Until the 1970s, the subjects under discussion in this chapter—women, gender, the family, and sexuality—either received little attention or were interpreted in uncomplicated terms. The dominant narrative about Chinese women, for example, was one about victimization, and the family was the culprit. Western missionaries led the way in formulating that characterization. Speaking of Chinese women’s conditions in the mid‐nineteenth century, one missionary wrote, “[s]uffering, privation, contempt, all kinds of misery and degradation, seize on her in the cradle and accompany her pitilessly to the tomb” (cited in Ebrey 1990, 197). When national crisis deepened in the early twentieth century, the victimized Chinese Woman, epitomized in the bodily image of her bound feet, became a symbol of China’s “backward” culture as well as women’s plight. This story line, articulated most forcefully during the May Fourth movement, was accepted as fact rather than as a cultural critique through much of the twentieth century.1
The scholarship that has emerged in the past decades marks a paradigm shift. Instead of writing about victimization, historians focused on women’s agency and subjectivity, and explored their lives as processes of negotiation between orthodox values and the cultural, socioeconomic, and localized conditions they lived in. This shift began in the 1970s, when organized efforts created the first wave of scholarly publication on Chinese women.2 Margery Wolf’s work (1972) on rural Taiwan, in particular, spearheaded a new way of looking at the family with her illustration of the mother–child centered “uterine family” and women’s communities. The fledgling field grew rapidly in the 1990s, when gender as a category of analysis came to the fore and interest in the history of sexuality rose. The decade also produced some of the most influential works concerning the pre-modern period, which had not attracted as much attention as twentieth‐century history.3
Broadly speaking, the new research sought to develop a nuanced understanding of the intricate gender system, reexamine the history of family from a female‐centered perspective, reconstruct the history of sexuality, and integrate gender into the broad narrative about Chinese history. It evolved in two contexts. On the one hand, it was inspired by the studies of women and gender in Euro‐American history, which supplied Chinese historians with analytical frameworks, categories, and vocabularies, even though they proved to have limitations when applied to the China case. On the other hand, the discovery of late imperial women’s writings, itself a result of the surging interest in women’s history, allowed researchers unprecedented access to women’s own voices.
This intellectual environment brought fresh perspectives and raised new historical questions. What ideas informed the sex‐gender system, and how did the system manifest itself in familial, social, economic, political, and cultural institutions in specific time and space? How did historical forces and conditions intersect in ways that reinforced gender performance and mediated gender roles? What impact did the twentieth century national struggle for modernity have on women, the family, and gender relations? These questions (and many more) guided historians to explore unvisited terrains including law, medicine, technology, and religion while reexamining familiar perceptions.
The knowledge generated as a result is exemplified in the revisionist history of footbinding, the quintessential symbol of women’s suffering and subordination. Refuting “a ‘black and white,’ ‘male against female,’ and ‘good or bad’ way of understanding” (Ko 2005, 227), new research examines how meanings of footbinding were created for the women and men who participated in that tradition and its significance for women’s culture, female networks, work, and creativity. In short, the past four decades have witnessed the transformation of our understanding of women’s lives and their place in the making of Chinese history. They have also profoundly changed our views of Chinese history at large. The history of China looked remarkably fresh in many respects, including the role of the state, the elasticity of the patriarchal family system, changes and continuities of cultural values and social practices, and the complex interplay of all sorts of historical conditions that shaped the ways women and men experienced their lives.
Organizing gender and the family: Confucian discourses
The fundamental ideas underlying the sex‐gender system in imperial China were rooted in the ancient thought about yin‐yang, the all‐encompassing cosmic forces of the universe. Yin—female—and yang—male—were opposites of one another, yet were complementary, mutually dependent and inclusive: there was femaleness in the male and maleness in the female. Yang was superior to yin, but their relative positions were in constant flux. The balance of yin‐yang forces produced a healthy and orderly natural world. Humans and human society likewise functioned in accordance with yin‐yang principles. Yin‐yang balance resulted in a healthy human body, just as perfectly arranged male and female roles led to a harmonious family and an orderly society.
The core principles of the Confucian gender system took hold during the Han, the first imperial court that declared Confucian philosophy to be its orthodox teaching. They were prescribed primarily in ritual classics: separation of sexes, differentiation of inner and outer spheres, and male leading female. “[Starting] at the age of seven, boys and girls should not sit on the same mat or eat together,” the “Nei ze” chapter of the Record of Rites pronounces. Men and women occupied separate social spaces, performing different but complementary roles. Men were responsible for the “outer” sphere and women the “inner” sphere. Interactions between men and women were to be strictly governed by ritual rules. The so‐called three subordinations placed a woman in a lower position all her life: she follows her father before marriage, her husband after marriage, and her son when widowed. She was judged by “four qualifications”: womanly virtue, words, bearing, and work. Lifelong fidelity to a husband was a virtue parallel to a minister’s loyalty to a ruler and thus symbolically connected women to outsiders in the realm of politics. It must be noted that these were guiding principles for the Han court to reorganize society and gender relations. They did not describe the actual behavior of the Han people.
