Gentry Women Research Articles

Pursuing Talent and Virtue: Education and Women's Culture in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century China

PURSUING TALENT AND VIRTUE: EDUCATION AND WOMEN'S CULTURE IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY CHINA* Dorothy Ko According to a popular formulation of the seventeenth century, "a woman is virtuous only if she is untalented." This saying encapsulates one extreme view of the purpose and program of women's education as it was conceptualized during this time.1 Subscribed to both by men and women, this view construed a woman's talents (cai) and virtues (de) to be mutually exclusive , and suggested that an advanced literary and cultural education was detrimental to her moral cultivation. Disseminated through the precepts for women purveyed by the commercial presses in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this view was reiterated so often that many modern-day readers assume it to be the only basis for interpreting women's education in traditional China.2 Paradoxically, this saying gained currency at the very time that the ranks of educated women were swelling. In this article, I argue that this formulation merely describes one vision or ideal of women's education, not the reality that many daughters of the gentry class experienced in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. I focus on the emergence of a new theory and practice of women's education, the premise of which was that talent and virtue were compatible and in fact mutually reinforcing. Women themselves played crucial roles in this education: mothers and aunts approached the task of educating girls with a sense of mission; daughters wrote essays and poems *I wish to thank Hal Kahn, Marilyn Young, Bill Rowe, Pat Ebrey, Paul Ropp and participants in the colloquium for their helpful comments. In particular, I express my special appreciation to Susan Mann, who initiated me into the brave new world of women's history a decade ago. 1Although its origins have often been attributed to the Song, this saying, and several variations of it, did not appear until the seventeenth century. Chen 1928: 188-93. Du Fangqin, author of a Chinese monograph on the position of women in Chinese history, has argued that the early Chinese before the Western Zhou period subscribed to the ideal of unity of talent and virtue for women. The subsequent subjugation of talent to virtue was rooted in the domestication of women. Du 1988: 170-72. Late Imperial China Vol. 13, No. 1 (June 1992): 9-39© by the Society for Qing Studies 9 10Dorothy Ko defending the propriety of both literary and moral education for themselves and other women. This woman-centered education constituted the germ of a culture of literate women. Relatively speaking, the number of women educated in the seventeenth century remained small.3 But the interest taken by the burgeoning commercial printing industry in the works of woman writers certainly suggests that literate women were enjoying unprecedented visibility. For the first time in Chinese history, a considerable number of women managed to have their works published during their own lifetimes. This new visibility of women's talent, more important than their absolute numbers, provoked debates on women's education and, by extension, the true nature of a woman's calling. These debates, as I will show, only addressed the proper balance between cultural and moral cultivation. The propriety of women's education was never challenged. In my forthcoming book, I discuss a broad range of issues such as the impact of the printing industry on the rise of woman writers, the effects of reading and writing on women's self-perceptions, women's roles as producers and consumers of culture, and the relationship between women's culture and the male-centered official kinship structure. In this article, therefore, I will limit my focus to the arguments developed by gentry women vindicating their enlightenment, and the approaches taken by mothers and aunts, practitioners of that education. The purpose of this article, in other words, is to illuminate the theory and practice of women's education as seen by women themselves. The picture that emerges, I shall argue, is quite different from the one we can glean from the didactic literature, or from records left by their fathers, husbands and sons. Woman as Everyday Strategist A woman's view of her world, rife...

The Epistolary World of Female Talent in Seventeenth-Century China

Vol. 10, No. 2 Late Imperial ChinaDecember 1989 THE EPISTOLARY WORLD OF FEMALE TALENT IN SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY CHINA Ellen Widmer1 When we attempt to reconstruct the social context within which women wrote poetry or painted in late imperial China, it is convenient to reach for the eighteenth-century novel, Honglou meng (Dream of the Red Chamber, or Story of the Stone), which describes a family poetry society, the so-called Crab-Flower Club (Haitang shishe). Because most of the members of this club were women, their activities provide a useful model of the circumstances under which one important category of women's poetry emerged. Dream of the Red Chamber presents a group of well educated , upper class women, most of whom belonged to a single extended family. Club meetings were festive domestic events, which took place primarily during the heyday of the Jia family in its garden, the Daguan yuan. A contrasting model of literary and artistic composition by women can be derived from the life and work of Yuan Mei (1716-98). Like their fictional counterparts in Dream of the Red Chamber, the women of Yuan's circle came mostly from gentry families and had good educations. They were less likely to be related, they did not live together, and certain of their activities took place at the home of their patron and teacher, Yuan Mei. In both cases, women produced poetry for a circle of personal acquaintances and did not reach out to a wider reading public.2 The poetry circle of the novel conformed to proper Confucian standards for gentle female conduct, since it operated within domestic confines. By contrast, Yuan's circle seemed more scandalous, inasmuch as its female members met outside the home and mingled socially with male talents. Another view of the circumstances under which women might read, write or paint is made available by the writings of a group of creative 1 I am indebted to the following individuals for suggestions on this essay: Patrick Hanan, Irving Lo, Susan Naquin, Marsha Weidner, and Judith Zeitlin. Kou Dezhang and Ou Jiefang Lee helped with translation. The original version of this essay was presented at the symposium , "Views from the Jade Terrace: Chinese Women Artists 1300-1912" held at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, October 1988. 2 On Yuan Mei, see Waley 1957, also Hummel 1967:955-957. Late Imperial China 10, No. 2 (December 1989): 1-43 T by the Society for Qing Studies Ellen Widmer Portrait of Shang Jinglan, by Ren Xiong (1820-57), from Wang Ling, ed., Yu Yue xianxian xiang zhuan zan (Commemorative Portraits and Biographies of Former Worthies of the Yue [Zhejiang] Region), 1856. Reproduced courtesy of the Harvard-Yenching Library. For more on Ren, see Howard Rogers and Sherman E. Lee, Masterworks of Ming and Qing Painting from the Forbidden City. Lansdale, Pennsylvania: International Arts Council, 1988, pp. 203-4. The Epistolary World ofFemale Talent in Seventeenth-Century China3 gentry women who lived in Jiangnan a century before Yuan Mei's time, during the Ming-Qing transition. These women formed a loose literary network, exchanged correspondence and encouraged one another's endeavors. They had male friends and patrons who regarded them with a mixture of admiration, paternalism and unease. Their relationships show the importance of solidarity among women themselves, rather than associations centered on men, in developing female talent. As teachers and disciples , as audience and critics for each other's work, these women reached out to each other across geographical and social barriers, linking domestic circles with literati salons, and the world of secluded wives with those of courtesans, merchants and professional artists. Modern Letters To understand the landscape of female talent among this network of seventeenth-century women, we must first pay attention to the three anthologies of literati letters known as Modern Letters. These letters are the major source through which the voices of the women studied here are heard. As a series of volumes selected and published by men who knew many of them, Modern Letters is a text which reveals both female artistic culture and male responses to it. This series was published in three installments (1663, 1667, and 1668) under the general editorship...

'Sally Has Been Sick': Pregnancy and Family Limitation among Virginia Gentry Women, 1780-1830

The extent of family planning practice in the antebellum South of the United States is examined using data on 298 Virginia gentry women born between 1710 and 1849. The data are from letters and diaries and indicate that although fertility remained high a definite trend to lower marital fertility can be established by the 1840s and 1850s. (ANNOTATION)