Buffy's Salon

A Woman's Place?

Woman's Place in War

Writing in the 1970s, the author Ruth Adams chronicled the changing role of women in the twentieth century.  Woman born at the turn of the century could have lived through two periods when it was her moral duty to devote herself, obsessively, to her children; three when it was her duty to society to neglect them; two when it was right to be seductively ''feminine''; and three when it was a pressing social obligation to be the reverse.  Three separate periods in which she was a bad wife, mother and citizen for wanting to go out and earn her own living, and three others when she was an even worse wife, mother and citizen for not being eager to do so.

A Woman's Place 1910-75 

Reading this, is it any wonder why women today are confused about their role in life?  Bear in mind that the last 30-40 years since this was written have seen increasingly bizarre pressures placed on the female sex.  We could perhaps add, being unhealthily thin, modeling our lifestyle on vacuous celebrities, dressing like a sex object, being a career woman, "having it all", being a domestic goddess and owning every new gadget and several pieces of designer gear as a start.  One wonders if we will have found any kind of equilibrium in another 50 years.

Girlhood in Nineteenth Century China

 

I have a particular love for books that show me how women lived in times and cultures that differ greatly from my own.  Snow Flower and the Secret Fan is such a book and I am enjoying learning just what it must have been like to have been a child and a young woman in China in the nineteenth century.

The story is told by Lady Lily Lu, the 80-year-old matriarch of Tongkou village, who, nearing the end of her life, sits down to write her final memoir; one that will be burned at her death. Using nu shu, a secret script designed and kept by women, Lily spends her final years recounting her training as a woman, her longing for love and the friendship of a lifetime.

I haven't finished reading the book yet so I am not writing a review as such, but I wanted to post what I have learned about girlhood at this time.  Of course there was a class system, as there is anywhere, and peasant girls would have a very different life to the upper and middle classes.  The society that Lily grew up in had rigid gender roles.

Whether you are rich or poor, emperor or slave, the domestic sphere is for women and the outside sphere is for men.  Women should not pass beyond the inner chambers in their thoughts or actions.  ...Two Confucian ideals ruled our lives.  The first was the Three Obediences: "When a girl, obey your father; when a wife, obey your husband; when a widow, obey your son."  The second was the Four Virtues, which delineate women's behaviour, speech, carriage, and occupation: "Be chaste and yielding, calm and upright in attitude; be quiet and agreeable in words; be restrained and exquisite in movement; be perfect in handiwork and embroidery."  If girls do not stray from these principles, they will grow into virtuous women.

Many girls had relative freedom (apart from house chores) until they reached about six years of age, when their feet would be bound (younger if from very prosperous households).  The process of foot-binding was hideous and the terrible pain lasted for many months, but it was essential if the girl was to make a good marriage.  One in ten girls died from foot binding and many others were left crippled.  Ideally, if binding was a success, the woman would have a gently swaying walk.  Bound feet were seen as a status symbol, like white skin (implying you could afford to stay out of the sun).  Even now there are some old women in China with bound feet.

Foot size would determine how marriageable I was.  My small feet would be offered as proof to my prospective in-laws of my personal discipline and my ability to endure the pain of childbirth, as well as whatever misfortunes might lie ahead.  My small feet would show the world my obedience to my natal family, particularly to my mother, which would also make a good impression on my future mother-in-law.  The shoes I embroidered would symbolize to my future in-laws my abilities at embroidery and thus to her house learning.

Of course, once a girl's feet were bound her freedom was cut short and she would spend her day helping inside the house (if the family could not afford sufficient servants) and being educated in home making and the womanly arts in the women's garthering room upstairs.  Depending on the prosperity of the family, the unmarried women of the family might all sleep in the women's gathering room.  She would not mix with any males outside her immediate family, which would be quite extended as younger brothers and their families often lived with older brothers.

The girl was able to have friendships with other girls her own age, but these girls were chosen for her not long after the foot binding, and the friendship would usually end once both girls were married.  Well born girls might be able to have one special friend (again, chosen for her) whom she would keep for life; and they would be bound together with as many rites and rituals as a married couple.  Girls always moved to their husbands' families, so that parents were able to enjoy the company of their sons a lot longer than their daughters. 

When she was about eleven she would be betrothed to a boy from another family, with the aid of a matchmaker.  It was not necessary for anyone from the two families to meet.  The girl's family would hope that she would marry into a respectable and prosperous family, but this would depend upon their own class, the beauty of their daughter and the size of her feet.  There would be a continual exchange of gifts on both sides, but it is unlikely that she would meet her intended until the day of the wedding.