The “three followings” and “four womanly qualities” constitute part of the family values espoused by Confucian teaching that were based on generational and gender hierarchies. Of the five fundamental human relationships—those between ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, and friends—three concern the family. They call for proper behavior for each party in accordance with one’s position in the family hierarchy: a father (a parent) should be benevolent; a son (child), filial; a husband, righteous; a wife, obedient; an elder brother, kind; a younger brother, respectful.
While all parties are required to act responsibly, the expectation of rigid compliance was placed on the junior and female members of the family. There is, however, an internal discrepancy in these seemingly coherent values. An older woman occupied a position that simultaneously subjugated and empowered her. As a woman, she was to follow/obey her son; yet as a parent, she had authority over him.
Held as sacred, these principles defined gender roles, giving form and shape to gender performance and shaping family and social lives. The separation of sexes and the inner–outer division meant women were concealed from public view wherever possible and socialization in Chinese society was essentially homosocial. For women, heterosocial contacts were largely limited to close relatives while men’s social lives revolved around all‐male networks and organizations outside the home, from “fellow students” (tongxue) and men who earned their examination degree in the “same year” (tongnian) for the educated, to those of the “same occupation” (tongye) and “same native place” (tongxiang) for the lower classes. The boundaries dividing inner and outer, however, were not fixed: they changed with context and one’s vantage point.
It is also important to bear in mind that, although the core Confucian gender canons remained steady through Chinese imperial history, their interpretation did not. For example, the Han period classic Lienü zhuan by Liu Xiang (79–8 BCE) held in high regard those who acted informally as advisors to their husbands, sons, or even kings. This type of “intellectual virtue,” however, ceased to appear in late imperial biographies even though men continued to praise the discernment of their mothers and wives in their personal writings. In late imperial China, chastity and fidelity outshone all other female moral attributes, but Confucian scholars disagreed sharply about whether it was ritually legitimate for a widow to follow her husband in death or for a girl to preserve lifelong fidelity for her deceased fiancé.
Throughout imperial history, the impact of gender norms varied considerably, depending on class, locality, stage in life course, and ethnicity. In general, women of the elite class of the Han ethnicity were more restricted by the norms than their non‐elite and non‐Han sisters, and senior women had more control and physical mobility than younger women. Historically speaking, women enjoyed more freedom in divorce, remarriage, and property rights in early and middle dynastic periods (through the Song), but the Ming and Qing stood out to be the most fulfilling age for elite women’s intellectual and cultural lives.
Imperial courts from the Han onwards consistently sought to implement Confucian gender and family ideology. Asserting that proper behavior of each individual formed the basis of an orderly realm and that the family was a building block of a good society, they promulgated laws and regulations to punish unorthodox behaviors and pursued the “transformation of morality through education” (jiaohua) for positive reinforcement. The state efforts grew more ardent in the late imperial period. For example, it expanded dramatically the court testimonial system (jingbiao), a major mechanism of the jiaohua.
The government regularly conferred awards on so‐called loyal officials, filial children, and, in particular, chaste women to set moral examples for society. Corresponding with the governmental endeavors, lineage heads and individual moralists wrote clan rules and didactic texts, many of which were modeled after the Lienü zhuan and Nüjie (authored by the Han dynasty female scholar Ban Zhao) and aimed at a female audience.
The family
The family in imperial China was patrilocal, patrilineal, and patriarchal. Family relations were organized on the ethics of filial piety and the five relationships. A range of normative behaviors manifested these premises: the preference for son over daughter, virilocal marriage (daughter marrying out to join her husband’s family), men and senior members holding authority over women and the junior, and family property passing on through sons, who, under China’s partible inheritance system, received an equal share.
Small families were common throughout Chinese history, but the joint family undivided for generations was the ideal, which spread among the elite as early as in the medieval period. Such a family, however, was understood to be difficult to manage. Family tensions were notoriously common, and male writers laid the blame for household disharmony squarely on women, chastising them as “narrow minded” and “selfish.” Although undesirable, household division occurred regularly, typically taking place upon the death of the family head.
Driven by women’s and gender history, research on the family has taken markedly differently directions; it grew from focusing on patrilineality to women’s lived experiences and family dynamics. This shift in perspective brought to light complexities and changes in family practices previously obscured, in particular with regard to women’s property rights, marriage finance, and women’s roles in the family. It demonstrates unequivocally the centrality of women in family preservation and survival, as well as their own sense of pride and fulfillment.
