From Private to Public Patriarchy

In patriarchal, patrilineal societies, sons are valued over daughters. Korean women patronized the mudang or shamans, women marginalized by polite society who had the power to communicate with the spirits. Most women who joined the movement, Taiping rebellion, found that liberation from the inner quarters meant hard manual labor. Sex segregation meant that Chinese, Korean, and Japanese women played a much less public role in social protest than did their European counterparts. Nineteenth‐century internal dislocations and foreign threats transformed the lives of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean men and women. The economic turmoil and political crisis caused by the opening of treaty ports to foreign trade in the 1840s and population pressure in southeastern China are often cited as factors in the rise of the new religion known as the Taiping or “great peace.” The desire to preserve the core of Chinese culture meant that reform came comparatively late to China.