Ethnic Sisterhood in Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses

The women’s movement is probably the key historical event forcing a revision of the modern feminist family. In the 1970s feminists promoted the metaphor of sisterhood as a challenge to patriarchy. In their call for global sisterhood, feminists would create an alliance of women everywhere based on the commonality of women and in opposition to the patriarchal societies within which women live. In the United States, for instance, “sisterhood” has been used effectively to enlist the sympathies of women on behalf of a variety of reforming causes and to enjoin women to activism. It is the recognition of sisterhood as both subject position and object of study that justified the founding of women’s studies programs. As a powerful slogan goes, “sisterhood is powerful.” Sisterhood has traditionally acted as a powerful emotional bond. In other words, sisterly relations have been a means for providing comfort, and, most important, empowerment in the practical realm of social relations. “Feminists have proposed a family of sisters based on their presumed psychological, biological, and cultural identity to and with each other” Michie notes. “The figure of the sister protects a feminist family by suggesting that the family of women is capacious enough to contain all women no matter how different from each other they may appear to be” (3). Throughout the 1970s, the metaphor of sisterhood has been the dominant model for female and feminist relationships. The construction of sisterhood also comes from the feminist desire to separate from the maternal discourse. Marianne Hirsch traces this evolution from motherhood to sisterhood as characteristic of the feminist family romance. She points out that in the 1970s, feminist writing was permeated with fears of maternal power and with anger at maternal powerlessness. In order to bond with her sisters in a relationship of mutual nurturance and support, the daughter attempts to separate from an overly connected or rejecting mother. With its possibilities of mutuality, the paradigm of sisterhood has the advantage of freeing women from the biological function of giving birth, but still offers a specifically feminine relational model. Sisters, they believe, can be “maternal” to one another without allowing their