Medium Post #1 HIEA 115
It’s a univeraly correct statement that male got the privilege compare to female in a long term in almost every country around the world. And that is due to the fact that male physically got more strength base on how their body grows which make them easily take the power from women, and “slavery” them. Although it can be somehow hard to believe, colonism, as some evil concept that take right and land away from native people, would eventually give right to female.
Before the time that Japanese colonialism changed the legal system in Taiwan and Korea, the females in these two countries shared a very low social status. They were viewed more like goods instead of human beings, which means males. The women were “traded” between families as some kind of resource to exchange goods or peace. After the colonels get involved, the law was regenerated and such “daughter exchanging” was viewed as slavery and widow get right to inherent belongings in Korea.
I believe these laws actually promoted the feminism movement in Taiwan and Korea. It also helps the Taiwanese and Korean elites to value female more. What basically the laws are about is that females are also human being, and they are allowed to have part of the same right as males have. The establishment of these laws put women in these two countries at a position which is much higher than where they were used to be. By getting more rights, females in these counties can also get more chance to speak up for themselves, and this can really help them to get more respect from the elites in the society. Since they are not goods to the males anymore, it is necessary that the males need to listen to what females were saying. Also, just the fact that women started to become equal in some aspects to men can lead the elite of the society to think and value females more.
Also how males view females can be very different between different social classes and regions people live. For an extremely rich family, when a female gets the right to inherit properties that means the female become the main voice of the family. For the big patriarchal family, you always get the most right to speak when you control most of the properties. As for a poor family, in Taiwan, the tradition about trading girls are no longer allowed, girls can be finally viewed as more than goods to trade. Since the girls gets their own lives and parents cannot make them go with the “slavery” tagged marriage, they are getting a better life that they can do more and more they want to.
It is interesting to search for the reason behind these series of change, and what I found that the rise of feminism in those colonials is a consequence driven by both coincidence and Japanese government’s intension. Japanese back then, was considered to be a “higher civilization” in the term of colonism. They need to promote their culture, what they used to do, and their traditional to the colonials in order to complete the colonization. They want the colonial be a part of them, not any separate culture or nation, they need to get uniform with the nation colonize them. And women who lived those places just happened to got much lower social status compare to Japan. By promoting the Japanese culture and policy, which women got relatively more right and freedom to choose, it just automatically inprove the women right there, even though the intension of Japanese government was not to promote feminism.