Love, literacy, and laments: themes of women writers in late imperial China

Abstract

Abstract In late imperial China (roughly the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century), the expanding literacy of women helped to popularize ideals of romantic love, and to raise women's expectations regarding marriage and their active participation in creative cultural activities. As a result, literate women easily experienced hopes and aspirations that conflicted directly with the demands of the patriarchal family system. As seen through a sampling of courtesan and gentry women's writings, some women responded to these conflicts by questioning the value of literacy itself, some expressed despair over their fate, while others began to raise questions regarding their society's constraints on women.