In the years before the marriage the girl would be busy making her dowry (quilts, shoes, clothes, presents for her in-laws) as it was considered bad form not to arrive in your new home fully provided for, for many years.  Once she had turned fifteen her hair would be pinned up in the style of a phoenix as a symbol of the coming marriage.  She would marry when she was about seventeen.  Her new family would travel to her home and, after the ceremony, she would be escorted back to her new home.  After four days she would be brought back to her original home.

Following the marriage ceremony the daughter would live at home with her parents, enjoying conjugal visits to her husband's family a few times a year.  She would continue to live with her parents until the end of her first pregnancy.  At this time she would move in permanantly with her husband's family and any official ties to her origianal family would be cut.  However, during certain festivals of the year it was traditional for a wife to return home to visit her parents so, if desirable, contact could remain.  However, a wise new wife would make her mother-in-law into her closest friend as this matriarch would largely be responsible for the happiness, or otherwise, of her new daughter.

Originally posted in July 2007.  I also recommend Peony in Love by the same author, which you can read about in Buffy's Library.

Happy & Healthy?

Harness' Electric Corset for Women of All Ages

A blog post at The Happiness Project looked at the correlation between happiness and weight.

It's a well known paradox that in many modern developed countries, such as both the United States and Britain, the average person is becoming more obese whilst the media consistently promotes photos of undernourished women (and even men) as the ideal.  Being either very over-weight or very under-weight is damaging to the health and not remotely attractive.  So why are we doing it to ourselves?

The thin ideal, which has infiltrated our culture to such an alarming degree, seems to have its roots in the following:

1. Whether it's inborn or inbred, most girls and women feel a certain level of dissatisfaction with their bodies, no matter how beautiful they are.
2. The media, especially in the form of girls' and women's magazines, the modeling world and all aspects of celebrity culture constantly push an image of the perfect female shape being significantly underweight.
3. Researchers have found that the most influential role models are those whom we perceive as being like ourselves. A teenage girl, for instance, will look at teenage girls on television or in magazines and unconsciously see them as a role model they should emulate.  Young women are particularly vulnerable because their bodies are changing through puberty, so their body image is not fixed or stable. 
4. Advertisers worsen the situation by making girls and women feel they need to buy their products in order to feel attractive and adequate.  In other words, a woman without deodorant, shaved legs and armpits, make-up, perfume etc is failing as a woman.   The vast majority of the women in the adverts are, of course, skinny.

The most interesting part of the post I mentioned above is a quote by Martin Seligman:

All thin-ideal cultures…have roughly twice as much depression in women as men. (Women diet twice as much as men...) [In] cultures without the thin ideal…the amount of depression in women and men in these cultures is the same. This suggests that around the world, the thin ideal and dieting not only cause eating disorders but also cause women to be more depressed than men. 

It's interesting that the ideal of a woman being skinny is prevalent only amongst societies which are relatively affluent.  This is because in a society where, for many, there is not enough to eat, being over weight becomes a status symbol.  Rather in the way that being suntanned used to be a sign that someone worked in the fields and wasn't a lady, being thin meant your family couldn't afford to feed your properly.

When we look back in history we see thousands of women torturing their bodies to fit a cultural view of beauty, which rarely has anything to do with good health or natural looks.  One of the hardest to understand is the women who bound the feet of their daughters, a practice I mentioned briefly in an earlier post about the excellent novel Snow Flower and the Secret Fan.  In the Western World woman have long constricted their bodies into corsets and at various times throughout history cosmetics have resulted in great damage: white face paint causing arsenic and lead poisoning and belladonna causing permanent damage to eye sight.

When will we realise that the only way to be healthy and happy is to be satisfied with our natural bodies and make the effort to nurture and look after them rather than try to force them to fit some relative cultural ideal?

Source for research: Journalism's Portrayal of the Thin Ideal

What do modern women want?

My Home, Husbands and Wives Magazine, UK, 1934

"Maybe women have not evolved to the point where they want to work as long as men. Or maybe they don't want to become company women on an institutional track; maybe they'd rather work for themselves than keep grasping for that elusive Managing Director title. Or maybe they just value time spent with friends and family more than time spent on office warfare.

"Five years ago, you would often hear high-powered women fantasize that they would love a Wife, somebody to do the shopping, cooking, carpooling, so they could focus on work. Now the fantasy is more retro: They just want to be that Wife.