Throughout imperial history, women inherited in the form of a dowry. Regardless of social class a woman was entitled to a dowry. The dowry’s importance increased with the rise of the examination elite in the Song when wealthy families used the dowry to attract desirable sons‐in‐law. But even modest families tried to provide a daughter with a respectable dowry, because the size of the dowry reflected the social standing of the family and affected the wife’s treatment in her marital home. An economic burden for the poor, it contributed to the infamous practice of female infanticide.
The significance of the dowry as a powerful asset at a woman’s disposal is suggested in biographical accounts where male authors routinely commended women for pawning or selling dowry items to assist their families in need. As the sole owner of her dowry, a married woman had full control over it, legally and customarily. Remarriage had no bearing on this practice until the Yuan, when a law banned women from taking their dowry into remarriage. The change, a result of the interaction of Mongol culture and neo‐Confucian ideology that stressed female chastity, significantly reduced a widow’s economic autonomy and encouraged widows to choose celibacy over remarriage.
Women’s legal claim to property was also weakened by another change in law. Prior to the Ming, family property could pass on to a daughter if the household did not have a surviving son, but the Ming and the Qing state required sonless couples to adopt an heir, selected among the sons of the husband’s brothers or male cousins, who would inherit the entire family property. The restriction, however, did not necessarily mean lesser influence for women. A chaste widow could enjoy considerable control over the choice of an heir and wield custodial power over the property.
Understandably, the primary importance of the continuation of descent lines put great urgency on young couples to bear sons. In theory the failure to produce a son could jeopardize the wife’s status—it was one of the seven grounds on which a man could divorce his wife (the other six were disobedience to in‐laws, adultery, jealousy, having a malignant disease, excessive talkativeness, and theft). Women’s health in this context received especial attention. “Gynecology” (fuke) came into existence in the Song, and infertility was a key subject that medical professionals addressed. On the other hand, the lack of effective birth control technology posed a different problem. Although condemned by the elite and local officials, the practice of infanticide persisted until the twentieth century.
Two remedies were available in the event of the wife failing to give birth to a son: adoption or for the husband to take a concubine. The law in the Ming and Qing permitted concubine‐taking only if a man did not have a son by the age of 40. Few heeded the rule, however. Records indicate that men purchased concubines as status symbols or for their emotional or sexual satisfaction, at any stage of their lives. Legally a concubine’s inferiority had no bearing on her children, who enjoyed the same status as those born to the wife.
An institution dating back to early Chinese history, concubinage expanded along with commercial development and the spread of entertainment culture, and the concubine’s relation with her husband’s (master’s) family grew more stable in the late imperial period. Small in number, concubines have a disproportionately large presence in historical records because of the peculiar position they occupied: they were objects of male sexual desire and a source of family disharmony. Late imperial family instructions frequently advised against concubine acquisition other than for the purpose of procreation, and moral tracts made jealousy a central issue of female education. However, some wives saw good reasons to accept or even support the institution of concubinage. Concubines could help with household chores and management, and they could perform reproductive duty that some wives might want to avoid. Moreover, the wife’s superior status allowed her to claim and raise the children born to a concubine as her own, and she ran no risk of being replaced by a concubine as her status was legally protected.
Women’s pivotal role in the patrilineal and patriarchal family system has been made crystal clear in research on the “inner quarters/chambers.” A wife was considered equal to her husband for purposes of ritual, and could assume full authority on major family decisions. When the husband sojourned elsewhere, a regular occurrence in late imperial times, this strengthened the position of authority for his wife. Evidence suggests that women identified their interest with those of their husbands, taking pride in their accomplishments. Memorial writings by male family members stressed the enduring hardships of wives and mothers and extolled their managerial skills and resourcefulness. Widows commanded tremendous respect for their devotion and sacrifice.
A major source of support for women falling on hard times was their natal family. Married daughters often returned to their parents for the time being, bringing their children along. Alternatively, a married daughter could be vital for her natal family’s preservation. Wealthy women paid tuition for their brothers’ education, or brought parents and other close relatives into their marital homes to care for them. The revelation of these common practices challenged the perceptions that a married woman broke all ties with her natal family and held the status of “outsider” in her marital home.
Marriage
Marriage served the foremost purpose of continuing descent lines. It was a predestined duty for every man and woman. However, while nearly all women married, poor men were often denied the opportunity to marry. The cultural preference for boys and related infanticide of baby girls seriously disrupted the natural sex ratio balance, leading to a shortage of marriageable women, a problem not helped by concubinage and the spread of widow chastity. In the nineteenth century, 20 percent of men were estimated to have never married. Called “bare sticks,” they were seen as rootless elements that threatened social stability. Legally speaking, Chinese marriage was monogamous, but concubinage and the legal sanction for men to have sexual relationship with maids rendered the monogamy principle somewhat meaningless.
