Word: womaning
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Everything happens to Gervaise. At the beginning of this grim dramatization of a Zola story, the "best-looking man in the neighborhood"--to whom the lame Gervaise has been informally married for seven years--runs off with another woman, leaving the destitute heroine with two children. At the end, with her legal husband--with whom she had spent a few happy years--dead, Gervaise is homeless and penniless, sitting dazed and sullen in a small...
This emancipation lasted scarcely ten years. The rising militarists, in destroying so much else, clamped down on women, and reasserted male superiority. But once Japan had plunged into war with the U.S., it was these same militarists who insisted that woman's place was in the factory. Even geisha girls were rounded up for munitions work, and housewives organized into "patriotic" associations to sew uniforms and make bandages. When the war ended in humiliating defeat, the men were totally discredited, and the young women ripe for transformation into mambo-garu-generally to the distress of their mothers...
...wife was simply to produce children-sons, not daughters. For 250 years under the Tokugawa Shoguns, Japan's population was kept stable largely by female infanticide.* Of the girls permitted to live, those who became prostitutes in order to support their parents were praised for filial piety. Every woman trod the Path of the Three Obediences: to her father before marriage, to her husband when she was wed, to her son if she became a widow. "The Japanese wife needs no religion," ran the saying. "Her husband is her sole heaven...
...best, this training in submission and subtlety produced the kind of woman who has moved men of the West as well as of the East to rhapsody. Carried away, a writer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica described her: "She is entirely unselfish; exquisitely modest without being anything of a prude; abounding in intelligence which is never obscured by egotism; patient in the hour of suffering; strong in time of affliction; a faithful wife; a loving mother; a good daughter; and capable, as history shows, of heroism rivaling that of the stronger...
...bamboo bends before the gale. There have been few Joan of Arcs or Molly Pitchers in the annals of Japan. Even the brilliant Lady Murasaki, who wrote the famed Tale of Genji early in the 11th century, felt it necessary to conceal her accomplishments. The only heroic-sized woman known to the Japanese is the legendary Empress Jingo, who supposedly conquered Korea in A.D. 200-but Koreans indignantly assert that absence of records proves she never existed. Until 1923, Japanese law declared that "women, children and mental defectives shall not be associated with political activities...