03.03.07
The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period
Cross-posted from Logs of the Written Word
Finished Reading: Completed 19 Feb, 2007
Status: Remains in Library
Book Name: The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period
Author: Patricia Buckley Ebrey
ISBN: 0520081587
LOC: HQ684.A25 1993
Publisher: University of California Press(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London)
Synopsis:
The Sung Dynasty (960-1279) was a paradoxical era for Chinese women. This was a time when footbinding spread, and Confucian scholars began to insist that it was better for a widow to starve than to remarry. Yet there were also improvements in women’s status in marriage and property rights. In this thoroughly original work, one of the most respected scholars of premodern China brings to life what it was like to be a woman in Sung times, from having a marriage arranged, serving parents-in-law, rearing children, and coping with concubines, to deciding what to do if widowed.
Focusing on marriage, Patricia Buckley Ebrey views family life from the perspective of women. She argues that the ideas, attitudes, and practices that constituted marriage shaped women’s lives, providing the context in which they could interpret the opportunities open to them, negotiate their relationships with others, and accommodate or resist those around them.
Ebrey questions whether women’s situations actually deteriorated in the Sung, linking their experiences to widespread social, political, economic, and cultural changes of this period. She draws from advice books, biographies, government documents, and medical treatises to show that although the family continued to be patrilineal and patriarchal, women found ways to exert their power and authority. No other book explores the history of women in pre-twentieth-century China with such energy and depth.
From: UC Press
UIS Spring 2007 Women in Chinese and Japanese history assigned reading.
A very thorough study of life in the Inner Quarters for Chinese women. Ebrey presents ideas that may be familiar to western readers: Chinese girls were the property of their father, then their husband upon marriage; footbinding; wives had very few legal rights, boy children were preferable to girl children. Yet, behind each of these stereotypes is reasoning and the story of an exception. Fascinating in its subject matter and the depth Ebrey plumbs to bring us the full story of Chinese women in the Sung era.
Favourite quotes:
For Ebrey, women played their assigned, even longstanding roles in the great drama of Sung history, but they were also extraordinary improvisers in a world that seemed structured to their disadvantage. (From Bonnie Smith’s forward - p. ix)
Emphasizing women’s victimization … only tends to obscure what women were able to accomplish. (p. 2)
Footbinding was an alteration of the body that changed everything about a woman’s body. (p. 41)
… new notions of masculinity stimulated the creation of revised standards of feminine beauty. (p. 42) [Editor's note: The Sung era was the time in Chinese history when civil service exams became the way to advance in government, therefore an emphasis on intellectual acuity was now placed on men, making them "softer" and less warrior-like. With this less physical lifestyle, men began to look differently physically, changing their outlook on masculinity and therefore revising the standards of feminine beauty.]
Monogamy, in this model, did not limit a man to one woman at a time; but it did limit him to one wife. (p. 47)
Symbolically women were associated with cloth, and since ancient times the sexual division of labor had been epitomized by the saying that men plow and women weave. (p. 132)
Long-entrenched practices of sexual segregation, after all, were built on the assumption that sexual desires were easily stimulated in both sexes. (p. 162)
Girls who expected to marry one day and women alread married were taught to look on rape as a violation of their personal integrity so fundamental that suicide was the most appropriate response. (p. 163)
For a woman, remarriage meant renouncing the family she had joined. It was comparable to a son abandoning his parents, not a man taking a new wife. (p. 199)
Most people in Sung times looked on second marriages for women as an expedient - a course of action that was routine and often necessary, but less admirable than remaining a widow. (p. 215)
To establish a firmer sense of security in such a negotiable world, Confucian scholars wanted to fix people in well-defined roles. (p. 269)