Maxine Hong Kingston.

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The first two chapters of Maxine Hong Kingston’s The Woman Warrior illustrate just how little power and place women have in society. By providing both a historical and modern example, she shows that even though the treatment of women has improved, it is still not ideal and is deeply rooted in human behavior. In “No Name Woman” Kingston’s aunt, a woman who becomes pregnant out of wedlock and ills herself and her baby, is a graphic example of what happens to a woman who makes a mistake. When her aunt—who doesn’t even deserve to keep her name anymore, after death—proves to the other people in her society that she is no longer able to fulfill her gender script and serve as a faithful wife and mother, she literally has no place in society. Unable to tolerate the life people would give her after the shame she caused to her family, her aunt feels that she has no choice but to kill herself. Kingston’s mother buys into society’s treatment of this aunt and tells Kingston, “Don’t tell anyone you had an aunt.” (Kingston, 15) Similarly, Kingston provides a real-world example of women’s lesser place in society in the second chapter, “White Tigers.” The first half of the chapter is an example of a very strong woman, a woman warrior, who protects her family and exacts revenge. It gives the sense that Kingston’s life is going to be different than her no-name aunt if she has such a strong woman as a role model. Then Kingston brings it back to her real life and family which is less than empowering for women. Kingston says, “I read in an anthropology book that Chinese say, ‘Girls are necessary too;’ I have never heard the Chinese I know make this concession.” (Kingston, 52-53) Kingston has almost as less control over her treatment and fate as her aunt. Nevertheless, her family expects her to be perfect.
This paradox—of a worthless woman with high expectations—is an interesting one and one which I find difficult to understand or at least to understand its origins. The article “Girls Need to Be Perfect” further explains this fact, even though it is less about discrimination and more about the unfair expectations placed on women. Children are already expected to do more than I think should be required of them: The bar for achievement keeps being raised for each generation [...]: ''Our children start where we finished.'' But it seems as if women have the added task of living past the reputation they’ve had for millennia of being incapable of performing as well as men. The high-performing girls discussed in the article reminded me so much of the girls in my high school: we all worked from the moment we got up ‘til the late hour we were finally able to go to sleep, and squeezed in as many extracurriculars as we could. Generally, girls at the girls school did much, much more than the boys at our brother schools, but it wasn’t a point of pride for the girls as much as just something we did—and it may even be something we were made fun of on top of that. In this way, perfectionism is both an expectation and a “disease” for women. I’d be interested in class to talk about how other girls think about their personal expectations.

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Girls are expected to do it all.