Study On Family Roles Of Intellectual Women In The Republic Of China

Family is a basic cell of society,and the stability and harmony of family is the cornerstone of social progress.Woman takes responsibility of supporting their parents,children,the continuation of family culture,and plays an irreplaceable role in the development of family and society as an important member of family.Because of the existence of hierarchy of sexual order,man's right often occupies the supreme position in the feudal family,and woman becomes family appendage.They have single and passive roles,weak self-consciousness and absent independent personality.And,they lose their initiative in many fields,such as politics,economy,culture and marriage.Since the Opium War,western powers gunboats continued to aggravate the semi colonial and semi feudal crisis in China,which put the whole nation into a panic social and unrest the whole nation in the exploration of salvation.Reformative Movement,The Revolution of 1911,54 New Cultural Movement and other social transformations were raging like storms.Progressive ideas coming with social transformations put women's problems into attention of the society.Women's family values and social values were excavated,and people begun to expect new roles for women.With the development of women's education,such as women education of church,self-organized women education,and women studying abroad,a group of intellectual women with new knowledge and idea,self-consciousness,and personality independence stepped onto the stage of history.They began to abandon the "women are inferior to men","men outside and women stay","male-female combination" backward concept.They had a certain right of speech or even decide on family economy,marriage and childcare.As daughters,they enhanced the idea of rights,maintained their rights in family property inheritance,and competed with men in workplace,strived for economic independence,got rid of the economic attachment to families.As wives,they changed the concept of love and marriage,abandoned the marriage purpose of "carry on family line",the marriage form of "command of parents,words of a match-maker" and the mate selection concept of "suitable match",and began to look for marriage with equality,harmony,and feeling.As mothers,they progressed the concept of rearing and educating,and feudal concepts of "more children more happiness" and "feed children against age" were loosened.They responded actively to the call for birth control,and changed the original rugged way of child care.A new relationship between mother and child were established after new intellectual mothers focused on developing of children's independent personality,scientificity and rationality of children rearing and education.In the process of reshaping,family role of intellectual women was constantly obstructed by old concepts,dead hands and old orders,thus it showed the characteristics of coexistence of initiative and passivity,progressiveness and compromise,radicalism and conservatism.Anyway,connotation of traditional sense of "filial daughter" "virtuous wife" and "kindness mother" had quietly changed.In the process of intellectual women's family role being abundant and conflicting,family power has been redistributed,family relations tend to be equal,and social modernization is accelerating.Although there are some limitations in the remodeling of intellectual women roles,the impact on the structure of the family rights,the participation in social construction,and the criticism of old concepts and old culture in its transformation process will all play an important role in modern women's self-development,family and social construction and critical inheritance of Chinese traditional culture.Besides it will also provide guidance for development of modern women's role,construction of family ethics and construction of contemporary social and cultural system.