The different terminologies referring to marriage for women and men encapsulated the gendered meaning of the institution. For a woman, marriage was termed “marrying off” (jia) or “returning home” (gui), which suggests her natal home was a temporary residence and her marital home was her ultimate destination. With marriage she became a member of her husband’s patriline and an ancestor of that lineage after death. Marriage for a man was called “taking a wife” (qu). It signified a major milestone toward fulfilling his duties of carrying on the ancestral sacrifice and continuing the descent line.
Because of the paramount importance of marriage, parents made every effort to ensure their children’s timely marriage. Properly grooming a daughter for marriage included teaching her moral values and skills of work and household management and, in late imperial times, having her feet bound around the age of 5. The tiny feet symbolized feminine beauty and social respectability, and they improved her value on the marriage market. Girls were expected to get married within a few years of puberty. Betrothal, however, could occur as early as when both parties were just a few years old. Childhood betrothal was popularized in late imperial times. An appropriate marriage called for enactment of rituals which varied by class and locality. Regardless of class or locality, ritual required that marriage be arranged by parents through a matchmaker. Material transactions were integral to betrothal and wedding. Families negotiated the terms of betrothal gifts and dowry and drew up a contract, which could be a point of contention.
In the selection of a future son‐in‐law or daughter‐in‐law, “matching doors” was a time‐honored norm. The importance placed on two families’ equal standing was on display most overtly during the Tang period, when the “great families” valued pedigree to such an extent that they did not consider the Tang royal house their equal and thus not worthy of intermarriage. On the other hand, the concern over the disobedience of a bride and well‐being of a daughter led some to favor hypergamy (women marrying up):marrying a daughter into a better‐off family ensured her material security, while getting a daughter‐in‐law from a lower family status meant she would be easier to manage.
A daughter’s welfare weighed heavily on parents when they made marital decisions for her. Troubled marriages and abusive mothers‐in‐law were not uncommon. Partly because of such worries, marriages between children of friends and relatives, including cousin marriage, which was technically illegal, were popular. This social strategy also served to strengthen an existing relationship. In the early imperial period women had “broad leeway to leave their husbands” (Hinsch 2002, 41), but divorce grew increasingly to be a male privilege in later periods. However, although men were allowed to divorce a wife on any of the “seven grounds,” many refrained from pursuing it because of the social unpopularity of divorce.
The normative major marriage (i.e., a grown bride joining the groom’s family) notwithstanding, socio-economic circumstances and local traditions gave rise to a range of alternative patterns, demonstrating the flexibility of the marriage system. In the late imperial period, the “little daughter‐in‐law marriage,” in which a young girl moved in with her future groom’s family years before the wedding, enabled families to secure a marriage at very low cost. The “delayed transfer marriage,” in which the bride joined her marital home after a few years of marriage, testified to the powerful influence of non‐Han culture. In many lower Yangzi localities, uxorilocal marriage (where a groom moved in with the bride’s family) was associated not only with the poor but also the elite as an upward mobility strategy.
For the majority of women who left to join their husbands’ families, the early years of transition could be traumatic. Sadness over separation formed a common theme in women’s poems, bridal laments, and “women’s script” (nüshu, discovered in southern Hunan). A young wife’s status improved with time, especially after she gave birth to a son. The peak of her status arrived with her old age. As a matriarch, she could enjoy enormous respect and influence. In affluent families, sons commissioned paintings and essays to commemorate their mothers’ major birthdays.
The moral discourse on the husband–wife relationship stressed hierarchy and mutual respect rather than equality and love, but literary sources provided abundant evidence that conjugal love was a cherished cultural ideal. Beginning in the seventeenth century, amid a cultural fascination with qing (feeling, emotion, love) and the rise of the “talented women,” companionate marriage captured the imagination of the educated elite.
An affecting account of companionship and love was given in a memoir by Shen Fu (1763–ca. 1825). However, defined in terms of intellectual and artistic compatibility and emotional connectedness, the new ideal did not spread beyond the literati or shake the Confucian structure of husband–wife relationship. It did, however, serve to some degree as an equalizer in marital relations, and set in motion a different way of understanding marriage that placed attention on individual happiness within arranged marriage.
Working and writing
Working and writing represent two aspects of gender performance with contrasting meanings. While Confucian gender norms did not judge men’s character based on their work ethic, work was one of the four “womanly qualifications” that defined women’s social worthiness. Learning and writing, on the other hand, were key qualities of refinement for a Confucian man and held the key to examination degrees and office‐holding. No such purposes were relevant for women. Nevertheless, it was not rare that elite women pursued learning and writing.
In agrarian China, the classic model of the gendered division of labor for the vast majority of population was “men plough; women weave.” “Plough” and “weave” symbolically referred to the two fundamental agricultural activities, one producing food and the other cloth. The imperial state regarded agriculture as the basis of a stable polity in which every man and woman took part: “If one man does not plough, someone may go hungry; if one woman does not weave, someone may suffer from coldness” (Ban Gu 1962, 1128). While stressing the complementary nature of the gendered division of labor, this classic model placed men and women safely in separate spaces. Upper class men were not expected to labor with their hands, but with their brains. Manual labor was a marker of social inferiority for men.
