Women in Song and Yuan China

Women in Song and Yuan China PDF Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Asian Voices
ISBN: 9781538144916
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

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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.

Women in Song and Yuan China

Women in Song and Yuan China PDF Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Asian Voices
ISBN: 9781538144916
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 232

Get Book Here

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.

Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960–1368)

Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in Sung and Yüan China (960–1368) PDF Author: Bettine Birge
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139431072
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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Book Description
This book, originally published in 2002, argues that the Mongol invasion of the thirteenth century precipitated a transformation of marriage and property law in China that deprived women of their property rights and reduced their legal and economic autonomy. It describes how after a period during which women's property rights were steadily improving, and laws and practices affecting marriage and property were moving away from Confucian ideals, the Mongol occupation created a new constellation of property and gender relations that persisted to the end of the imperial era. It shows how the Mongol-Yüan rule in China ironically created the conditions for radical changes in the law, which for the first time brought it into line with the goals of Learning the Way Confucians and which curtailed women's financial and personal autonomy. The book evaluates the Mongol invasion and its influence on Chinese law and society.

The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History

The Song-Yuan-Ming Transition in Chinese History PDF Author: Paul Jakov Smith
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684173817
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 549

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Book Description
This volume seeks to study the connections between two well-studied epochs in Chinese history: the mid-imperial era of the Tang and Song (ca. 800-1270) and the late imperial era of the late Ming and Qing (1550-1900). Both eras are seen as periods of explosive change, particularly in economic activity, characterized by the emergence of new forms of social organization and a dramatic expansion in knowledge and culture. The task of establishing links between these two periods has been impeded by a lack of knowledge of the intervening Mongol Yuan dynasty (1271-1368). This historiographical "black hole" has artificially interrupted the narrative of Chinese history and bifurcated it into two distinct epochs. This book aims to restore continuity to that historical narrative by filling the gap between mid-imperial and late imperial China. The contributors argue that the Song-Yuan-Ming transition (early twelfth through the late fifteenth century) constitutes a distinct historical period of transition and not one of interruption and devolution. They trace this transition by investigating such subjects as contemporary impressions of the period, the role of the Mongols in intellectual life, the economy of Jiangnan, urban growth, neo-Confucianism and local society, commercial publishing, comic drama, and medical learning.

Crossing the Gate

Crossing the Gate PDF Author: Man Xu
Publisher: SUNY Press
ISBN: 1438463219
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
Challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. In Crossing the Gate, Man Xu examines the lives of women in the Chinese province of Fujian during the Song dynasty. Tracking women’s life experience across class lines, outside as well as inside the domestic realm, Xu challenges the accepted wisdom about women and gender roles in medieval China. She contextualizes women in a much broader physical space and social network, investigating the gaps between ideals and reality and examining women’s own agency in gender construction. She argues that women’s autonomy and mobility, conventionally attributed to Ming-Qing women of late imperial China, can be traced to the Song era. This thorough study of Song women’s life experience connects women to the great political, economic, and social transitions of the time, and sheds light on the so-called “Song-Yuan-Ming transition” from the perspective of gender studies. By putting women at the center of analysis and by focusing on the local and the quotidian, Crossing the Gate offers a new and nuanced picture of the Song Confucian revival.

Celestial Women

Celestial Women PDF Author: Keith McMahon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1442255021
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 313

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Book Description
This volume completes Keith McMahon’s acclaimed history of imperial wives and royal polygamy in China. Avoiding the stereotype of the emperor’s plural wives as mere victims or playthings, the book considers empresses and concubines as full-fledged participants in palace life, whether as mothers, wives, or go-betweens in the emperor’s relations with others in the palace. Although restrictions on women’s participation in politics increased dramatically after Empress Wu in the Tang, the author follows the strong and active women, of both high and low rank, who continued to appear. They counseled emperors, ghostwrote for them, oversaw succession when they died, and dominated them when they were weak. They influenced the emperor’s relationships with other women and enhanced their aura and that of the royal house with their acts of artistic and religious patronage. Dynastic history ended in China when the prohibition that women should not rule was defied for the final time by Dowager Cixi, the last great monarch before China’s transformation into a republic.

Women in Ming China

Women in Ming China PDF Author: Bret Hinsch
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538152975
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 211

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Book Description
This groundbreaking work provides an original and deeply knowledgeable overview of Chinese women and gender relations during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). Bret Hinsch explores in detail the central aspects of female life in this era, including family and marriage, motherhood, political power, work, inheritance, education, religious roles, and virtues. He considers not only the lived world of women, but also delves into their emotional life and the ideals they pursued. Drawing on a wide range of Western and Chinese primary and secondary sources—including standard histories, poetry, prose literature, and epitaphs—Hinsch makes an important period of Chinese women’s history accessible to Western readers.

Women Writers of Traditional China

Women Writers of Traditional China PDF Author: Kang-i Sun Chang
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804732314
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 932

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Book Description
The book also includes an extended section of criticism by and about women writers.

Precious Records

Precious Records PDF Author: Susan Mann
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 9780804727440
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 348

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Book Description
Most analyses of gender in High Qing times have focused on literature and on the writings of the elite; this book broadens the scope of inquiry to include women's work in the farm household, courtesan entertainment, and women's participation in ritual observances and religion. In dealing with literature, it shows how women's poetry can serve the historian as well as the literary critic, drawing on one of the first anthologies of women's writing compiled by a woman to examine not only literary sensibilities and intimate emotions, but also political judgments, moral values, and social relations.

The Burden of Female Talent

The Burden of Female Talent PDF Author: Ronald Egan
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1684170745
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
Widely considered the preeminent Chinese woman poet, Li Qingzhao (1084-1150s) occupies a crucial place in China’s literary and cultural history. She stands out as the great exception to the rule that the first-rank poets in premodern China were male. But at what price to our understanding of her as a writer does this distinction come? The Burden of Female Talent challenges conventional modes of thinking about Li Qingzhao as a devoted but often lonely wife and, later, a forlorn widow. By examining manipulations of her image by the critical tradition in later imperial times and into the twentieth century, Ronald C. Egan brings to light the ways in which critics sought to accommodate her to cultural norms, molding her “talent” to make it compatible with ideals of womanly conduct and identity. Contested images of Li, including a heated controversy concerning her remarriage and its implications for her “devotion” to her first husband, reveal the difficulty literary culture has had in coping with this woman of extraordinary conduct and ability. The study ends with a reappraisal of Li’s poetry, freed from the autobiographical and reductive readings that were traditionally imposed on it and which remain standard even today.

Leftover Women

Leftover Women PDF Author: Leta Hong Fincher
Publisher: Zed Books Ltd.
ISBN: 1783607912
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 176

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Book Description
‘Scattered with inspiring life-stories of courageous women.’ The Guardian In the early years of the People’s Republic, the Communist Party sought to transform gender relations. Yet those gains have been steadily eroded in China’s post-socialist era. Contrary to the image presented by China’s media, women in China have experienced a dramatic rollback of rights and gains relative to men. In Leftover Women, Leta Hong Fincher exposes shocking levels of structural discrimination against women, and the broader damage this has caused to China’s economy, politics, and development.