Written by / First Psychology Writers
Editor / Tommy
In a documentary "China's Leftover Women" directed by two Israeli directors,
The married lives of three women in their thirties, highly educated, financially independent, and living in China's first-tier cities were recorded.
The PBS documentary was widely praised after its launch on China's domestic online platform, with a Douban score of 7.8.
The three women are:
Hua Mei, a lawyer working in a Hong Kong law firm;
Xiao Min, an anchor at a radio station in Beijing, owns his own property and vehicle;
and Gai Qi, an assistant professor at the film school who came from a family of scholars.
Hua Mei, 34, was born into a rural family in Shandong Province, and her family members included her parents and sisters, who constantly urged her to get married, even jokingly saying "".
The 28-year-old Xiao Min completely obeyed her mother's arrangement, and her mother's many conditions for marriage made Xiao Min miss a lot of good fate.
In less than a year, the 30-year-old Gai Qi quickly chose a partner from the countryside to marry and have children, but her in-laws asked to hide Gai Qi's real age.
Gai Qi got married mainly because of the old age of his parents and the debts accumulated in the family due to his father's serious illness.
The stories of these three women reflect their different attitudes and choices about marriage.
Despite the challenges and trade-offs in their respective lives, their experiences are representative of the real situation of many women in today's society.
1. Confined women
It is estimated that there are about 90 million unmarried women over the age of 27 in China, and their existence has caused some distress to the family and even the whole society.
However, the real obstacles to these women's success in marriage are family pressures, societal expectations of women's roles, and sophistication.
For example
Hua Mei's family, especially her parents and sisters, complained about her marital status.
They came from an ordinary farming family in Shandong, and they had always hoped that Huamei would hold a wedding in their hometown to maintain the family's face.
Although Hua Mei had a successful career, because she never married, her family thought that she had made the family lose face in the village.
Under the dual pressure of family and career, Hua Mei often feels helpless and aggrieved.
Although she is eloquent in court, her role and dilemmas within the family are difficult to change.
Her status as a lawyer and her professional knowledge have not helped her break the confines of these identities, and her thinking seems to remain in traditional concepts, not fully integrated with modern feminist consciousness.
2. Are women really independent?
Xiaomin's case shows that even if the conditions are superior, female independence may only be a superficial phenomenon.
She has a good appearance and character, is financially independent, and can theoretically easily find a suitable partner.
However, her mother's strict requirements for her marriage partner, such as the other party must be registered in Beijing, cannot have a rural background, and have a stable job, greatly increased the difficulty and cost of Xiaomin's love and marriage.
This additional pressure from the family makes it difficult for Xiao Min to get rid of the label despite her superior conditions.
Xiao Min's mother doesn't care too much about whether her daughter is mentally happy, she values more about what kind of person Xiao Min can marry in the future.
In her opinion, if the other party's conditions do not allow an ordinary middle-class family to be elevated to a higher level, or at least choose a partner on the basis of a good match, then the marriage is not worth it, and Xiaomin loses money.
Although the economic conditions of Xiaomin's family are good, it is not impossible to pursue a better life.
The key problem is that Xiaomin herself lacks independence in personality, lacks psychological maturity, and appears to be very dependent on others and has no opinions.
The combination of these internal and external factors has made her position in the marriage market awkward.
So, instead of discussing whether women's independence is just an empty phrase, let those women who are called "leftover women" ask themselves:
What we usually call female independence is first of all spiritual self-awareness and autonomy, followed by economic and personality self-reliance and perfection, and finally free choice in marriage and love.
In these aspects, Xiaomin, who is known as Ma Bao Nu, seems to have only achieved economic independence, and the soft power in other aspects has not been fully reflected.
3. The influence of family values and traditions on marriage
Gai Qi doesn't really like getting married, and he doesn't even have much joy about it.
At the age of 30, she made a choice entirely under family pressure: considering her father's illness and debts, her mother's pension problems, as well as her own age and lack of love.
In the midst of this depression and predicament, although Gai Qi is an assistant professor at the film school, this status does not seem to have brought much help to her own family.
In the dead of night, she felt anxious and confused:
Parents are getting old and need to be cared for;
I have been single for a long time and have not been able to have children.
In a rapidly evolving society, the whole family feels abandoned by the times.
In this case, it is only through marriage that women can connect with society.
Getting married means having children, facing your spouse's rural family background, and dealing with your family's and relatives' relationships.
After giving birth, a woman's life will revolve around hospitals, workplaces, wet markets, kindergartens, schools, and parent groups.
In these complex social relationships, a woman can be fully formed and become a node in the social network.
For a highly educated woman like Gai Qi, marriage seems to be an inevitable and necessary choice.
As for self-actualization and love, it doesn't seem to be a priority anymore for older women.
The feminist Simone de Beauvoir mentions in her book The Second Sex,
Women's social roles are not predestined, but are the product of social conventions.
Women who have a womb have biological differences that make them take on more responsibilities than men, which also makes them more vulnerable in society.
When childbearing becomes an unshirkable responsibility for women, society's expectations of women have become narrower and stingy.
Without having children, her ambitions are seen as deviant;
If you don't behave gently and work hard like a man in the workplace, you are considered to be unruly;
If she insists on her own point of view in an argument with her husband, she is considered to be ignorant of the heavens and the earth, and that men are inferior to women.
The 90 million leftover women who have not been able to enter marriage smoothly for various reasons are not entirely their own problems.
If they can be clear about what they really want and bravely reject those constraints, women can achieve true independence and have more choices in love and marriage.
The End -
The First Psychological Writing Group | A group of young people who like to look up at the stars
Keywords in this article: older leftover women, psychology
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