Regardless of class, every woman worked with her hands. Another classical concept, “womanly work” (nügong), conveyed a similar idea about the importance of work and the types of work appropriate for women. Nügong referred to needlework and the work that produced cloth, all of which were performed in the closure of the home. Understandably, in reality women engaged in a wide range of work other than nügong, and lower class women routinely worked outside the home because of economic necessity:in agriculture (such as tea picking and mulberry leaf picking), in shops and restaurants, or as domestic servants, matchmakers, and midwives.
A major contribution of the study of women’s work is its revelation of women’s tremendous economic contribution. Cloth and grain were main items of taxation for much of Chinese history and women’s textile work directly contributed to the state’s financial well‐being. Local officials, such as those in the High Qing era, promoted women’s work in spinning and weaving to raise household productivity and to secure state taxation. Economic functions aside, the state and the elite saw work for women as having moral significance as well: it produced virtues—industry, frugality, and resource-fulness—in addition to objects of value.
Girls were taught the importance of work and trained in the skills of nügong from an early age. They internalized the same value by participating in playful cultural events such as the popular “Double Seven” (held on the seventh day of the seventh lunar month). Under the moonlight of the “Double Seven,” girls competed with one another with their embroidery works and made offerings to the Weaving Maid for blessings of “refined skills” (qiqiao). How well a girl mastered the techniques affected her reputation and marital prospects.
If work defined a woman’s moral character, writing did not. Yet throughout history it was learning and writing that sent women to lasting fame, thanks to the entrenched cultural tradition glorifying learning, in women as well as in men. There were two contrasting models for writing women: the upright instructor erudite in classical learning, represented by Ban Zhao, and the prodigy who shines from aesthetic brilliance, represented by the poet Xie Daoyun. Both Ban and Xie came from elite backgrounds, but writing was not the monopoly of the elite. For much of imperial history the few elite women known for their literary brilliance had to share the fame with those with questionable moral qualities, namely Daoist nuns (during the Tang) and artistic courtesans.
In the late imperial period, thanks in part to the advancement of printing technologies, the number of women writers grew dramatically. Research on their writings shed unprecedented light on women’s creative energy, their emotions, and their social interactions. In fact, the phenomenon of talented female poets was so threatening for some men that they questioned whether women should be educated at all, or what were appropriate subjects for women’s learning. Women from the educated class pursued interests in a wide range of subjects, including history, literature, classics, and religious canons. While a small number devoted themselves to scholarship and fictional writing, the most popular genre of writing was poetry, a form of self‐expression, intellectual and political commentary, and communication of emotions with family and friends. A major anthology of women’s poetry, Guochao guixiu zhengshi ji, was compiled by Yun Zhu in the early nineteenth century, after her years of efforts collecting women’s poetry from across the empire in order to preserve women’s literary and moral achievements from their time. Writing, critiquing, compiling, and publishing brought educated women into contact with one another and helped forge women’s communities and networks. The activities eroded to some extent the rigid gender demarcation as literati men gladly participated in the promotion, circulation, and publication of women’s works.
Sexuality
Research on sexuality gained momentum in the 1990s, beginning with a critical reassessment of Robert van Gulik’s 1960 classic, Sex Life in Ancient China. Scholars took aim at his argument that the Chinese sexual life was “normal and healthy,” pointing out its Orientalist cultural assumptions. The subsequent decades saw concerted efforts seeking to understand how ideas of sexuality were constructed, represented, and played out in social and cultural lives, sometimes with a cross‐cultural comparative framework.
As early as the Warring States period, the idea that human sexual desire was natural was firmly established. “The need for food and sex is innate to human nature,” according to Gao Zi. Sexual attraction between male and female was seen as the manifestation of the working of the yin and yang cosmological forces, and therefore, sexual energy must not be blocked lest it bring harm to human health and cosmological harmony. This conception differs sharply from the western notion that associated sex with “sin” (Mann 2011, xvii). Similarly, the mutually complementary and inclusive nature of yin (female) and yang (male) meant that masculine and feminine traits were fluidly defined, contrasting the rigid polarity of male and female in the west. Hence, whereas in the west, physical prowess projected masculine strength, in imperial China the delicate body did not suggest masculine deficiency. The imagery of the ideal male of late imperial times—the “romantic scholar” (caizi)—appears feminine to our modern eyes. While the boundaries between femininity and masculinity were unstable, studies have also shown manhood was constantly articulated and defined vis‐à‐vis the female “other.”
