Rise Of The Modern Woman Analysis

China is both a ‘transitional’ and a ‘developing’ economy. A transitional economy indicates one that is moving towards a more liberalized trade regime and in recent decades, China has overwhelmingly opened up its industries to global trade. With the opening of trade has also come vast increases in economic development measures such as, GDP per capita. Yet, it still greatly lags behind it’s ‘industrialized’ counter parts. Both of the terms “transitional’ and ‘developing’ have a connotation that a country is transitioning and developing towards something; something similar to the Western-model economy. China is often upheld as the counter example to the Western model, but its economy and culture, especially in the twenty-first century has become more and more similar to those of the West (Ritzer, 2015: 64). Just as the Chinese economy has slowly changed towards being more Western, so has female identity within this system morphed and continued to progressively resemble the American idea of the “modern woman.”
In Dr. Virginia Drachman’s American history class, “Rise of the Modern Woman” (2014), she discusses that the American idea of the “new woman” deals heavily with the transition of women from staying mainly in the private, home-based …show more content…
It follows a Western view of a modern woman being urban, independent, and still feminine. Yet, the similarities between Chinese and Western women are not absolute. Many Chinese women, both lower and middle class, experience pressures from the traditional system, especially in terms of marriage. Young factory workers are expected to return home and eventually marry a man and perpetuate the rural lifestyle (Pun: 68). Urban career woman fear being called a “leftover woman” if they fail to get married at the socially prescribed ‘right age’ of younger than 26 (Gaetano: