Bret Hinsch has written a compact and lively survey of the history of women in China from earliest times to the end of the Qing dynasty in 1911. Hinsch draws on a wide range of sources in Chinese and English as well as a few in Japanese and French, to produce an engaging narrative in 208 pages (with an impressive 30-page bibliography) that should be a welcome addition to courses on Chinese history and gender studies.
In chapter one, “Ancient Beginnings,” Hinsch traces the early evolution of Chinese patriarchy, noting the clear divisions of labor and increased social stratification in general, and gender stratification in particular, by the late Neolithic. Elaborate elite (royal) burials in the Shang and the early written oracle bone records reveal some powerful women, such as the wife of Shang King Wu Ding, Fu Hao, who led troops into battle and had an elaborate tomb filled with bronzes, jades, ivory, and shell ornaments, as well as the remains of sixteen human sacrifices. From oracle bone inscriptions it is also clear that patriarchy was well established in Shang times. Kings were polygynous and multiple wives helped insure the birth of multiple sons.
In the Zhou period, women no longer participated in warfare, and a woman's status depended almost entirely on the status of her father and her husband. The Zhou elite practiced surname exogamy—people of the same surname could not marry. Marriage was the primary means of building alliances between powerful families, and elite women maintained close relations with their natal families after marriage. Zhou ritualists emphasized the subordination of women to their parents (father), to their husbands, and, in widowhood, to their adult sons. Yet women were also often praised for their moral guidance of their children and sometimes also their husbands. “Many early ethical ideals developed as ways to limit the potential harm that female sexuality posed. Ritualists promoted rules intended to separate women from men, restrain female sexuality, bolster male interests, and uphold the patrilineal family” (21).
In chapter two, “Womanhood under the Empire,” Hinsch argues that women enjoyed more rights in the Han era than in many later periods. They could own property, and widows could become de facto heads of households. A growing emphasis on filial piety gave mothers considerable power and influence over their sons, notwithstanding the Confucian teachings on the “three bonds” (san-cong 三從). Empress Dowager Lü 呂 (241–180 bce), effectively seized control of the throne after the death of her husband, the Han founder, Han Gaozu 漢高祖. Despite the effectiveness of her rule in helping stabilize the new empire, subsequent historians tended to demonize her as the negative example which proved the necessity to keep palace women out of politics and public policy.
Three Han authors had a major impact on gender relations in subsequent eras. Sima Qian 司馬遷, the Grand Historian, tended to blame power-hungry women for the fall of the Zhou dynasty. Liu Xiang 劉向 (77–6 bce) compiled Biographies of Women (Lienü zhuan 列女傳), “the most influential Chinese book about women ever written” (44), with the didactic purpose of praising virtuous daughters, wives and mothers, and condemning seductive and power-hungry shrews who sowed chaos and destroyed dynasties. Subsequent dynastic histories emulated Liu Xiang's didactic biographies, and began to place a premium on chastity as the ultimate virtue for women, a trend that grew especially in the Ming and Qing eras.
The third Han author of importance was Ban Zhao 班昭 (45–ca. 116 ce), who finished her brother's monumental Records of the Han (Han-shu 漢書), and wrote Admonitions for Women (Nüjie 女誡), “the first surviving Chinese book aimed specifically at a female readership” (51). Though Ban Zhao is often condemned by modern Chinese historians for reinforcing female subordination, Hinsch rightly points out that she was effectively proposing survival strategies for women in a male-dominated world, showing new brides how to win allies and thrive in their husbands’ households. This too set a pattern followed by many subsequent writers of instructions for women.
In chapter three on “the early medieval era,” Hinsch traces the impact of the north–south division on the lives of women. Nomadic domination and intermarriage in the north gave women more freedom to be active outside the home, as nomadic women rode horseback, mingled with non-family members, and even conducted government business. The nomadic practice of the levirate guaranteed widows the right to remarry. Confucian norms prevailed more in the south, but even in the south, literary writing featured more emotionally expressive and physically beautiful women, literary talent came to be more highly valued in women, and the rise of Buddhism and religious Daoism gave women spiritual outlets not previously available. Buddhist nuns could study with eminent teachers, travel on religious pilgrimages, and find safe refuge in times of war and banditry.
As in earlier times, elite families used marriage to build social and economic networks, and the value of dowries and betrothal gifts increased, sometimes “turning a wedding into a blatant financial transaction” (71). The nomadic Xianbei tribe that founded the Northern Wei Dynasty practiced monogamy, and that ideal inspired some Chinese women to become more vocal in complaining about their husbands taking concubines and visiting prostitutes. Some families began to place a premium on women's literacy as an asset in prospective brides. Literate mothers could provide a head-start education for their sons (and daughters).