The belief in the naturalness of sexual needs did not give individuals free rein when it came to sexual behavior. Indeed, all major intellectual, religious, and medical traditions in China regarded sexuality as an object for management, manipulation, and control, even though they differed in rationale and approach. The Daoist “nourishing life” (yangsheng) theory viewed sexual union as beneficial to health and as an effective means of prolonging life.
Buddhists rejected sex for spiritual salvation. Sexual pleasure was delusional, a cause of suffering that had to be transcended. The medical tradition, on the other hand, concerned itself neither with longevity nor salvation. Instead, it focused on regulating sexual intercourse for the social function of reproduction. Interacting with this range of ideas was the morality‐centered sexuality espoused by Confucian teaching. Recognizing human beings’ penchant for sexual pleasure and fearful of the destructive effect of transgression on social order, ritual classics prescribed strict rules to ensure the separation of sexes and fortify social codes of propriety. Sexuality was a key site of cultivating and performing Confucian masculinity. Mourning rituals, for example, required that a man withdraw from sex for 25 months during the observations after his father’s death.
Since the Han, the state assumed a major role in enforcing Confucian sexual morality, making it part of its broad agenda of social control, political consolidation, and empirebuilding. The Qing dynasty, in particular, represents an era of governmental regulation of sexuality. Projecting an image of a legitimate, morally upright Confucian ruler, the Manchu court aggressively purged erotic materials in fiction and theater. It outlawed adultery, prostitution, sodomy, and rape, including homosexual rape. Furthermore, it eliminated the status of the “debased” people and therefore made all its subjects conform to standard gender norms in response to a swelling population of “bare sticks” that threatened the family and social order. Local officials targeted religious pilgrimages and local festivities that brought women into public spaces where mingling of sexes was unpreventable.
The government endeavors found ready assistance from lineage heads and other local elites. Clan rules and didactic literature regularly warned against sexual transgression and indulgence. Punishment and exhortation went in tandem with honoring and reward. Imperial China hailed a long history of recognizing moral exemplars through its jingbiao system. In the late imperial period, women of exemplary chastity—those who died from resisting rape, and who preserved lifelong chastity or killed themselves to follow their husbands/fiancés in death—became the face of the jingbiao. Representing the largest group of recipients, they were honored in the tens of thousands and commemorated in shrines and on stone arches financed by the state.
Paradoxically, the late imperial period witnessed not only the female chastity cult, but also a glamorous courtesan culture and the fashions of male homoeroticism. Courtesans shone for the first time during the Tang, dazzling their clients—civil examination candidates and government officials—with their beauty, wit, music, and poetry, but the seventeenth century boasted the most talented courtesans of all time. They liaised with famous members of the literati class and created astonishingly accomplished works of art—poetry, calligraphy, and painting—which became part of the lasting legacy of the late Ming high culture. The courtesans’ aura faded considerably in the next two centuries, when the talented wives of the elite class fashioned companionate marriages.
Cultural tolerance toward homosexual relationships can be traced back to early imperial history. The famous “cut‐sleeve” story tells of Emperor Aidi of the Han who cut off the sleeve of his robe so he would not wake up his lover who slept by his side. It became a euphemism for male–male love with no overtly negative moral judgment attached. Male–male love occurred most frequently where men congregated, such as monasteries and schools. In the Qing, patronizing handsome young actors (female impersonators) gained attraction among some members of the literati. Although romanticized in literary representation, male homosexual relationships in China were characteristically hierarchal rather than egalitarian, making the modern category of homosexuality a questionable fit for the China case. In comparison to the rich records about male homosexual relationships, female–female love is much harder to trace and has received much less scholarly attention.
The twentieth century: Transformations and limitations
Entering the last decades of the Qing, the culture that valorized women’s learning and celebrated the companionate marriage ideal came to a slow halt. The definitions of female virtue and gender roles, family and marital practices, and sexuality, discussed above, all faced disruption in the deepening of national crisis and the influx of western knowledge. In search of answers for China’s weakness, reform‐minded intellectuals identified a so‐called woman problem where the “uneducated” and “unproductive” women were seen to be the causes of China’s weakness. For much of the twentieth century, women and the family were major topics of the discourse on national strengthening and modernity and were major targets of social reform.
The millennium‐old practice of footbinding, now seen as a sign of national shame, became the first target of reform. Leading reformers like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao established anti‐footbinding societies and made the unbinding of feet a condition of admission to girls’ schools. The movement to abolish footbinding and unbind the bound feet, however, was traumatic for women and encountered strong resistance in some rural areas. Outmoded, footbinding ceased to exist a few decades later.
Schooling for girls developed hand in hand with the anti‐footbinding movement. The efforts were initiated by western missionaries in the 1840s, joined by reformminded elite in the subsequent decades, and by the Qing government, which rolled out a system of public education for girls in 1907. For the reformers, the schooling of girls served to prepare them for productive domestic roles: to assist their husbands, teach their children, help their families and improve the Chinese race. The school curriculum included both practical and scientific subjects along with moral education featuring western heroines, such as Joan of Arc, as well as Chinese icons, such as Ban Zhao. To demonstrate their social respectability, schools imposed strict dress codes that emphasized modesty and simplicity.
