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Chan zu : "jin lian chong bai" sheng ji er shuai de yan bian

Gui shu shi : Ming mo Qing chu jiang nan de cai nü wen hua

Teachers of the inner chambers : women and culture in seventeenth-century China

This pathbreaking work argues that literate gentry women in seventeenth-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 seventeenth-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 seventeenth-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.

Online ACLS Humanities E-Book