Joy Luck Club Sexism Essay

Many women find that their mothers have the greatest influence on their lives and the way their strengths and weaknesses come together. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, the lives of four Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters are followed through vignettes about their upbringings and interactions. One of the mothers, An-Mei Hsu, grows up away from her mother who has become the 4th wife of a rich man; An-Mei is forced to live with her grandmother once her mother is banned from the house, but eventually reunites and goes to live in the man’s house with her mother. Her daughter, Rose, has married an American man, Ted, but their marriage begins to end as he files for divorce; Rose becomes depressed and unsure what to do, despite

The Joy Luck Club is Amy Tan's first novel. It consists of four sections with sixteen short stories. One of the main issues of the novel is the relationship between Chinese mothers and their Chinese – American daughters. ‘‘Your mother is in your bones.’’ (Tan 1998, 30) There is a cultural chasm between them because of the difference in the way they were brought up and different influences of the environment.

The Joy Luck Club portrays strong women. The examples that come across most strikingly to the reader are the women who lived in traditional China. An-Mei Hsu gained her strong will from her mother's weak spirit. In her story, titled "Magpies," An-Mei's mother is forced

Throughout Amy Tan’s novel, The Joy Luck Club, the reader can see the difficulites in the mother-daughter relationships.  The mothers came to America from China hoping to give their daughters better lives than what they had.  In China, women were “to be obedient, to honor one’s parents, one’s husband, and to try to please him and his family,” (Chinese-American Women in American Culture).  They were not expected to have their own will and to make their own way through life.  These mothers did not want this for their children so they thought that in America “nobody [would] say her worth [was] measured by the loudness of her husband’s belch…nobody [would] look down on her…” (3).  To

Traditions, heritage and culture are three of the most important aspects of Chinese culture. Passed down from mother to daughter, these traditions are expected to carry on for years to come. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, daughters Waverly, Lena, Rose and June thoughts about their culture are congested by Americanization while on their quests towards self-actualization. Each daughter struggles to find balance between Chinese heritage and American values through marriage and professional careers.

Sexism is a challenge almost all women face. In a way, sexism can be beneficial because it can motivate women to defy society's standards and anything holding them back. However, in The House on Mango Street, author Sandra Cisneros, shows both sides of sexism, and how it can motivate women. Sexism can also make women give up and not accomplish anything. While Cisneros has the protagonist fight off sexism, Esperanza runs into many cases of sexism where the women just give up. Similarly, with The Help, author Kathryn Stockett, also shows both the positive and negative side of sexism. Skeeter, the protagonist fights off sexism to gain freedom, and in doing so she finds that all her friends don’t want to change the roles they have. Both

Imagine you are being used as a tool and ignored from this world. You would feel depressed. In this world, huge number of women or girls are being excluded from the society or their rights and freedoms are ignored from men. Sometimes they get sexually abused or raped and some women can't get education just because they are female and I believe that this is ridiculous because just they have different gender, they are ignored or sometimes used as a tool.

In the novel The Joy Luck Club written by Amy Tan, there are several stories that intertwine into one novel. Each of the stories takes place China where the roles and the actions of woman are vastly different compared to American tradition. In the different stories, they all are about different mothers and daughters. Throughout the book, the reader can see the development in each relationship between mother and daughter with their conflicting backgrounds from China to America.

“We may look and act modern in many ways, but we can’t escape what we are... obedient chinese daughters.” This quote sums up the world that May and Pearl live in, that no matter the culture, no matter the time period, and no matter the situation, your gender decides your fate or does it? The theme of gender and how they dictate our roles in society run rampant in Shanghai Girls by Lisa Lee. Lee’s novel covers a great deal about the immigrant experience and the struggles they had to go through to adapt to their new environment but one thing they didn 't need to adapt was the parts they played in their families. The importance of this traditional society,where the men are the breadwinners and the women the caretakers are first shown in how Pearl and Mays family worked. The father was expected to make money and take care of the household, while the mother, May and Pearl were off fooling around. When the situation turns dire, the father does not conform to his role to help his family and takes the easy way out and sells off his daughters. However the father did not account for his daughters refusing the offer he already made to pay back his debts. This caused a thunderstorm of confusion and trouble, which led to the death of respect, Pearl had for her father. For in this critical moment, the father wet himself and could not muster out a word but the mother brilliantly stepped in and defused the situation. “I see hardness in her that I’ve never seen before.”,

Like the Analects, Ban Zhao's writings do not attempt to address what is right or wrong about society and the role of women within it (Ban Zhao, Lessons for a Woman, 1). Instead, she blames the lack of female education on the ignorance of men, and maintains that although men understand their own place in the society, they fail to realize that the complementary role of women is one that must also be taught (Ban Zhao, Lessons for a Woman, 3). Her writings serve to rectify this

The Joy Luck Club finishes with the story of Lena. Lena is the American born daughter of immigrant Ying-ying, and she is married to Harold. Unlike Lindo, her marriage was not arranged; however, her marriage fits the recurring theme of toxicity within relationships of opposing sexes. Similar

Based on Lessons for Women, women in the China were taught that they were unworthy, unsophisticated, unenlightened and by nature unintelligent. (Strayer

Todays society and the society in Joy luck club are very similar because they both involve sexism. In the novel Lindo is forced by her mother in law and husband by making her a slave of some sort. But things get a little out of control when An mei gets raped by her husband but ends up marrying the guy because she has to save her so called honor. But that man that raped her, he can do anything he wants, he will not be pushed around or called names because that is the mans nature. Girls in China can not speak freely for themselves, they are supposed to be listening to the man because supposedly they are so much better and can do anything or everything unlike woman that sits around and does nothing.

    Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club is a novel that deals with many controversial issues. These issues unfold in her stories about four Chinese mothers and their American raised daughters. The novel begins with the mothers talking about their own childhood’s and the relationship that they had with their mothers. Then it focuses on the daughters and how they were raised, then to the daughters current lives, and finally back to the mothers who finish their stories. Tan uses these mother-daughter relationships to describe conflicts of history, culture, and identity and how each of these themes are intertwined with one another through the mothers and

One way that some people tried to deny the sexist behavior in China is saying that women actually have more power than men. They supported this idea by saying that women can control their sons or husbands which directly reflects on controlling Chinese society. This argument is invalid because, although women did have some sort of control over their sons and husbands, it was not the kind of control that would affect their career or important decisions. The kind of control that they had was within the family. For example, if they wanted something to be done within the family and they knew they did not have the power to do it, they would try to use their husbands or sons as an excuse. However, this did not have a great effect on the important issues of their husbands and sons. Even if they were going to use the males as an excuse, the males have the ultimate decision and control of whether they will listen to the wife or disregard her wishes.