The History of Chinese Women before the Age of Orientalism

Abstract

Patricia Buckley Ebrey's The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period and Dorothy Ko's Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth Century China each represents a landmark in the field of Chinese history. Together they present the first historical studies in English of Chinese women in early periods: the Song (Sung) dynasty (960-1279) and the late Ming/early Qing (Ch'ing) period (1570s-1720s), respectively. For years, while China historians remained nearly impervious to feminist influence, European and North American historiography was transformed by historians using gender as a category of analysis and taking women as historical subjects. Only in the mid1970s—and responding not to Euro-North American feminist history, but rather to feminist scholarship in anthropology and literature—did historians of China begin writing about Chinese women in the past. A pathbreaking conference volume1 and a few key articles2 appeared first, charting an agenda for research that scholars in the 1980s pursued in earnest. Much of this early scholarship was revisionist, reacting against what was identified in the late 1970s as an Orientalist3 view of Chinese women. In this climate, historical scholarship on Chinese women took a critical look at patriarchy while keeping a skeptical distance from aspects of female victimization such as footbinding and female infanticide. Virtually aU of this work focused on modern Chinese history, that is, the history of China after the mid-nineteenth century confrontation with European imperialism. Only in the last few years has pre-modern historical scholarship on Chinese women reached a point where books are being written.4 The two works under review here are therefore landmarks in two ways: sinological tours deforce that will win respect within the China field, they also mark the early maturity of a relatively new field, providing for the first time booklength studies of women's roles before the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. They offer English-reading historians out