Using Family and Waiting Years as your sources, write an essay on the role and status of women in China and Japan in the twentieth century. The length of the paper should be approximately 5-7 pages.

This is a reflective paper. You need not tie the contents of the books to the class lectures, which do not address the issues raised in the readings—familial dynamics, status of women, gender roles and relations, and social values. You may want to consider the following questions and issues while writing the paper:

1) What were the traditional roles and status of women?
2) What were society’s expectations with regard to women?
3) How should daughters behave? What were the responsibilities of wives?
4) What was the value-system or code of behavior applicable to women?
5) How did women interact with each other?
6) How did they interact with men?
7) How were they oppressed?
8) Did they voice and express their frustrations, and if they did, how?
9) Did the awareness of western values begin to alter women’s self-conception? How did such awareness lead to the heightening of tensions in a family?
10) Using the following criteria of a good and happy individual life as the frame of reference, determine the extent to which the Chinese and Japanese women depicted in the books have lived up to, or fallen short of, these criteria:
• the right to a life of normal length;
• good health and adequate nourishment;
• ability to avoid unnecessary pain;
• opportunity to be educated, to think, and be creative;
• ability to participate in the formation of what is considered to be a good community;
• self-determination in planning one’s life;
• opportunity to play, laugh and seek leisure.