During the New Culture Movement, new intellectuals launched an all‐out assault against Confucian ideology and the family and gender practices it supported. The movement especially targeted arranged marriage, parental control, female chastity, and concubinage, and introduced new ideas about sexuality, women’s rights, and free‐choice marriage. Its legacy is long‐lasting. It gave rise to the political activism of the “new woman,” who was educated, employed, and engaged in public life, and new cultural ideals became the cornerstone for social policies of the nationalists and the Communists alike.
Amid political disunity, Japanese invasion, and civil war, the 1930s and 1940s saw initial measures taken by the Republican government and the CCP government (in its base areas) to reform family and marriage practices on principles of equality, free choice, monogamy, women’s property and divorce rights, but they yielded limited results. The Nationalist government promoted the “small family” ideal. While the small family became a norm for the urban areas, the traditional family and lineage practices remained strong in the countryside. Poor families sent their daughters to work in modern factories, effectively helping to bring down inner‐outer barriers and the separation of sexes.
The most consequential force in reshaping family and marital practices and gender relations was the PRC government. After its inauguration in 1949, the PRC put in place a wide range of social and economic programs, including land reform, the marriage law, and collectivization; it founded a Women’s Federation, and launched literacy and public health campaigns. Although most of these initiatives did not prioritize women’s issues, but rather aimed at consolidating the regime’s power and transforming China into a socialist state, they incorporated to varying degrees social and economic policies that served to weaken the traditional family and gender practices.
The 1950 Marriage Law was the single most far reaching and transformative initiative, designed for the purpose of reforming family and marriage and establishing gender equality. Regarded by some scholars as “one of the largest‐scale and most radical experiments in the history of social reform programs” (Diamant 2000, 6), the law abolished arranged marriage, bigamy, concubinage, and child betrothal nationwide, establishing marriage as a monogamous institution based on the complete willingness of the two parties. It granted women equal rights to family property and divorce. The law on divorce, however, met strong resistance because for poor peasants, divorce from a wife meant the loss of the bridal investment as well as a dim chance to get another wife.
Another central area where the PRC government aggressively reshaped gender practice was women’s labor. In line with their advocating that paid employment was crucial for women’s emancipation, the state mobilized women to meet its need for an expanded workforce for economic development, honoring those who excelled as labor models. In the late 1950s, women’s labor in the countryside increased sharply thanks to the collectivization of agriculture. During the Great Leap Forward movement, up to 90 percent of the female population participated in agricultural production. State efforts to bring women into the workforce contributed to the economic success of the state while fostering an affirmative social attitude about women working in public. It weakened patriarchal authority and traditional gender order.
The extent of the success of the Communist Revolution, however, has been a subject of debate. Feminist scholars criticized the state for failing to implement forcefully the Marriage Law and for prioritizing national interests over women’s rights.4 They noted that the government did not do enough to break the patriarchal family system, and the principle of “equal work, equal pay” often meant, in practice, tracking women into less‐skilled, lower paying jobs. Others offered more positive assessments, pointing to evidence that peasants, in particular young rural women, took advantage of the marriage law for their own benefit, and collectivization created venues for women’s participation in public life and for male–female interaction. Arranged marriage eroded slowly but surely. While virilocal marriage remained dominant and parents continued to arrange marriages for their children, beginning in the 1950s, consultation with children grew to be a common practice. However, traditional practice with regard to women’s property rights persisted. Women’s legal entitlement to family property largely failed to yield significant results. Family heads, usually male, continued to control family property, and daughters were routinely excluded from inheritance beyond the dowry.
The record of the PRC’s policies to destabilize traditional family structure and elevate women’s status, therefore, is mixed. In general, there were considerable rural–urban and generational gaps with regard to the impact of these policies. Changes were more rapid in cities and among the youth. For young women, public engagement of various sorts—sponsored by the collectives and Youth League, for example—and slogans such as “women can hold up half the sky” shaped powerfully their sense of self‐worth. The PRC era’s most radical version of gender equality emerged during the Cultural Revolution (1966–76) when the “Red Guard” rebelled against parental authority and the masculine “iron girl” set a new role model for young women. Rejecting traditional female roles and attributes, the iron girl would compete with her male “comrades” in all aspects of revolutionary tasks.
