WOMEN IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY CHINA: A PROBLEM IN IDENTIFYING AND MEASURING CHANGES IN SOCIAL NORMS. A COMMUNITY COLLEGE CURRICULUM

This curriculum dissertation investigates the problem of how difficult it is to identify and measure social change by examining how much correspondence existed between ideal female norms and actual role behavior and how much change has occurred in female norms and behavior in twentieth-century China. It looks at extremely idealized norms such as chastity/fidelity, submissiveness, and self-sacrifice in two historical times: the transitional period, 1898-1949 and the Communist period, 1949-1982. This structure permits students not only to study both periods but also to compare them.; Topics within the curriculum include love and marriage, work, family identity for women, women in politics, the May Fourth Movement, and birth control policy. The sociological concepts of norm and role are used to investigate social change during a turbulent time in modern China. Utilizing an inquiry learning strategy, students identify ideal female norms and then formulate hypotheses and test them. A variety of materials have been assembled for hypothesis construction and testing. Included are government documents, fiction, autobiographies, statistical tables, newspaper and magazine articles, and village studies. Throughout the curriculum, students are confronted with the problem of whether the evidence can be considered representative, given its incompleteness, a dilemma which has constantly plagued researchers.; This material suggests that the role behavior of Chinese females did not completely correspond to ideal norms between 1898 and 1949 and probably never had since the patriarchal family needed women to manage households and to work in agriculture, resulting in behavior which did not coincide with ideal norms. It also indicates that changes in female norms and role behavior happened even before 1949 among a small segment of the Chinese population, the urban intelligentsia, in response to western influence and that this process of change accelerated after 1949 with the introduction of Chinese Socialist norms. Finally, it suggests that although a considerable transformation has ocurred, traditional attitudes, norms, and customs have persisted since 1949, particularly in the countryside, despite government efforts to eradicate them.