Role Of Women in Pearl S. Buck's "The Good Earth"

The theme is Pearl S. Buck’s The Good Earth is more than just one man’s struggle to rise to economic success. She portrays and focuses on the feminism and depiction of Chinese women probably during or before the Xinhai revolution. The appearance of Railroads suggests the novel took place after 1908, which is when the lines of shanghai to the north were constructed, relatively connecting southern and northern China. This allowed an escape for farmers like Wang, who had to move to the city with his family in order to survive. The novel portrays women with great realism by including traditional Chinese practices like foot binding, wife purchasing, and concubines. The role of women in this time period was to bare sons over daughters, obey their husbands, and to be a household wife and lover. In Chinese village life, the society is oppressive to women. The clearest illustration of this occurs through O’lan. Her parents sell her off to the great house of Hwang. At this time in China, poor families would often sell their daughters off into slavery or prostitution. Since she was deemed ugly, she was put into the kitchen where she claimed to be beaten and abused verbally and physically. Wangs father helped Wang realize that a hard working women is more important than a beautiful one. When O’lan and Wang meet in the Hwang house, his immediate reaction is disappointment in the fact her feet were not bound. In China, bound feet were a mark of beauty, something Wang did not describe his wife as. The narrow feet of the Chinese women were considered fit mainly for the eldest daughters, because it was assumes they would never work and would marry someone rich, unlike their younger sisters, which the binding of feet were not as important. It was expected the youngest to be sold into bond-slavery or to grow into domestic slavery and when old enough ;sold to a rich man as a concubine or the wife of a laboring man, like O’lan, and be able to work alongside them.
O’lan, after