Tai tai (太太) is a
Chinese colloquial term for an elected leader-wife; or a wealthy
married
Marriage, also called matrimony or wedlock, is a culturally and often legally recognized union between people called spouses. It establishes rights and obligations between them, as well as between them and their children, and between t ...
woman who does not work.
It is the same as the
Cantonese
Cantonese ( zh, t=廣東話, s=广东话, first=t, cy=Gwóngdūng wá) is a language within the Chinese (Sinitic) branch of the Sino-Tibetan languages originating from the city of Guangzhou (historically known as Canton) and its surrounding ar ...
title for a married woman.
It has the same euphemistic value as "lady" in English: sometimes flattery, sometimes subtle insult. One author describes it as equivalent to the English term "
ladies who lunch".
Cultural significance
By the time of the
May Fourth Movement
The May Fourth Movement was a Chinese anti-imperialist, cultural, and political movement which grew out of student protests in Beijing on May 4, 1919. Students gathered in front of Tiananmen (The Gate of Heavenly Peace) to protest the Chin ...
in 1919, the term had come to imply a wife who was "dependent on her newly rising bourgeois husband" for her
consumerist lifestyle, and Chinese feminists and "new women" of that era tried to disassociate themselves from the term precisely for that reason.
The term has become well-known, and features in Western discussions in the field of
Women's studies.
uses the term to describe Madame Liang in her novel, Three Daughters of Madame Liang.
The 1947 film ''
Long Live the Missus!'' (Taitai wansui), written by
Eileen Chang
Eileen Chang ( zh, t=張愛玲, s=张爱玲, first=t, w=Chang1 Ai4-ling2, p=Zhāng Àilíng；September 30, 1920 – September 8, 1995), also known as Chang Ai-ling or Zhang Ailing, or by her pen name Liang Jing (梁京), was a Chinese-born A ...
and directed by Sang Hu, represents conflicts between taitai in the mode of a
comedy of manners
In English literature, the term comedy of manners (also anti-sentimental comedy) describes a genre of realistic, satirical comedy of the Restoration period (1660–1710) that questions and comments upon the manners and social conventions of a g ...
.
[Christopher Rea, trans. ''Long Live the Missus!'' (''Taitai wansui''): translation of the full filmscript. MCLC Online Publications, 2019: https://u.osu.edu/mclc/online-series/long-live-the-missus/]
References
Chinese words and phrases
{{vocab-stub