In chapter four, “An Era of Effervescence,” Hinsch highlights the relative freedom of women in the Tang era, when women were often active outside the home, and under the influence of nomadic cultures, “could even engage in athletic pastimes such as ball games, horseback riding, archery, and hunting” (87). In the early Tang, especially, women were relatively free of the Confucian ritual constraints imposed on women both before and after the Tang. Widow remarriage was common, and Buddhist convents and Daoist temples provided refuge for many widows. In urban entertainment centers, elite men patronized artistically talented courtesans which produced a great deal of love poetry, and produced a new model of male–female relations built on shared literary, intellectual and artistic interests.
Hinsch recounts the rise and eventual rule of Wu Zetian 武则天as Empress Wu, and notes the important Confucian backlash that resulted in strong Confucian warnings against the involvement of women in politics. Hinsch notes the An Lushan Rebellion as a turning point in the dynasty, but surprisingly does not mention a key factor leading to the rebellion, Emperor Xuanzong's 玄宗 infatuation with his consort Yang Guifei 楊貴妃. In subsequent eras, Confucian historians cited Yang Guifei and Empress Wu equally as negative examples, to reinforce the idea that women should be confined to the domestic sphere and kept entirely out of the political realm.
In chapter five, Hinsch calls the Song era “The Great Transition,” in reference to the reaction against Tang cosmopolitanism, the reassertion of Confucian orthodoxy, and the return to more restrictive attitudes toward women's roles in society. However, women's literacy grew in importance in the Song, with the rise of competitive civil service examinations which made education central to the establishment or maintenance of elite status. The memory of Empress Wu, and the growing power of the Confucian bureaucracy confined Song empresses to the political sidelines. With the demise of the Tang aristocracy, wealth trumped ancestry in arranged marriages, and families provided daughters with lavish dowries to make marriage alliances with prominent families.
Hinsch rightly cautions against our seeing the Song only in terms of a Neo-Confucian crackdown on the rights of women. There were many different strands of Song Confucianism, and no one strand dominated in Song times. Although Hinsch devotes only two pages to the Mongol conquest and its impact, he notes, appropriately, that the Khitan, Jurchen, and Mongol threats to the Song all helped shape Chinese attitudes toward gender roles, as Chinese writers saw the relative freedom of women in nomadic cultures as evidence of Chinese superiority.
In his last two chapters, on the Ming and Qing, respectively, Hinsch sees these dynasties as perhaps the most restrictive on women in all of Chinese history. In both the Ming and Qing, footbinding grew in popularity, seclusion of women became more widespread, and widow chastity and widow suicide grew into a veritable cult. Drawing on the scholarship of Dorothy Ko and Susan Mann, among others, Hinsch also notes the growing literacy of women in the late imperial era, and the growing importance of women's social networks among the literate elite. Increased female literacy helped facilitate the rise of companionate marriages, and helped spread the Neo-Confucian teachings that emphasized wifely obedience of women to fathers, husbands, and (eventually) sons, and that valorized widow chastity as the ultimate feminine ideal.
A flourishing courtesan culture in the late Ming gave way to a more puritanical outlook in the Qing, as Manchu rulers demonstrated their loyalty to Chinese culture by promoting the Song Neo-Confucian interpretations of Zhu Xi 朱熹. But late Ming courtesan culture also gave Ming loyalists a way to express their feelings in terms of nostalgia for Ming courtesans. (In this regard Hinsch might have mentioned the moral fortitude of the famous courtesan poet Liu Rushi 柳如是, who unsuccessfully urged her master, Qian Qianyi 銭謙益, to commit suicide rather than serve the Qing.)
In the Qing period, the government installed a system of honors for chaste widows, and as women's literacy expanded, Confucians produced more and more didactic works for women. By the late nineteenth century, local histories were filled with accounts of widow suicide. Many marginalized males came to identify with women, and to celebrate androgynous qualities, such as sensitive men with rich emotional lives and strong women with great moral courage.
The foreign invasions and domestic upheavals of the nineteenth century subjected Chinese women to the perils of war and famine. Western missionaries introduced schools for women only, led campaigns against footbinding, and criticized arranged marriages and concubinage. And as the Qing dynasty headed toward collapse, some in the Chinese elite turned against many traditional beliefs and practices, footbinding being a prime example, and called for the abandonment of Confucian ideals for more egalitarian Western ones. In this regard, Hinsch might have mentioned the late Qing revolutionary Qiu Jin 秋瑾 whose martyrdom in 1909 was to inspire more revolutionaries in the coming decades.
In a brief conclusion, Hinsch notes that recent scholarship on Chinese women has emphasized the agency of women in China, albeit an agency within the constraints of the traditional Chinese family system. It is a difficult task to satisfy every taste in this kind of survey. I might have liked a little more attention to novels and poetry, and to men who criticized the treatment of women in the Ming and Qing eras. But Hinsch has successfully synthesized a great deal of Western and Chinese scholarship to produce a compact, readable and engaging survey of a vast topic. It is a welcome addition to the field and should have wide use in courses on Chinese history and society, and on Chinese and comparative women's history.
