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"Opening up questions about women's lives, about gender, about why we read history at all and how we write it, Patricia Buckley Ebrey has made The Inner Quarters a place we need to enter."—from the Foreword
Only recently has the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911) been rediscovered. Through these valuable texts, we apprehend in ways not possible earlier the complexity of women’s experiences in the inner quarters and their varied responses to challenges facing state and society. Writing in many genres, women engaged with topics as varied as war, travel, illness, love, friendship, female heroism, and religion. Drawing on a library of newly digitized resources, this volume's eleven chapters describe, analyze, and theorize these materials. They question previous assumptions about women’s lives and abilities, open up new critical space in Chinese literary history and offer new perspectives on China’s culture and society. “This volume rewrites the history of Chinese women’s literature by taking a truly inter-disciplinary (instead of merely multi-disciplinary) approach. In so doing, it ends up illuminating the centrality of writing women to the social, political, and intellectual lives of the Chinese empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.” Prof. Dorothy Ko, Barnard College, Columbia University, author of Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (California, 2005).
To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated, interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave drama to transitions in people's lives and conveyed conceptions of the hierarchy of society and the interdependency of the living and the dead. Patricia Ebrey's social history of Confucian texts shows much about how Chinese culture was created in a social setting, through the participation of people at all social levels. Books, like Chu Hsi's Family Rituals and its dozens of revisions, were important in forming ritual behavior in China because of the general respect for literature, the early spread of printing, and the absence of an ecclesiastic establishment authorized to rule on the acceptability of variations in ritual behavior. Ebrey shows how more and more of what people commonly did was approved in the liturgies and thus brought into the realm labeled Confucian. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
A collection of five erotic stories from Ming dynasty China, in English for the first time.
This study of poetry by women in late imperial China examines the metamorphosis of the trope of the "inner chambers" (gui), to which women were confined in traditional Chinese households, and which in literature were both a real and an imaginary place. Originally popularized in sixth-century "palace style" poetry, the inner chambers were used by male writers as a setting in which to celebrate female beauty, to lament the loneliness of abandoned women, and by extension, to serve as a political allegory for the exile of loyal and upright male ministers spurned by the imperial court. Female writers of lyric poetry (ci) soon adopted the theme, beginning its transition from male fantasy to multidimensional representation of women and their place in society, and eventually its manifestation in other poetic genres as well. Emerging from the role of sexual objects within poetry, late imperial women were agents of literary change in their expansion and complication of the boudoir theme. While some take ownership and de-eroticizing its imagery for their own purposes, adding voices of children and older women, and filling the inner chambers with purposeful activity such as conversation, teaching, religious ritual, music, sewing, childcare, and chess-playing, some simply want to escape from their confinement and protest gender restrictions imposed on women. Women's Poetry of Late Imperial China traces this evolution across centuries, providing and analyzing examples of poetic themes, motifs, and imagery associated with the inner chambers, and demonstrating the complication and nuancing of the gui theme by increasingly aware and sophisticated women writers.
In this feminist history of eight centuries of private life in China, Francesca Bray inserts women into the history of technology and adds technology to the history of women. Bray takes issue with the Orientalist image that traditional Chinese women were imprisoned in the inner quarters, deprived of freedom and dignity, and so physically and morally deformed by footbinding and the tyrannies of patriarchy that they were incapable of productive work. She proposes a concept of gynotechnics, a set of everyday technologies that define women's roles, as a creative new way to explore how societies translate moral and social principles into a web of material forms and bodily practices. Bray examines three different aspects of domestic life in China, tracing their developments from 1000 to 1800 A.D. She begins with the shell of domesticity, the house, focusing on how domestic space embodied hierarchies of gender. She follows the shift in the textile industry from domestic production to commercial production. Despite increasing emphasis on women's reproductive roles, she argues, this cannot be reduced to childbearing. Female hierarchies within the family reinforced the power of wives, whose responsibilities included ritual activities and financial management as well as the education of children.
A look at the over eight thousand year history and civilization of China.
An assessment of the relationship between race and poverty in the United States, and potential solutions for the issue. Renowned American sociologist William Julius Wilson takes a look at the social transformation of inner-city ghettos, offering a sharp evaluation of the convergence of race and poverty. Rejecting both conservative and liberal interpretations of life in the inner city, Wilson offers essential information and several solutions to policymakers. The Truly Disadvantaged is a wide-ranging examination, looking at the relationship between race, employment, and education from the 1950s onwards, with surprising and provocative findings. This second edition also includes a new afterword from Wilson himself that brings the book up to date and offers fresh insight into its findings. Praise for The Truly Disadvantaged “The Truly Disadvantaged should spur critical thinking in many quarters about the causes and possible remedies for inner city poverty. As policymakers grapple with the problems of an enlarged underclass they—as well as community leaders and all concerned Americans of all races—would be advised to examine Mr. Wilson’s incisive analysis.” —Robert Greenstein, New York Times Book Review “The Truly Disadvantaged not only assembles a vast array of data gleamed from the works of specialists, it offers much new information and analysis. Wilson has asked the hard questions, he has done his homework, and he has dared to speak unpopular truths.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “Required reading for anyone, presidential candidate or private citizen, who really wants to address the growing plight of the black urban underclass.” —David J. Garrow, Washington Post Book World
This pathbreaking work argues that literate gentry women in 17th-century Jiangnan, far from being oppressed or silenced, created a rich culture and meaningful existence within the constraints of the Confucian system. Momentous socioeconomic and intellectual changes in 17th-century Jiangnan provided the stimulus for the flowering of women's culture. The most salient of these changes included a flourishing of commercial publishing, the rise of a reading public, a new emphasis on emotions, the promotion of women's education, and, more generally, the emergence of new definitions of womanhood. The author reconstructs the social, emotional and intellectual worlds of 17th-century women, and in doing so provides a new way to conceptualize China's past, one offering a more realistic and complete understanding of the values of Chinese culture and the functioning of Chinese society.
This rich collection of writings--many translated especially for this volume and some available in English for the first time--provides a journey through the history of Chinese culture, tracing the Chinese understanding of women as elucidated in writings spanning more than two thousand years. From the earliest oracle bone inscriptions of the Pre-Qin period through the poems and stories of the Song Dynasty, these works shed light on Chinese images of women and their roles in society in terms of such topics as human nature, cosmology, gender, and virtue.