Conference turris::womannotes-v2

    Is it true, then, that only women are prohibited from having a second
    child?  Would a man actually be allowed to father several children as
    long as each were its mother's only child?  I didn't think it worked
    that way; I thought women and men both were prohibited from having more
    than one child.
    
    						=maggie

    For reference:

    HANZI::CHINA covers political and other controversial issues related
    to China. There is a large Chinese readership there including Chinese
    outside of China (some of whom were born there) and Chinese in China
    (which includes Taiwan and Hong Kong).

    Cultural (non political and non political) topics regarding the Far
    East (including China) are covered in HANZI::FAR_EAST. Both conferences
    are located in Hong Kong FWIW.

    		Alfred co-moderator HANZI::CHINA (KP7 etc)

    Alfred, was there a particular topic you had in mind in the China
    conference?  I did a dir/title= on all the following:
    child, son, daughter, father, mother, marriage, family, abortion, 
    choice, birth, horse (year of) and parent... to no avail.
    
    regards,
    Marge

I read a very interesting and, to me, confusing piece in (I believe) the Sunday
NY Times Book Review last weekend. It was about equal rights along gender lines
and the USSR. It was a book review, but I can't remember the title of the book.
The reviewer also had experience with women's issues in the USSR. I came away
from the article with the impression it was trying to tell me the following:

o There are not equal rights along gender lines in the USSR.
o The revolution against the tsars/communism had only made things worse.
o Equal rights along gender lines had indeed been written into something like a
constitution when the communists took over.
o Women do the majority of the back breaking labor
o Women are paid 2/3 what men are paid, on the average
o The society is a matriarchy.
o Women are strong, for having to keep family together and feed. 
o Men are weak, from being taken care of by strong mothers and not getting any
direct reward from society for being strong (Like, capitalism gives you
money...).
o There is a proverb "Women can do everything, men can do the rest"

I found these messages very confusing, probably because of my cultural/
American feminist bias that equates patriarchy = repressed women = weak women.

I worked with Jewish Russian emigres in my last job. One of them told me that
there were equal rights, since women are doctors and work on job crews. Yet I
did not perceive any difference in attitude among my Russian-born co-workers
and others. Most were men; only one was a woman, and she was not a particularly
assertive nor well-rewarded member of the team. The door holding issue was even
more confusing.

I guess the summary statement is - it's hard for me to separate cultural bias
from what true equality would mean.
	Mez

    Mez,
    
    I can offer you one datum to decrease (or increase) your confusion:
    The job of doctor is not anywhere near as well-respected in the
    Soviet Union as it is here.
    
    						Ann B.
    
    P.S.  The novel, _The_Moon_Goddess_and_the_Sun_, claims that *every*
    Russian form of government has been an instantiation of the same set
    of rules that the Mongols imposed (if I am remembering correctly).

    RE: .3 No I had no particular topic in mind. Starting a new topic
    was what I was thinking of. 
    
    			Alfred

    In the USSR there are two grades of physician:  "doktor" and "vrach". 
    The distinction isn't along the lines of our "specialist" -vs- "GP" but
    more like "physician" -vs- "paramedic" or "nurse practitioner", though
    "vrach" is considered a medical speciality rather than a nursing or an
    emergency-care one.
    
    Most women doctors are vrachi. 
    
    						=maggie

Being of Czech descent (a culture closely related to the Russain), 
the cultural dichotomy Mez mentions is quite familiar to me.  
The sexual discriminations I grew up with were not of the same kind that
it seems most women involved in this file grew up with.  

It wasn't in terms of ability.  Women are seen as strong, competent, 
maybe even stronger than men.

Women were paid less, but it wasn't strictly economic. Women usually run 
the family economy and make most of the family's major purchase decisions.

It certainly wasn't in terms of work.  Being able to do a good day's labor,
cutting wood or shingling rooves, was an important part of being a good woman.

Intelligence, perhaps -- there's an attitude of "strong as an ox and dumb 
as one too" as the ideal wife.  But on the other hand a woman who is 
intelligent often gets as much education as a man -- keeping in mind that
education in itself is not highly valued.  There's a tendency to regard 
the educated of either sex as wimps.

But all in all it was just the simple belief that women aren't worth as 
much on a human scale as the men.  It had nothing whatsoever to do with
any kind of objective evidence.  There was no reason for it.  

This kind of sexism is much different from the average American sexism in
that it really doesn't keep an individual woman from *doing* anything.  It's
all in the attitude.

--bonnie

    The idea is the same, the executions are different for different
    cultures.  Each has its own method for deciding where women belong and 
    how to keep them there, (legally, socially, traditionally, etc).  Which 
    leads me to believe that the world over, in most cultures, women aren't 
    allowed in on the deciding.  Right at the starting gate, the men are
    "the people" and the women are one of the aspects of life "the people"
    control, however variant the different ways are.

    Back to the issue of reproductive choice = equality. In my mind the
    freedom of NOT having babies is what has helped the women's movement in
    America. Women were not held back because they couldn't have children.
    The opposite, while not what I would call freedom, does not prevent a
    woman from other work the way uncontrolled pregnancies might.

    The entire world, not just China, is approaching a time when population
    control will have to be on the forefront. There is an article on this
    very subject in this month's Sierra magazine. We are facing a world
    population that can not be fed while maintaining what we in the west
    would consider an adequate standard of living.

    If we want to allow the population to keep grwoing at it's present rate
    there will be freedom for very few. The rest will die of starvation and
    disease. China is fighting for it's survival, the rest of the world
    isn't that far behind. I see the control of the number of children a
    person can have as more acceptable than mass deaths from starvation.
    liesl

    .0 > . . . in China, where women have had guaranteed legal equality for
    .0 > 40 years, and where social equality has been realized among the
    .0 > educated, and is becoming a reality more and more throughout daily
    .0 > life.
    
    Right.  That's why there are so many women in the Chinese government,
    and so many Chinese businesswomen touring the US and cutting deals. 
    What pure horsefeathers.  The presence of such principles in
    "constitutions" can be pretty meaningless, as in the Chinese and Soviet
    cases.  Indeed, closer to home, didn't we have some stirring
    statements about "created equal" nearly a century before the
    Emancipation Proclamation?
    
    		- Bruce