Concubines and Bondservants

Concubines and Bondservants PDF Author: Maria Jaschok
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description

Concubines and Bondservants

Concubines and Bondservants PDF Author: Maria Jaschok
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description


Concubines and Bond Servants: The Social History of a Chinese Custom

Concubines and Bond Servants: The Social History of a Chinese Custom PDF Author: Maria Jaschok
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781597403672
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description


Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society

Marriage and Inequality in Chinese Society PDF Author: Rubie S. Watson
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520071247
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Until now our understanding of marriage in China has been based primarily on observations made during the twentieth century. The research of ten eminent scholars presented here provides a new vision of marriage in Chinese history, exploring the complex interplay between marriage and the social, political, economic, and gender inequalities that have so characterized Chinese society.

Obscene Things

Obscene Things PDF Author: Naifei Ding
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822383446
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
In Obscene Things Naifei Ding intervenes in conventional readings of Jin Ping Mei, an early scandalous Chinese novel of sexuality and sexual culture. After first appearing around 1590, Jin Ping Mei was circulated among some of China’s best known writers of the time and subsequently was published in three major recensions. A 1695 version by Zhang Zhupo became the most widely read and it is this text in particular on which Ding focuses. Challenging the preconceptions of earlier scholarship, she highlights the fundamental misogyny inherent in Jin Ping Mei and demonstrates how traditional biases—particularly masculine biases—continue to inform the concerns of modern criticism and sexual politics. The story of a seductive bondmaid-concubine, sexual opportunism, domestic intrigue, adultery and death, Jin Ping Mei has often been critiqued based on the coherence of the text itself. Concentrating instead on the processes of reading and on the social meaning of this novel, Ding looks at the various ways the tale has been received since its first dissemination, particularly by critiquing the interpretations offered by seventeenth-century Ming literati and by twentieth-century scholars. Confronting the gender politics of this “pornographic” text, she troubles the boundaries between premodern and modern readings by engaging residual and emergent Chinese gender and hierarchic ideologies.

Women in Song and Yuan China

Women in Song and Yuan China PDF Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538144921
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This deeply researched book provides an original history of Chinese women during the pivotal Song and Yuan dynasties (960–1368). Bret Hinsch explores the most important aspects of female life in this era―political power, family, work, inheritance, religious roles, and emotions―and considers why the status of women declined during this period.

Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China

Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China PDF Author: Hsieh Bao Hua
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739145169
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 397

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Book Description
In the long course of late imperial Chinese history, servants and concubines formed a vast social stratum in the hinterland along the Grand Canal, particularly in urban areas. Concubinage and Servitude in Late Imperial China is a survey of the institutions and practice of concubinage and servitude in both the general populace and the imperial palace, with a focus on the examination of Ming-Qing political and socioeconomic history through the lives of this particular group of distinct yet associated individuals. The persistent theme of the book is how concubines, appointed by patriarchal polygamy, and servants, laboring under the master-servants hierarchy, experienced interactions and mobility within each institution and in associating with the other. While reviewing how ritual and law treated concubines and servants as patriarchal possessions, the author explores the perspectives available for individualconcubines and servants and the limitations in their daily circumstances, searching for their “positional powers” and “privilege of the inferiors” in the context of Chinese culture during the Ming-Qing time period. For a list of the book's tables and their sources, please see: http://www.wou.edu/wp/hsiehb/

Women and the Family in Chinese History

Women and the Family in Chinese History PDF Author: Patricia Ebrey
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134442920
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
This is a collection of essays by one of the leading scholars of Chinese history, Patricia Buckley. In the essays she has selected for this fascinating volume, Professor Ebrey explores features of the Chinese family, gender and kinship systems as practices and ideas intimately connected to history and therefore subject to change over time. The essays cover topics ranging from dowries and the sale of women into forced concubinary, to the excesses of the imperial harem, excruciating pain of footbinding, and Confucian ideas of womanly virtue. Patricia Ebrey places these sociological analyses of women within the family in an historical context, analysing the development of the wider kinship system. Her work provides an overview of the early modern period, with a specific focus on the Song period (920-1276), a time of marked social and cultural change, and considered to be the beginning of the modern period in Chinese history. With its wide-ranging examination of issues relating to women and the family, this book will be essential reading to scholars of Chinese history and gender studies.

Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific

Colonialism and Male Domestic Service across the Asia Pacific PDF Author: Julia Martínez
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 135005674X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Examining the role of Asian and indigenous male servants across the Asia Pacific from the late-19th century to the 1930s, this study shows how their ubiquitous presence in these purportedly 'humble' jobs gave them a degree of cultural influence that has been largely overlooked in the literature on labour mobility in the age of empire. With case studies from British Hong Kong, Singapore, Northern Australia, Fiji and British Columbia, French Indochina, the American Philippines and the Dutch East Indies, the book delves into the intimate and often conflicted relationships between European and American colonists and their servants. It explores the lives of 'houseboys', cooks and gardeners in the colonial home, considers the bell-boys and waiters in the grand colonial hotels, and follows the stewards and cabin-boys on steamships travelling across the Indian and Pacific Oceans. This broad conception of service allows Colonialism and Male Domestic Service to illuminate trans-colonial or cross-border influences through the mobility of servants and their employers. This path-breaking study is an important book for students and scholars of colonialism, labour history and the Asia Pacific region.

Bound to Emancipate

Bound to Emancipate PDF Author: Angelina Chin
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442215615
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Emancipation, a defining feature of twentieth-century China society, is explored in detail in this compelling study. Angelina Chin expands the definition of women’s emancipation by examining what this rhetoric meant to lower-class women, especially those who were engaged in stigmatized sexualized labor who were treated by urban elites as uncivilized, rural, threatening, and immoral. Beginning in the early twentieth century, as a result of growing employment opportunities in the urban areas and the decline of rural industries, large numbers of young single lower-class women from rural south China moved to Guangzhou and Hong Kong, forming a crucial component of the service labor force as shops and restaurants for the new middle class started to develop. Some of these women worked as prostitutes, teahouse waitresses, singers, and bonded household laborers. At the time, the concept of“women’s emancipation” was high on the nationalist and modernizing agenda of progressive intellectuals, missionaries, and political activists. The metaphor of freeing an enslaved or bound woman’s body was ubiquitous in local discussions and social campaigns in both cities as a way of empowering women to free their bodies and to seek marriage and work opportunities. Nevertheless, the highly visible presence of sexualized lower-class women in the urban space raised disturbing questions in the two modernizing cities about morality and the criteria for urban citizenship. Examining various efforts by the Guangzhou and Hong Kong political participants to regulate women’s occupations and public behaviors, Bound to Emancipate shows how the increased visibility of lower-class women and their casual interactions with men in urban South China triggered new concerns about identity, consumption, governance, and mobility in the 1920s and 1930s. Shedding new light on the significance of South China in modern Chinese history, Chin also contributes to our understanding of gender and women’s history in China.

Working in China

Working in China PDF Author: Ching Kwan Lee
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135988900
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
After a quarter of a century of market reform, China has become the workshop of the world and the leading growth engine of the global economy. Its immense labour force accounts for some twenty-nine per cent of the world's total labour pool but all too little is known about Chinese labour beyond the image of workers toiling under appalling sweatshop conditions for extremely low wages. Working in China introduces the lived experiences of labour in a wide range of occupations and work settings. The chapters of this book cover professional employees such as engineers and lawyers, service workers such as bar hostesses, domestic maids and hotel workers, and industrial workers in a variety of factories. The mosaic of human faces, organizational dynamics and workers' voices presented in the book reflect the complexity of changes and challenges taking place in the Chinese workplace today. Based on extraordinary and thorough field research, this book will have a wide readership at undergraduate level and beyond, appealing to students and scholars from a myriad of disciplines including Chinese studies, labour studies, sociology and political economy.