The following article is from China Newsweek and written by Hu Yong
Why are women always poor? Women have always been poor, not just for the last 200 years, but since ancient times
Little Women begins by writing, "A Christmas without gifts is not a Christmas." Poverty is terrible! It's not fair that some girls have a lot of beautiful things, while others don't have anything. ”
Little Women Movie Poster (Greta Gerweger 2019)
The first feeling I felt when I read this was that the book was about money. The life of author Louisa May Olcott proves that she has been wrestling with money all her life. The novel is often transformed into films, plays, and TV series, and in the new 2019 film directed by Greta Gerweger, the writer joe March (The prototype of Louisa) of the Four Sisters says, "Praise doesn't guarantee I won't go hungry." This line is the original words of Louisa, who has been forced to make various financial decisions.
Lines from the movie Little Women
Like the March family, the Olcotts tasted poverty. At a younger age, Louisa became a paid partner and governess, as Joe did in the novel. She also did some humble jobs such as needlework, laundry, and maidwork. Louisa grew up wanting to help lift her family out of poverty, so her writing wasn't romantic at all. She made writing a job, and she had to be mercenary because she made a living selling her stories.
So, she had to think, what could be sold? Louisa, who was never married, wanted Joe to marry either. But when she wrote her second little women, readers urged Joe to marry her neighbor Laurie. Louisa wrote in her diary: "The girls wrote to ask who the little woman had married, as if this were the only goal and end of a woman's life. I wouldn't marry Joe to Laurie to please anyone. Perhaps to annoy female fans, Louisa finally married Joe to Professor Barr, who was not romantic at all.
The first edition of Little Women sold out in two weeks, and Louisa did keep the copyright because she knew how to keep it, and she got a 6.6 percent royalty because her publisher didn't think anyone would buy it. Joe's haggling with publishers in the film makes it clear that she understands the importance of income and royalties, or the economy, to a woman's independent and free life.
So Little Women is about "women, art, and money," and the work that best expresses such a theme is Virginia Woolf's A Room of Your Own. Everyone remembers her high-pitched voice: "In order to write, you need a room of your own." Hearing these words, you will think of an attic and a cozy little stove, and a woman wrapped in a shawl, alone, writing.
"Own room" here alludes to the fact that the prerequisite for a woman to become a writer is an independent economic base. Wulf said: "Poetry depends on intellectual freedom, and intellectual freedom depends on matter." In this way, women do not have the opportunity to write poetry. "How can you possibly become a poet?" If you don't have money, you can't write poetry.
But Woolf actually wanted to say more. The question may not be simple, why are there so few great female writers, and the point is: Why are women always poor? Women have always been poor, not just for the last 200 years, but since ancient times.
Gender inequality is one of the oldest and most pervasive forms of inequality in the world. Despite some important progress in changing the situation in recent years, women in no country have achieved economic equality with men, and women are still more likely than men to live in poverty.
Image source: Visual China
This is reflected in, first, that many women are in the lowest-paid jobs. Globally, they earn 24 per cent less than men, and at the current rate of progress, it will take 170 years to close this gap. Secondly, women lack decent jobs. In developing regions, 75 per cent of women work in the informal economy, are less likely to have employment contracts, legal rights or social protection, and are often not paid enough to escape poverty. Third, women do unpaid care work, such as childcare and housework, at least twice as much as men, sometimes 10 times, often outside of their paid work. The value of this work is estimated at least $10.8 trillion each year, more than three times the size of the global tech industry. Fourth, if paid and unpaid work are counted together, women work longer hours than men. This means that globally, today's young women will work an average of 4 more years than men in their lifetime.
Image source: picturedesk.com
With X-ray intuition, director Gerweger discovered a kernel that made Little Women have had such an impact on generations of ambitious women: it was the story of a woman who wanted to write, and she did change her financial predicament by writing.