Maureen Dowd (New York Times -2000)

Just for Wives

My Home, Husbands and Wives Magazine, UK, 1934

I have read a lot of helpful and thought-provoking blogposts aimed at giving good advice to wives.  Here's a selection of my favourites, all of which contain real, practical suggestions.  I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did:

First of all, what not to do: 10 Bad Habits that could ruin your marriage.  According to a 2003 Newsweek study, between 15% and 20% of couples are living in a sexless marriage, where couples make love no more than 10 times a year. While sex is not the be-all, end-all to a marriage, it’s one of the best ways to maintain intimacy. And when sex becomes a distant memory, your intimacy takes a severe hit.

And now what you really do need to do: Six Fundamentals of Love & Respect Kelly wondered if her husband, Steve, would remember their 10th anniversary. Some years he had forgotten.  But, this year, he remembered. He had found just the right card, and he was sure it would be a great anniversary. When he handed her the card, she beamed from ear to ear. But when she read it, her countenance turned sour and dark. "It’s not bad… for a birthday card," she scowled.  (Great advice here for husbands too)

The next two articles look at different ways we can take our husbands for granted:

What your husband wishes he could tell you - Have you ever found yourself sitting with your beloved in front of the tv? You're clipping your toenails before flossing your teeth. You're wearing that hideous floppy grey flannel robe and your legs hairier than a lumberjack's. And then you find yourself wondering why the romance is gone.

Please don't check your manners at the door -  I see otherwise personable young men and women treat their spouses in demanding, selfish, ungrateful, bossy, loud, and otherwise downright unpleasant ways. They are cordial to everyone else, but with their spouse they forget the most basic of manners -- even down to not saying "please" and "thank-you". Under the guise of trying to "help their spouse", they constantly pick at their spouse's faults. At home, they blurt out things in a manner they would never dream of using with anyone else.

An overview of the issue of submission in marriage from a Biblical point of view.  Viewed in the light of God’s Word, subjection is not a forced slavery to which a wife must make herself conform. It is not a loss of individuality or personality. True biblical subjection is a woman’s creative and challenging pleasure of discovering how she can show her husband that she respects him, admires him, and depends on him. That requires the death of all pride and the destruction of all selfish motives. 

What if you want to make some profound changes to your home or family and your husband is not on board?  (Written very much from a Biblical perspective.)  When I started on this "journey" of wanting to be a godly wife and mother, I didn't even think my husband was saved. He definitely was no leader (I had destroyed that in the first place).  He definitely wasn't godly. Our home definitely wasn't godly.  But over time, as I put God first, and then my husband next, and prayed to be a crown to my husband, my husband pulled along side me--and then ahead of me as our family's spiritual leader and my spiritual head. 

On a lighter, but perhaps no less vital, note, the importance of having fun in marriage.  Having fun together is an important way to create positive feelings toward each other and toward life in general. We’ve set aside Wednesday nights and Saturdays for our regular dates. This breaks up our weekly routine, relieves stress, renews hope, and keeps the friendship side of our marriage thriving.

Authentic Beauty

 

Pop over to A Booklover's Journal to see my review of Authentic Beauty by Leslie Ludy.  An interesting and inspiring title very relevant to today's woman.

1930s Housewife Quiz

77 As a 1930s wife, I am Very Superior Take the test!

  I lost points for putting my cold feet on my husband in bed.

When she was bad she was horrid

Young Lady with Angel

There was a little girl,
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle of her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

I was raised by a family who believed that girls were a blessing and I can remember being particularly fond of that silly rhyme that told me that little girls were made of sugar and spice and all things nice whereas little boys were made of slugs and snails and puppy dog tails!

Alas, looking at the media coverage of young women today I doubt these words are going to trip off the tongue of anyone summing up modern girlhood. For those of us who don't live with teenage girls, what sort of images are available to us today?? As one writer comments:

It is a very common sight to see hoards of young girls wearing next to nothing, paralytically roaming the streets, shouting and making obscene gestures.

I have to concur from my own experience of being in towns and cities during Friday and Saturday evenings. Of course, I need to stress that there are probably a lot of young women who aren't behaving like this, but a street-full in every urban area is still too much.

The BBC has highlighted the problem of the "ladette" with articles on the tendency for modern girls to increasingly indulge in binge drinking and to display unacceptable levels of violence. Drinking to excess, apart from being bad for your health, obviously leads to an increase in unethical behavior, including playing truant from school, breaking the law, increased sexual promiscuity (without protection, naturally) and generally anti-social behaviour.

