EA 170/Week 4a OUTLINE

I. Review of Education as a power/gender issue

A. Writing in Chinese was known as otokomoji

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?

1. Eg. in Genji pp. 39

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:

"The key in terms of mental ability is chess. There's never been a woman Grand Master chess player. Once you get one, then I'll buy some of the feminism."

a. What was his point?

b. Wikipedia on women in chess: 2 female International Grand Masters before 1989, 20 since

c. 1991 Judit Polgar becomes the youngest grandmaster ever at 15 (see also the article on her older sister Susan Polgar; as the older sister she hit much more overt discrimination)

2. President of Harvard, Lawrence Summers (January 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 explaination 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 get the message that they should not be too strong or smart, whether through overt discrimination or less overt forms of normative labeling

a. examples of the effects of labeling girls

1) Youtube of Barbie

2) "Ban Bossy" campaign (but note also backlash against this; also what about that ad showing before the video???)

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 she argue we should do to change math classrooms so they better support both boys and girls studying math?

Where does this leave us?

D. Back to Tale of Genji: What do men seem to think?

1. Negative comments in Tale of Genji

a. [Tyler p. 39 “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!”

b. [Tyler pp. 37-38] “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!” (39)

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?

III. Intro to the changes in political structure in transitional Kamakura Period (1185-1336)

A. Basic historical point: women lost ground economically, politically and socially from the

Kamakura period onward.

B. Outline of changes in political organization of society:

HEIAN (794-1185)): aristocracy centered court society, government in Heian Kyo (now called Kyoto).

Towards the end of Heian period, decline of Fujiwara power, eventually provincial warrior family of

Taira (Heike) Kiyomori takes control of government.

KAMAKURA (1185-1336): Defeat of the Taira (Heike) family in a series of battles (the Genpei war) 1180-1185 culminates in Minamoto (Genji) family taking control of government, which is moved to Kamakura. A national network of feudal (lord-vassal) relations develops for both warrior and aristocratic families: whereas before the land was held by the power of the court, now it is held as land grants from the Kamakura military government.

MUROMACHI/MOMOYAMA (1336-1600): government is moved back to Kyoto by Ashikaga Takeuji. A series of civil wars results in a decentralized grouping of warrior families whose power base was independent and land-based.

TOKUGAWA or EDO (1600-1868): a relatively re-centralized power structure with the Tokugawa family in control in Edo (now called Tokyo)

C. How do these changes affect the social position of women?

1. How does it affect their representation?

a. Ideology = normative ways that people think about themselves and others

b. changes in ideology tend to be the result of economic and political changes  

1) eg. p. 593 Confucian ideology of proper place of women in society develops in Tokugawa period

2. Effects of decline of women’s education:

3. Who is representing women now?