Women and the Family in Rural Taiwan (ISBN 0804708495)

An interesting twist on Confucian values:
Margery Wolf's anthropological case study of women in a rural Taiwanese farm village reexamines the traditional patriarchal view of women roles with a closer look at the ways women manipulate the Confucian family by their uterine family connections and by networking within the women's community. Wolfsets forth a revisionist dynamic: the Uterine family and how mothers bond with sons as opposed to the traditional Confucian family values. Wolf claims there is a women's community and a the support system it can provide underlaying the traditional patrilineal values. To make her point, Wolf describes the socialization of female children in the natal family from birth through young womanhood and within the marital family from engagement and marriage to the time they take over the domestic duties of the mothers-in-law. Kingroups and various women's social groups are juxtaposed against village locales. The close relationship between a mother and her sons is compared to the harsher treatment of daughters. Also depicted is entrance into the women's community and the ways the women's community can apply pressure through gossip and loss of face. She also explains non-normative situations: the simpua child, uxorilocal marriages, prostitution. These show examples of women on the outside of the traditional family roles. Adopting a wife for a son as an economic savings and to eliminate stress by training the daughter-in-law, and the difficulties of marrying a brother. Husbands who take their wives family name to provide sons for the lineage, and the stresses of the uxorilocal marriage. Prostitution as a lucrative alternative for some families. Wolf has clearly demonstrated a different dynamic employed by women which overlays the traditional male power structure of the Confucian family, within which women create for themselves a position of security and limited control over their lives and their children's lives and can thus make bearable and even improve family life within the limits of the patriarchal patrilineal society of rural Taiwan.

Decrying women's status, arguing for mothers' centrality:
This account of a typical life-cycle of Chinese women in a multi-surnamed Hokkien village, aptly characterized as an "afterthought to fieldwork" by Norma Diamond in _The American Anthropologist_ enlivens the demographic analyses of her (then-) husband Arthur Wolf's work on patterns of adoption and marriage. She stresses the importance of informal neighborhood groupings of (unrelated) women and dwells extensively on prostitution, especially by adopted daughters (the obssession of Arthur Wolf's life work), and on rivalry between women. In particular, Margery Wolf stresses the rivalry between daughters-in-law and mothers-in-law as leading to the breakup of larger family units into nuclear family households (although in her earlier work she had emphasized the fragility of bonds between brothers that preexisted sister-in-law rivalry as a centripetal force within families ). Wolf considerably underestimated the extent to which women's work outside the house was (and is) important to to the economic well-being of their families and to financing family enterprises. As Diamong complained, "there is little feel for how adult women view themselves and their lives, how they interact with the males in their lives, and how completely they accept the male evaluation of them as economically useless and ritually polluting." Taiwanese scholars have challenged the Western conception of female "pollution" in the work of Wolf, Emily (Martin) Ahern, and others. The specificity of Wolf's _House of Lim_, although it probably depends on unnamed Taiwanese research "assistants" eliciting and translating the data, makes it the most useful of her books.

A wonderfully informative look at another culture:
I was assigned this book as part of an introductory anthropology course, however, once I started reading it, I had no problem finishing (unlike most other assigned college reading.) The book details and defines all aspects of women in rural Taiwan shedding light on a culture very misunderstood and stereotyped by Americans. A very interesting and even exciting read as the culture of rural Taiwan enfolds. A truly exceptional anthropological field study by Margery Wolf.