Teachers of the Inner Chambers

Teachers of the Inner Chambers
Author: Dorothy Ko
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 422
Release: 1994
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780804723596

This pathbreaking work argues that literate gentry women in 17th-century Jiangnan, far from being oppressed or silenced, created a rich culture and meaningful existence within the constraints of the Confucian system. Momentous socioeconomic and intellectual changes in 17th-century Jiangnan provided the stimulus for the flowering of women's culture. The most salient of these changes included a flourishing of commercial publishing, the rise of a reading public, a new emphasis on emotions, the promotion of women's education, and, more generally, the emergence of new definitions of womanhood. The author reconstructs the social, emotional and intellectual worlds of 17th-century women, and in doing so provides a new way to conceptualize China's past, one offering a more realistic and complete understanding of the values of Chinese culture and the functioning of Chinese society.

Cinderella's Sisters

Cinderella's Sisters
Author: Dorothy Ko
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2005
Genre: History
ISBN: 0520253906

Footbinding is widely condemned as perverse & as symbolic of male domination over women. This study offers a more complex explanation of a thousand year practice, contending that the binding of women's feet in China was sustained by the interests of both women and men.

Every Step a Lotus

Every Step a Lotus
Author: Dorothy Ko
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 174
Release: 2001
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780520232839

A well-written and beautifully illustrated book on foot binding and the exquisite shoes designed for the tiny feet.

Precious Records

Precious Records
Author: Susan Mann
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 348
Release: 1997
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9780804727440

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.

A Flourishing Yin

A Flourishing Yin
Author: Charlotte Furth
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 1999-03-05
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0520208293

Content Description #"A Philip E. Lilienthal book."#Includes bibliographical references and index.

The Talented Women of the Zhang Family

The Talented Women of the Zhang Family
Author: Susan Mann
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 352
Release: 2007
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780520250895

"There is absolutely nothing remotely like this book in the history of late imperial women. [An] immensely important book."--Gail Hershatter, author of Women in China's Long Twentieth Century "A masterful work."--Lynn Hunt, coeditor of Beyond the Cultural Turn

The Birth of Chinese Feminism

The Birth of Chinese Feminism
Author: Lydia He Liu
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 326
Release: 2013
Genre: Art
ISBN: 023116291X

The book repositions He-Yin Zhen as central to the development of feminism in China, juxtaposing her writing with fresh translations of works by two of her better-known male interlocutors. The editors begin with a detailed portrait of He-Yin Zhen's life and an analysis of her thought in comparative terms. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1873-1947) and Liang Qichao (1873-1929), to which He-Yin's work responds and with which it engages. Jin Tianhe, a poet and educator, and Liang Qichao, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that "enlightened" male intellectuals like themselves should defend. Zhen counters with an alternative conception of feminism that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends in thought.

The Labor of Reinvention

The Labor of Reinvention
Author: Lin Zhang
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2023-03-07
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0231551290

From start-up founders in the Chinese equivalent of Silicon Valley to rural villages experiencing an e-commerce boom to middle-class women reselling luxury goods, the rise of internet-based entrepreneurship has affected every part of China. For many, reinventing oneself as an entrepreneur has appeared to be an appealing way to adapt to a changing economy and society. Yet in practice, digital entrepreneurship has also reinforced traditional Chinese ideas about state power, labor, gender, and identity. Lin Zhang explores how the everyday labor of entrepreneurial reinvention is remaking China amid changing geopolitical currents. She tells the stories of people from diverse class, gender, and age backgrounds across rural, urban, and transnational settings in rich detail, providing a multifaceted and ground-level view of the twenty-first-century Chinese economy. Zhang explores the surge in digital entrepreneurialism against the backdrop of global financial crises, the U.S.-China trade war, and the COVID-19 pandemic. She argues that the rise of internet-based industries and practices has simultaneously empowered and exploited digital entrepreneurs and laborers. Despite embracing high-tech innovation, state-led entrepreneurialization does not represent a radical break with the past. It has provided a means for implementing developmental goals while retaining the importance of the traditional family and generating new inequalities. Shedding new light on global capitalism and the digital economy by centering a non-Western perspective, The Labor of Reinvention vividly conveys how the contradictions of entrepreneurialism have played out in China.

Art by the Book

Art by the Book
Author: J. P. Park
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2016-06-01
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0295807032

Sometime before 1579, Zhou Lujing, a professional writer living in a bustling commercial town in southeastern China, published a series of lavishly illustrated books, which constituted the first multigenre painting manuals in Chinese history. Their popularity was immediate and their contents and format were widely reprinted and disseminated in a number of contemporary publications. Focusing on Zhou's work, Art by the Book describes how such publications accommodated the cultural taste and demands of the general public, and shows how painting manuals functioned as a form in which everything from icons of popular culture to graphic or literary cliche was presented to both gratify and shape the sensibilities of a growing reading public. As a special commodity of early modern China, when cultural standing was measured by a person's command of literati taste and lore, painting manuals provided nonelite readers with a device for enhancing social capital.