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Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538115417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227
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Book Description
This pioneering book provides a comprehensive survey of ancient Chinese women’s history, covering thousands of years from the Neolithic era to China’s unification in 221 BCE. For each period—Neolithic, Shang, Western Zhou, and Eastern Zhou—Bret Hinsch explores central aspects of female life: marriage, family life, politics, ritual, and religious roles. Deeply researched, the book draws on a wide range of Chinese scholarship and primary sources, including transmitted texts, inscriptions, and archaeological evidence. The result is a comprehensive view of women’s history from the beginnings of Chinese civilization up to the beginnings of the imperial era. Clear and readable, the book will be invaluable for both students and specialists in gender studies.
Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538115417
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 227
Get Book Here
Book Description
This pioneering book provides a comprehensive survey of ancient Chinese women’s history, covering thousands of years from the Neolithic era to China’s unification in 221 BCE. For each period—Neolithic, Shang, Western Zhou, and Eastern Zhou—Bret Hinsch explores central aspects of female life: marriage, family life, politics, ritual, and religious roles. Deeply researched, the book draws on a wide range of Chinese scholarship and primary sources, including transmitted texts, inscriptions, and archaeological evidence. The result is a comprehensive view of women’s history from the beginnings of Chinese civilization up to the beginnings of the imperial era. Clear and readable, the book will be invaluable for both students and specialists in gender studies.
Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 0742568245
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 253
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Book Description
After a long spell of chaos, the Qin and Han dynasties (221 BCE–220 CE) saw the unification of the Chinese Empire under a single ruler, government, and code of law. During this era, changing social and political institutions affected the ways people conceived of womanhood. New ideals were promulgated, and women's lives gradually altered to conform to them. And under the new political system, the rulers' consorts and their families obtained powerful roles that allowed women unprecedented influence in the highest level of government. Recognized as the leading work in the field, this introductory survey offers the first sustained history of women in the early imperial era. Now in a revised edition that incorporates the latest scholarship and theoretical approaches, the book draws on extensive primary and secondary sources in Chinese and Japanese to paint a remarkably detailed picture of the distant past. Bret Hinsch's introductory chapters orient the nonspecialist to early imperial Chinese society; subsequent chapters discuss women's roles from the multiple perspectives of kinship, wealth and work, law, government, learning, ritual, and cosmology. An enhanced array of line drawings, a Chinese-character glossary, and extensive notes and bibliography enhance the author's discussion. Historians and students of gender and early China alike will find this book an invaluable overview.
Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442271663
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 273
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Book Description
This accessible text offers a comprehensive survey of women’s history in China from the Neolithic period through the end of the Qing dynasty in the early twentieth century. Rather than providing an exhaustive chronicle of this vast subject, Bret Hinsch pinpoints the themes that characterized distinct periods in Chinese women’s history and delves into the perception of female identity in each era. Moving beyond the traditional focus on the late imperial era, Hinsch explores how gender relations have developed and changed since ancient times. His chronological look at the most important female roles in every major dynasty showcases not only the constraints women faced but also their vast accomplishments throughout the millennia. Hinsch’s extensive use of Chinese-language scholarship lends his book a fresh perspective rare among Western scholars. Professors and students will find this an invaluable textbook for Chinese women’s studies and an excellent supplement for courses in gender studies and Chinese history.
Author: Anne Behnke Kinney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231163096
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 386
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Book Description
When should a woman disobey her father, contradict her husband, or shape the policy of a ruler? According to the Lienü zhuan, or Categorized Biographies of Women, it is not only appropriate but necessary for women to offer counsel when fathers, husbands, sons, and rulers stray from virtue. The earliest Chinese text devoted to the moral education of women, the Lienü zhuan was compiled by Liu Xiang (79–8 B.C.E.) at the end of the Han dynasty (202 B.C.E.–9 C.E.) and recounts the deeds of both virtuous and wicked women. Informed by early legends, fictionalized historical accounts, and formal speeches on statecraft, the text taught generations of Chinese women to cultivate filial piety and maternal kindness and undertake such practices as suicide and self-mutilation to preserve chastity and reform wayward men. The Lienü zhuan’s stories inspired artists for a millennium and found their way into local and dynastic histories. An innovative work for its time, the text remains a critical tool for mapping women’s social, political, and domestic roles at a formative time in China’s development.