Meanwhile the number of crimes committed by young women has jumped by 25% in the last four years. Bullying, girl gangs, theft and assault are on the increase amongst teenage girls.

By constantly reinforcing to young women that they can do anything that young men can do, are we inadvertently pushing them towards the worst forms of male behavior? In a recent interview the actress Eileen Atkins said that:

today's young women had got it "completely wrong" by believing that equality was about aping the heavy drinking and sexual habits of their male counterparts. My skin crawls when I see laddish women presenting television shows who almost slap their thighs as if they're in panto. I think, 'Stop. This isn't what we meant by feminism.' It's gone completely wrong.

Interestingly, the same article quotes feminist Germaine Greer exclaiming at the recent trend towards so-called ladettes:

"If women can see no future beyond joining the masculinist elite on its own terms, our civilisation will become more destructive than ever."

Meanwhile researches of anti-social behaviour have pointed out that teenage girls and boys mix together a lot more now than they used to do twenty years or more ago. This, coupled with several years of late adolescence which for many are spent footloose and fancy-free, provides the opportunity for many girls to really find and express their inner ladette/slapper. And there has always been the lure of the "bad boy"; these days fewer girls are protected by their parents and society and more likely to be lead up the garden path and right into a prickly rose bush.

I am not for restricting the lives of girls unnecessarily and certainly not for returning to double standards, but wouldn't it be refreshing to see femininity, gentleness, nurturing, refinement, prudence and even virtue held up as a model for young girls rather than the behaviour of the most loutish male?

The Path to Biblical Womanhood

Beachside Stroll

We probably have a fair idea of what Biblical Womanhood once meant, but the world we live in has changed beyond measure from those ancient days.  Can these words realistically have any meaning for us now?  Well, I have found some interesting resources online about what Biblical Womanhood actually could mean in this day and age.  Of course, much of it runs directly contrary to the modern expectation of womanhood or girlhood.  However, if you're interested in taking the road less travelled you might want to check out some of these signposts along the way. 

Keeping the elusive Proverbs 31 woman as our guide as we walk along the path we should remember to:

Honour our parents

Set apart our "inner sancturary"

Expect to be challenged by our Faith

Celebrate our femininity

Consider the differences between the sexes

Understand the importance of Servanthood

Remember that old fashioned virtue: chastity

Try out  A Month of Modesty

Refuse to Gossip

Always Cultivate Wise Habits

and for those of us not married, consider the busy Ministry of Single Girls 

Feminine or Masculine?

In my earlier post about gender I mentioned the fact that women and men appear to demonstrate differences other than the overt physical ones.  I thought it would be interesting to note some of the ways that psychologists have found that boys and girls do tend to display differences in behaviour and temperament.

• Women appear to be better at communicating.  By the age of 2 a female has a vocabulary twice as big as a male.  (Probably because of the different ways their brains are 'wired'.)
• Men show more aggressive tendencies than women, even from being toddlers.  (Probably because of greater levels of testosterone).  An experiment conducted by Lewis with one-year-old children to see how they would react to being separated from their mother by a barrier found that boys tried to knock the barrier down while the girls stood passively, crying for help
• Men have greater spatial awareness than women (brain wiring again)
• Male infants are generally more interested in objects than people, female infants respond more readily to a human voice than do male infants
• Fom being children, females are more likely to co-operate to achieve a goal whereas males are more likely to be competing with each other
• When looking for a life partner, men tend to focus on how attractive the woman is, women tend to be more interested in whether the man will be a good provider
• Men talking together talk about practical things, women talk about emotional things
• Various studies have shown women showing more empathy than men

And now some things that are not true!

• Men are not less 'romantic' than women - in an experiment Weiss found 67% of males believe in love at first sight compared to 54% of females.
• Man are not better drivers than women, in fact more accidents are caused by men.  They are just more confident drivers.

It should be noted that we are talking about general trends here.  Experiments that found women show more empathy then men are by no means saying all women are empathic and no men are, simply that a larger percentage of women showed empathy than men.

Both men and women display altruism but they tend to do so in different ways.  A man is more likely to risk his life at a moment's notice to save another person.  However, a woman is more likely to sacrifice months, or even years, to looking after a sick relative.  I think this is an excellent example of how, ethically and in many other ways, women and men are intrinsically different, but ultimately equal.