ABSTRACT
The Republic of China on Taiwan has moved into the ranks of the world’s ‘developed’ countries in the space of a few decades. The social and economic position of women has improved in tandem with these national successes but the Confucian cultural norms of the overwhelmingly Chinese population of the island still pose certain challenges to the status of women. Progress towards improving the status of women in Taiwan can almost be considered an inadvertent consequence of national development rather than a central concern of social and political planners. Taiwan’s family planning program was eugenicist in philosophy. Aiming to improve the quality of the population, the government focused its population control campaigns on those groups identified as ‘problematic’. In the post-war period, Taiwanese educational standards have risen considerably and the inequality between the levels of men’s and women’s education has decreased. Educational advancement has been a critical factor in the gradual improvement of the status of women in recent decades.