For the first 30 years of its rule, the state upheld consistent, if at times ineffective, policies and programs concerning women and gender roles. But the beginning of the economic reforms in the late 1970s marked a retreat from its earlier positions. Amid backlash against the Cultural Revolution “iron girl” model, the state dropped the slogans that used to empower women. A sharp shift in discourse during the 1980s that emphasized female biological difference helped to revive gender stereotypes and even legitimize job discrimination against women. The major reform policies—the decollectivization of agriculture, relaxation of the household registration system, opening the Chinese market to foreign and private investments, and the ending of lifetime employment for state workers—provided unprecedented economic freedom and social and geographic mobility, but also created enormous challenges for women. Young women migrated in greater numbers than older women and were commonly employed in urban manufacturing and domestic work. Their improved income was achieved at the cost of enduring poor living and working conditions and separation from their families. For urban women, the disappearing job security and equal pay protection meant they were particularly at the mercy of their employers. Deemed less valuable than male workers, they were the first to be laid off or sent home for early retirement.
In 1979, the state implemented the so‐called one‐child policy to control population growth, which it deemed to be undermining national development. The policy was most consequential for women in rural areas, where resistance was fierce. The perception that the mother was responsible for the sex of the child often subjected women to domestic violence, while they were being pursued by local officials to perform coerced abortion.
The social consequence was revealed by the skewed sex ratios reported in parts of rural China in the following decades, males outnumbering females by ratios ranging from 119:100 to 126:100, depending on the locality (i.e., there were more men than women everywhere; in some places, 119 men per 100 women, in others, 126 per 100). The statistics suggest the practice of sex‐selective abortions through the use of ultrasound technology, or even infanticide. The enforcement of the one‐child rules relaxed over time. In 2015, the government officially revised the policy, allowing two children per couple.
Some of the most significant social and cultural changes took place in realms of sexuality, family relationships, and marital practice. With the fall of the Qing and the influx of western influence, Chinese attitudes about sex and homosexual love grew increasingly negative, in particular under CCP rule.
Homosexuality was subjected to persecution and imprisonment. Since the economic reforms, the Mao era’s rigid state control of sexuality gave way to, on the one hand, a resurgence of prostitution and other forms of commodification of the female body, and on the other hand, eased social acceptance of individual choices by young urban residents, including homosexuality.
Parental control over children had begun weakening since the 1950s and, at the turn of the twenty-first century, seems to have nearly disappeared. Children ignoring the responsibility of caring for parents emerged to be a new social problem. The expansion of youth autonomy and power was enabled by the reform policies that allowed young villagers unprecedented mobility and earning opportunities in major cities. In the meantime, the influx of global pop culture exposed the younger generation to fresh ideas of romantic courtship and marital intimacy. Displays of love were no longer a taboo in public and premarital sex gradually gained social acceptance. The notion that marriage was a lifetime commitment seems to be eroding as evidenced by the steady climb in the divorce rate over the past several decades.
Conclusion
Research on women, gender, the family, and sexuality has been exceptionally fruitful with a multifaceted impact. It demonstrates that, contrary to the long‐standing assertion about Chinese women’s subjugation, women played crucial roles in the family system. It brings to the surface the centrality of gender and sexuality to the imperial polity and governance. It reveals the elastic nature of the gender system: a system in which women found meaning, fulfillment, and satisfaction. It sheds light on women’s intellectuality and inner worlds, brought into view through their own writings. It makes clear that by placing women and gender at the center of historical inquiry we are able to gain fresh appreciation for the dynamics of the family system, role of the state, shape and texture of social, economic, and cultural changes, and, finally, the extent of China’s modern transformation in the twentieth century.
Given China’s long history and vast regional variations, it is not surprising that there remains considerable unevenness in terms of the issues, periods, or geographical areas in which historians have worked in a short period of four decades. Taking the imperial period as an example, more research has been done on the late imperial period, the lower Yangzi region, and the elite; while research on women thrived, men’s studies have not gained adequate attention. Moreover, there have been very few disagreements and debates, a reflection of the relatively young state of the field. Moving forward, historians are delving into new territories on all fronts while expanding the use of sources to include visual and material objects. Historians on the modern period, on the other hand, have increasingly turned to oral history while taking advantage of newly available archival materials, making it possible to construct PRC history in a much more complex and personalized way. As historians engage in new sources and march into new territories, it can be expected that the scope of research will continue to grow and diversify, enriching our understanding of Chinese history.
Notes
1 It should be noted that, from the early twentieth century to the 1960s, historians in China produced some of the most influential academic works on women, including Hu 1985 and Chen 1959. But these publications did not have much impact on changing the general discourse on women’s suppression.
2 They include the three volumes edited by Marilyn Young (1973), Margery Wolf and Roxane Witke (1975), and Richard Guisso and Stanley Johannesen (1981).
3 They include Ebrey 1993, Ko 1994, and Mann 1997. For a detailed review on western scholarship through the mid‐1990s, see Teng 1996.
4 See, e.g., Johnson 1983 and Stacy 1983.
By Weijing Lu in "A Companion to Chinese History",edited by Michael Szonyi, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd,UK, 2017, excerpts pp.207-220. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.