School of Historical and Philosophical Studies - Theses

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Middle class working women and the Chinese family in Hong Kong: a preliminary study

Ng, Gaik Hoon ( 1994)

The persistent image of the uncontextualised 'Chinese woman' in much writing about China and the Chinese diaspora is one of unrelenting misery and subordination. It is an image that is associated with general accounts of institutional familial patterns of 'the traditional family' (see for example, Levy, 1949). These reductive descriptions of what must be a rich, complex tapestry of family interaction and individual motivations are heavily influenced by evidence from the nineteenth and early twentieth century in China (Johnston, 1983:242, note 1) - a period when women are often pictured as suffering the worst excesses of sexual subordination. The lives of women in particular are continually rewritten in a literature which portrays Chinese women as passive objects controlled by 'Confucianist' doctrines. (From Introduction)