What Kind of Mother Does A Woman Become?he Legal Construction of Motherhood in the Post-war Taiwan
Date Issued
2009
Date
2009
Author(s)
Chuang, Yun-chin
Abstract
Becoming a mother is an important experience to women, but women in Taiwan often have to quit their jobs to care for children. As a result, although the role of mother is an important identity of women, the practice of motherhood always means the hard choice between work and family, or burning the candle at both ends. Many researchers adopt a sociological approach to analyze this phenomenon. They describe in detail how family, society and ideology structure the institution of motherhood. This thesis tries another approach – a legal approach- to analyze how law structures the public/private split and forces women to be a carer in the private sphere. I use the method of feminist legal history to observe how the public/private split and the institution of motherhood transform in the post-war Taiwan. I find that the public/private split brings the different responsibility distribution between mothers and fathers as well as the family and the state. Childcare is the unescapable responsibility to women and the family, and as a result, men and the state just have to “help” occasionally. I use the concept of draftee mother/volunteer father and draftee family/volunteer state to name this phenomenon. Public/private split includes two kinds of splits: split between the state and the family; and split between workplace and the family. These splits are not always the same as we know today. In the 1950s and 60s, women in rural Taiwan often carried their children on the back while working in the farmland, so work and childcare were not apart. Their mother-in-law or daughters also helped to care for children, and this meant the mother was not the sole carer. Nevertheless, the state and Women’s Association distinguished work from care and linked motherhood to care through the day-care nurseries for farmer’s children, public health administration and the Civil Code. In other words, they promoted an ideal mother as the sole carer who did not have to work. In the 1970s, while more and more women went out of home to work, the public/private split became more obvious. The law not only ignored this split but also assigned the childcare responsibility to women, family and market through the legislation of Child Welfare Act, Early Childhood Education Act and labor laws. Therefore, men and the state could be exempted from the responsibility of childcare. From 1949 to1988, the privatization of childcare was established step by step. It made women with children hard to participate in the labor market and also made childcare market become highly profit-making. The state also did not provide any active childcare policy. Many women’s rights organizations experiencing the conscious-raising process in the 1970s began to pay attention to these phenomena and asked for legal reform which blurred the boundaries between the public sphere and the private sphere. They introduced parental leave and public childcare policies to build a new institution in which the state and men could be responsible for childcare as well, and then can childcare be a “real” choice of women and family. I think these transformations in progress will change the lives of mothers and fathers of the next generation as well as the relationship between the state and the family. I hope that through my work more people will come to discuss what kind of parent we want to be, what kind of state we want to have. Thus, this historical work may give some understanding of the past and contribute to the imagination of the future.
Subjects
feminist legal history
motherhood
childcare
public/private split
draftee mother/volunteer father
draftee family/volunteer state
Type
thesis
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