’s movements led by the well educated middle-class women and their relevant associations have accomplished the following major successes legislatively, economically and politically a decade ago:
1. Taiwan had the first female Vice President in Far Eastern Asia, elected in 2000,
and the first female Presidential candidate running against two males with a narrow
the margin of loss in January 2012;
2. passed the Equal Rights, Equal Pays Law;
3. amended several family laws to protect single parent and divorced women; and
4. passed the Civil Liberty Union Law that same-sex can legally marry and is protect by the law.
In conclusion, could you believe that giving a man a thriving opportunity, he might save and build a country, but giving a woman a proper opportunity to develop her potential, she might keep a nation healthy and bring up the future kind, compassionate, and productive generations to come? This might be one of the main reasons we say that to measure a civilization is not by the amount of its GDP or GNP, but by assessing how children, women (and, yes, its animals) are treated?????
Due to time constraints, the statistic data relating to the changing socio-economic statuses of women in Taiwan will be shown through the slides/PowerPoint presentation! Thanks for all of your attention and patience.