Author: Constance A. Cook
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438467125
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 174
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Book Description
Using newly discovered and excavated texts, Constance A. Cook and Xinhui Luo systematically explore material culture, inscriptions, transmitted texts, and genealogies from BCE China to reconstruct the role of women in social reproduction in the ancient Chinese world. Applying paleographical, linguistic, and historical analyses, Cook and Luo discuss fertility rituals, birthing experiences, divine conceptions, divine births, and the overall influence of gendered supernatural agencies on the experience and outcome of birth. They unpack a cultural paradigm in which birth is not only a philosophical symbol of eternal return and renewal but also an abiding religious and social focus for lineage continuity. They also suggest that some of the mythical founder heroes traditionally assumed to be male may in fact have had female identities. Students of ancient history, particularly Chinese history, will find this book an essential complement to traditional historical narratives, while the exploration of ancient religious texts, many unknown in the West, provides a unique perspective into the study of the formation of mythology and the role of birthing in early religion.
Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 153813490X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
This important book provides the first comprehensive survey of women in China during the Sui and Tang dynasties from the sixth through tenth centuries CE. Bret Hinsch provides rich insight into female life in the medieval era, ranging from political power, wealth, and work to family, religious roles, and virtues. He explores women’s lived experiences but also delves into the subjective side of their emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Deeply researched, the book draws on a wide range of sources, including standard histories, poetry, prose literature, and epigraphic sources such as epitaphs, commemorative religious inscriptions, and Dunhuang documents. Building on the best Western and Japanese scholarship, Hinsch also draws heavily on Chinese scholarship, most of which is unknown outside China. As the first study in English about women in the medieval era, this groundbreaking work will open a new window into Chinese history for Western readers.
Author: Xiaorong Li
Publisher: University of Washington Press
ISBN: 0295804432
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
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.
Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1442222352
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
Masculinities in Chinese History is the first historical survey of the many ways men have acted, thought, and behaved throughout China’s long past. Bret Hinsch introduces readers to the basic characteristics of historical Chinese masculinity while highlighting the dynamic changes in male identity over the centuries. He covers the full span of Chinese history, from the Zhou dynasty in distant antiquity up to the current era of disorienting rapid change. Each chapter, focused on a specific theme and period, is organized to introduce key topics, such as differences between the sexes and the mutual influence of ideas regarding manhood and womanhood, masculine honor, how masculine ideals change, the use of high culture to bolster masculine reputation among the elite, and male role models from the margins of society. The author concludes by exploring how capitalism, imperialism, modernization, revolution, and reform have rapidly transformed ideas about what it means to be a man in contemporary China.
Author: Marie Anna Lee
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527527158
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
Deep in the fir woods of southwestern China, in a village called Dimen, live several women who are masters of many cultural arts. Following the centuries-old lifestyle of their ancestors, they are the living repositories of their civilization. They carry the unwritten history and wisdom of the Kam people in their songs, weave cloth that is smooth and strong, and dye fabric to the richest indigo blue. They devote every free moment to embroidering sleeves, hems, hats, and purses in the bright colors of the natural setting that surrounds the village. Through everyday activities, lessons in craft, folk stories and songs, the women weave a patchwork of Kam culture and reveal its hidden treasures in fibers, textiles, papermaking as well as ethnography, anthropology, and Sinology. This book presents an opportunity to learn from the past long lost in Western tradition, explore contemporary rural life in China, and experience ancient culture metamorphosing under the pressure of technology.
Author: Paul R. Goldin
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824864654
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 242
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Book Description
The subject of sex was central to early Chinese thought. Discussed openly and seriously as a fundamental topic of human speculation, it was an important source of imagery and terminology that informed the classical Chinese conception of social and political relationships. This sophisticated and long-standing tradition, however, has been all but neglected by modern historians. In The Culture of Sex in Ancient China, Paul Rakita Goldin addresses central issues in the history of Chinese attitudes toward sex and gender from 500 B.C. to A.D. 400. A survey of major pre-imperial sources, including some of the most revered and influential texts in the Chinese tradition, reveals the use of the image of copulation as a metaphor for various human relations, such as those between a worshiper and his or her deity or a ruler and his subjects. In his examination of early Confucian views of women, Goldin notes that, while contradictions and ambiguities existed in the articulation of these views, women were nevertheless regarded as full participants in the Confucian project of self-transformation. He goes on to show how assumptions concerning the relationship of sexual behavior to political activity (assumptions reinforced by the habitual use of various literary tropes discussed earlier in the book) led to increasing attempts to regulate sexual behavior throughout the Han dynasty. Following the fall of the Han, this ideology was rejected by the aristocracy, who continually resisted claims of sovereignty made by impotent emperors in a succession of short-lived dynasties. Erudite and immensely entertaining, this study of intellectual conceptions of sex and sexuality in China will be welcomed by students and scholars of early China and by those with an interest in the comparative development of ancient cultures.
