by I-Ping Ou Remember the 2009 hit Taiwanese drama Queen of No Marriage? The protagonist Shan Wu Shuang, a 33-year-old career woman, is a hard-working senior editor for a magazine, but her successful career brings not only glory but also the hindrance of finding a suitable mate. This is a very accurate portrait of Taiwan’s current marriage situation. Indeed, according to the Department of Statistics of the Ministry of the Interior, the average age of first marriage for women has risen by two years since 2002. This phenomenon, woman marrying later or not getting married at all, is not restricted to Taiwan. Actually, the whole of Asia is going through the same transformation. Why? Let us review the history of marriage in Taiwan and see what can be said about this phenomenon’s Taiwanese origin. We can divide the history of marriage in Taiwan into three periods: pre-modern, modern, and post-modern. In the pre-modern period, patriarchy made women subordinate to men. Under Confucian ethics, women have to be obedient to their husbands and take care of all the housework. Also at this time, polygamy was still common, and women were even tradable if the family was in need. The modern sense of marriage came with industrialization and urbanization after WWII. Up to this point, marriage was mostly arranged by parents, and free love was not often an option. Industrialization and urbanization set individuals free from their immediate bonds with the patriarchal family, and people had more freedom to choose their spouse. This freedom gave marriage a more egalitarian color. However, in the 1960s, in order to distinguish itself from communist China, the government started to advocate traditional values, such as women’s role of supporting their husbands and mothering. This became a paradox in modern marriage—even as women and men were encouraged to pursue romantic love and freedom, the division of labor at home was also encouraged.
With this latent conflict, Taiwan entered a third period of marriage. Women’s education gave them a voice, and they could no longer toleratetheir inferior position both in the society and at home. The conflict, disclosed and critiqued by feminism, became visible and women were able to stand up against the patriarchal hegemony. From the above information we can see that there are three sides to the cause of Taiwanese women’s reluctance to marry. First, women’s education has risen in the past few decades to the same level as men. Higher education has given them more access to feminism that discloses women’s unjust treatment in a patriarchal society. Second, along with education came female employment. With modernization and education, women nowadays are no longer caged at home. What came with this employment was their independence from men. Women for the first time in history don’t need a husband to be the breadwinner. They could do just as well if not better. However, the expectations of being a wife or a mother did not match women’s image of an egalitarian relationship, which they had come to expect from their education and their economic independence. For example, in a dual-income household, women are still, in most cases, the laborer at home, because it is widely considered women’s duty to take care of the family and men’s right to stay away from all housework. This last factor has brought drastic conflict and is the most prominent aspect affecting women’s attitude toward marriage. Hence we can conclude that gender inequality in Taiwan is the structural cause of women’s reluctance to marry. a
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The Taida Student Journal has been active since 1995 with an ever-changing roster of student journalists at NTU. Click the above link to read about the authors Archives
May 2024
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