Ancient feudal society was a society that favored sons over women, and men were inferior to women, and backward ideas were scattered everywhere, and the status of women was very low. Heavy household chores, financial independence and inability to participate in social activities. A pair of small feet buried the happiness of their lives, the so-called small feet a pair, a vat of tears. However, looking back at the vicissitudes of the past century, we will find that after the modern era, the fate of Chinese women has undergone profound changes. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Cai Yuanpei and others established the China Education Association in Shanghai, and put the establishment of girls' schools on the agenda.
Immediately after the Qing court also began to implement the New Deal, officially incorporating women's education into the national education system, and women were able to enter a broader social field. Since then, out of the small world of painting, a large number of talented women have emerged in this era, Lin Huiyin, Zhang Ailing and so on. The talented woman I want to talk about today is somewhat different, her talent has nothing to do with the family's ideological enlightenment, and even has been poisoned by feudal thought.
This talented woman is Su Xuelin, who was born in 1897 in Ruian County, Zhejiang Province, and was originally named Su Xiaomei. There is a saying that a woman is so bitter that it is unfortunate that Su Xuelin's grandmother is a woman who is happy to embarrass women. Deeply influenced by feudal ideas, the old lady regarded the birth of a dozen sons as the greatest achievement of her life, and even looked down on her because her eldest daughter-in-law had only four children. All day long, she thinks about how to toss her daughter-in-law, and she is even more dissatisfied with her granddaughter, and more importantly, she thinks that "a woman must be talentless."
Therefore, under the manipulation of the old lady, Su Xuelin could not read like a boy when he was young, and only at the age of seven did he follow his uncles and brothers to study in his grandfather's private school. After a year of studying, the boys all went to school again, and she had to drop out. But the little girl really likes to read, and every day when she is bored, she uses the one or two thousand Chinese characters she learned from the private school to borrow the novels of her uncles and brothers to read. Over time, she watched "Journey to the West", "Water Margin", "Liaozhai Zhiyi" and so on, and enjoyed it.
Later, when my uncle and brothers entered The Shanghai New Middle School or University, there were more books and newspapers that they could bring back, and Su Xuelin could choose to read. The hard reading of her childhood and girlhood laid a solid foundation for her future creation and academic research. In 1914, my father moved to Anqing and met an uncle who had studied in Japan. The uncle persuaded her father that Su Xuelin was able to enter a local Christian primary school, but returned to the countryside half a year later.
She could not grind her grandmother and the elders of the family, and she was anxious to jump into the deep stream several times to commit suicide, and finally her mother saw that her daughter was so unbearable to take her to the provincial city. In this way, Su Xuelin finally read a book, studied at the Beijing Higher Women's Normal School, and was taught under well-known professors such as Hu Shi, Li Dazhao, and Zhou Zuoren. In the autumn of 1921, she went to France to study without her family until the day before her departure. During the three years, he often fell ill due to the lack of water and soil, and eventually returned to his hometown due to his mother's illness.
When he returned, he was asked by the family to marry, and her husband was Zhang Baoling, the son of a hardware merchant who had never met, and Zhang Baoling had gone to the United States to study. After completing the science and engineering courses at MIT and teaching at Soochow University after returning to China, he was actually a good match in that era. However, Su Xuelin did not like him and wanted to break the marriage contract several times, because the family had not succeeded. She could only admit to the marriage, but in fact, from the beginning of the marriage, she did not sleep with Zhang Baoling for the next 36 years.
After marriage, he has been separated from her husband and continued her academics, teaching at Hujiang University, Anhui University, Wuhan University, Taiwan Normal University, and National Cheng Kung University. In 1961, Su Xuelin heard that Zhang Baoling died of illness in Beijing, but she did not remarry after that. It can be said that her heart has never been on Zhang Baoling, nor has it ever been placed on her marriage with Zhang Baoling. She only has academic research in her heart, and she has been greatly satisfied in the boring examination and writing in the eyes of ordinary people.
On April 21, 1999, Su Xuelin, 104, died of illness and talked about his marriage with Zhang Baoling before his death. She said that she had no love for him and could not be at ease to be his ideal wife, so it was better to be in name only from beginning to end. Of course, I also have to thank Zhang Baoling for her perfection, so that she can devote herself to academic achievements wholeheartedly, which is enough. It is worth mentioning that another sensational thing in this talented woman's life is her half-life relationship with Lu Xun.
At first, she had great respect for Lu Xun, humbled herself as a student, and said that Mr. Lu could occupy a permanent position in the history of Chinese literature with only two books. However, after Lu Xun's death on October 19, 1936, her attitude suddenly changed and she began to criticize the anti-Lu half of her life. In the six months after November 1936 alone, she wrote nine articles insulting Lu Xun, doing her utmost to slander and slander. It was not until 1967 that the anti-Lu cause was stopped, and Su Xuelin's change of attitude before and after was really puzzling.