Thank you Kim for your focus on the value of childbirth and child rearing and the corresponding evaluation of women and women's roles in society. I think the traditional devaluation of girls has roots not only in Chinese culture, but in all patriarchies. Because women were likely to die in childbirth, getting too attached to a woman meant risking loss. It was true that in China women married into and lived with and produced sons for the husband's family, thus not producing value for their family of origin. But husbands were expected to provide a bride price so women did have some value. I believe it was more the loss of a loved child that caused families to avoid attachment to their girl children.
It remains a puzzle to me to this day how women are caught up in devaluing women. How is it that women voted for Trump after he publicly devalued the women he molested? How can it be that there are loyal “Trumpettes”? Male envy of women's power to be pregnant and give birth is surely part of it. Fear of the seductive power of women is surely another part of it. But what about self-disregard? What about these women's beliefs that they are just decoration or just service providers? Or helpless butts of male power? Or powerful because they control powerful men?
Surely we can speculate about these ideas. Psychoanalytic data on such questions is very hard to find. One of the most convincing papers I ever read in this vein is Annie Reich's paper A Contribution to the Psychoanalysis of Extreme Submissiveness in Women (1940). The mere title of the paper is startling even today. Thinking of submissive women as suffering from psychopathology is itself a statement. Reich's conclusion that these women give up their self-esteem in favor of attachment to a man whom they overvalue tells us a lot about how such women think and why they believe that their men are right to devalue them. The more
men devalue women, the more some women are eager to attach themselves to a man they perceive as powerful. And the more feminists depict their men as powerless sissies the more such women hate feminism. Or am I being too blunt?
Lucille Spira pointed out to me the Eve story in your contribution as a myth about the danger of women. In the Adam and Eve story, it is Eve who tempts Adam into breaking God's law. The danger of being seduced into sin and guilt by a seductive woman is built into this misogynistic story. I believe that the story in which a woman is created out of a man's rib is a story about where babies come from that denies the female power to reproduce. It makes woman secondary, ancillary, unequal and dangerous. And at the root of it is the female power to reproduce.
This cultural trope is a response to biological reality. It counters the reality that women live longer than men, that women face greater pain and suffering in childbirth than men face in war. Not every soldier suffers pain and the danger of dying, but every woman who gives birth to a child does. Not every man has to be valiant in the face of pain and danger, but every woman who bears a child does. To imagine men as brave and powerful and women as weak and submissive counters the humiliation to men of this reality.