EA 170/Week 3b OUTLINE (Fall 2017) I. Review of Education as a power/gender issue A. Writing in Chinese was known as otokomoji (male writing) 1. Two forms of syllabary for Japanese: hiragana (cursive, used for personal exchanges) and katakana (angular, used for official documents) B. How is Chinese used politically?
Men had to write and read Chinese for all court documents, and for formal occasions had to produce Chinese poems. This is why the Chinese scholar's daughter is helpful:
C. So why are women not encouraged to study Chinese? Why is it considered “unfeminine”? 1. Murasaki Shikibu's Diary: p. 139 2. Why is it problematic for Murasaki Shikibu to be good at Chinese? D. Contemporary examples? 1. Rev. Pat Robertson (November 1989, when he was running for President), explaining why women should not be involved in politics:
a. What was his point? b. Wikipedia on women in chess: 2 female International Grand Masters before 1989, 33 since. c. 1991 Judit Polgar becomes the youngest grandmaster ever at 15 in 1991 (see also the article on her older sister Susan Polgar; as the older sister she hit much more overt discrimination). The current youngest grandmaster is also female (Hou Yifan of China at 14, in 2008) 2. President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers (January 2005) [ article (1/18/2005)]: in a luncheon talk on how to diversify the sciences, he says that one hypothesis for why women do not succeed at math and science is simply innate differences from men ("Different availability of aptitude at the high end") and that this is a more likely explanation of why there were so few female professors at Harvard in the sciences than any overt discrimination. a. Can you see any problems with this? E. Explanations for why women are still underepresented in math and sciences today 1. "leaky pipeline" explanation -- in any number of everyday situations girls (and minorities) get the message that they should not be too strong or smart, whether through overt discrimination or less overt forms of normative labeling a. "Hidden Figures": both racism and sexism at work. b. examples of the effects of labeling girls 1) Youtube of Barbie 2) "Ban Bossy" campaign (but note also responses against this: New Yorker) 3) marketing for desktop computers in the 1980s only targets boys: almost immediate drop in number of female computer scientists (female coders outnumbered male coders before this) 2. "stereotype threat" explanation: that when targeted groups are told that their group is not good at something and then they are immediately tested, their scores go down. (The reverse can be true as well, in which case it is called "stereotype boost.") a. BUT recently published research (January 2012) argues against stereotype threat as explaining differences in achievement between men and women at the highest level of math accomplishment. See this Youtube video.
b. Note that a 1 study in 3 replication rate is actually not bad these days. 3. AND according to Jo Boaler's article, fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) of men and women doing math problems may indicate that men (in general) use a different part of the brain to do math than women (in general). a. What does Boaler argue we should do to change math classrooms so they better support both boys and girls studying math? b. Second point: when girls and minorities underperform, the argument is that the issue is innate; when white boys underperform (as has started to be the case recently) that argument is never made. 4. Scientific American article (September 2017) "The Brilliance Paradox: What Really Keeps Women and Minorities from Excelling in Academia" In brief: when a field focuses on "genius" or "brilliance" as the marker for success, women and under-represented minorities shy away from the field a. Academic fields that prize the brilliance of their members, the authors found, are likely to be less diverse in gender and racial makeup. b. Although innate cognitive ability is not, as far as scientists can tell, tied to gender or race, it is psychologically easier to ascribe this trait to people from groups stereotypically assumed to be intelligent. c. Women and African-Americans may subconsciously interpret a field's emphasis on brilliance as a subtle "Keep Out" sign that dissuades them from entering certain disciplines in the sciences and humanities. d. Examples include Philosophy, Math, Physics and (interestingly) Music Composition Where does this leave us? What do you think? D. Back to Tale of Genji: What do men seem to think? 1. Negative comments in Tale of Genji a. [Tyler pp. 33] “She would pursue my edification or instruct me in matters beneficial to a man in government service, and no note from her was ever marred by a single one of those kana letters, being couched in language of extreme formality. What with all this I could not have left her, because it was she who taught me how to piece together broken-backed Chinese poems and such, and for that I remain eternally grateful.” The story ends with her eating garlic for a cold. His friends don’t believe his story and say “You might as well have made friends with a demon. It is too weird!” (33) b. [Tyler p. 34-35 “There is nothing at all attractive about having absorbed weighty stuff like the Three Histories and the Five Classics, and besides why should anyone, just because she is a woman, be completely ignorant of what matters in this world, public or private? A woman with any mind at all is bound to retain many things, even if she doesn’t actually study. So she writes cursive Chinese characters after all and crams her letters more than half full of them, even ones to other women, where they are hopelessly out of place, and you think, Oh no! If only she could be more feminine!” 3. Actual historical situation of Murasaki Shikibu in her Diary, p. 139: 4. Summary: E. What is the attitude of the women in her household to her studying Chinese? 1. Diary p. 133
a. Why? 2. Criticism of Murasaki Shikibu by Saemon no Naishi (p. 137) "There is a woman named Saemon no Naishi, who, for some strange reason,
took a dislike to me" 3. Why would women police other women with regard to education? a. b. II. “The Lady who loved Vermin” A. What do the people in the story find strange about the woman who admires bugs and worms? 1. Attitude towards the cult of beauty a. Practicality b. Makeup, blackening teeth, eyebrows etc. 2. Writing Style 3. Buddhist logic in argument 4. Doesn't want to be seen by people B. Would these qualities be considered either feminine or masculine behavior at the time? Or neither?
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