Abstracts
Panel 1
How the History of Women in Early China Intersects with the History of Science in Early China
Lisa Raphals
University of California, Riverside
At first the received history of science in China seems to have little place for women, especially in early China. Reconsiderations of the history science in China and the status of Joseph Needham's Science and Civilization in China have not addressed this question. I begin with the question of what we mean by the history of science in China as it relates to women. I next survey what scientific disciplines and texts provide sources on women, either as practitioners or as consultants. I then review sources on women in (1) medicine, (2) the so-called shushu 數術 culture of numbers, divination and longevity practices described in the Hanshu yiwenzhi 漢書藝文志 and (3) the evidence of excavated texts.
The Book of Odes as a Source for Women's History
Anne Behnke Kinney
University of Virginia
Exploring the lyric voices of the Odes has always been bedeviled by our utter ignorance of even the most minimal contexts of these intensely emotional outpourings. While many of these poems, especially those found in the Odes of the States, appear to be either about or by women, there is no iron-clad proof for such an attribution. But even if we were able to identify either the speaker or the subject of a particular ode as female, we would still be faced with a nagging uncertainty over what historical period any one of these compositions represents. Both of these difficulties dissolve, however, if we analyse these works from the perspective of Han commentaries. By taking such an approach, we will still not be able to unravel the mysteries surrounding the original date, attribution and subject matter of the Odes, but we can use these commentaries to understand how Han scholars understood them. Moreover, reading the Odes of the States from the perspective of the Mao commentary reveals an astounding number of women-centered narratives.
Discourses on Women Virtues and Their Early Revelations in The Book of Poetry
Eva Kit Wah Man
Hong Kong Baptist University
This paper will focus on the pre-Qin Confucian text of The Book of Poetry as an important source for the early discussion of women virtues in Chinese Women's history. The text, as commonly recognized, had acted as core educational materials for the cultivated class in the pre-Qin period. The paper will first review its discussions on women virtues by referring to some representative cases or stories described on the source and then classify the kinds of virtue recommended into gendered virtues and common excellence of human qualities. The paper will then investigate these approved virtues and compare them with the “Ethics of Care” introduced by Western Feminists (e.g. Carol Gilligan). Special attention will be paid on the following relations: 1) situational ethics and common ethics; 2) gendered virtues/norms and universal/ transcendental ethics (good women and great men); 3) the ideals of women beings and their inner beauty. The paper will conclude the multiple modalities of women virtues suggested by this early Confucian source and compare them with the Western discussions on gender and ethics. Cross references will be made to other pre-Qin texts and the later developments and influences of these discourses will be briefly reviewed.
Panel 2
Women in Portraits: An Overview of Epitaphs from Early and Medieval China
Ping Yao
California State University Los Angeles
This paper examines epitaphs from the period between the Han Dynasties (202BCE-220CE) and the Tang Dynasty (618-907). During these times epitaph writing developed, evolved, and eventually became a crucial component of mortuary practice. Even though only less than one third of the known epitaphs were dedicated to women, men's epitaphs nevertheless routinely recounted their relations to female family members. All of them, thus, prove to be quite useful in recovering everyday female experience and in reconstructing discourses on family, marriage, gender relations, and the role of women in Chinese history. In surveying gender ratio, class, region, ethnicity, differences between men's epitaphs and women's epitaphs, as well as the ideal life courses distilled from these epitaphs, this paper intends to explore the nature, development, and limitations of these writings, and to assess their values as primary sources for studying women in Chinese history.
Illustrating Chinese Women's History
Patricia Ebrey
University of Washington, Seattle
Almost everyone who publishes a book about Chinese Women's History includes illustrations. Authors are generally delighted when their publishers let them (or encourage them) to include a dozen or more illustrations, seeming on the whole to believe the more the better. The majority of these illustrations are depictions of women, with tomb figurines and tomb wall paintings more common for the Tang period, paintings for the Song period, and wood block prints for the Ming and Qing periods. There are solid intellectual grounds for including pictures. Conceptions of gender were conveyed not just through words but also through visual means (such as clothing and hairstyles), some of which can be conveyed in pictures. Pictures can also reinforce points about women's activities by showing women weaving, caring for children, reading, or writing. Although authors of book on women's history have stressed the importance of finding and making as much use possible of works written by women, the fact that the overwhelming share of visual depictions of women were done by men has not deterred them from generous use of them.
One reason to examine the use of illustrations in books on women is to look for ways this practice can be improved—are some sorts of illustrations more effective, or at least less misleading than others? Another is the more ambitious goal of assessing the usefulness of works of art as sources for Chinese women's history. Can pictures be used as sources that add to what we learn from texts? Or does our interpretation of them depend so heavily on texts that the real source of what we are drawing from them comes from the texts?
To show what authors have in fact done, in this paper I examine several books, including my own. I distinguish between authors who use only depictions made within the culture and time period they are studying and those who also employ outsiders' depictions, such as pictures of much later date or by Japanese or Western travelers. I also distinguish between illustrations that are cited in the text or in long captions, making it clear what they are meant to illustrate, and ones that serve as illustrations in a more general sense. I label some pictures “technical” illustrations, chosen to show some aspect of material culture that the reader might not understand (such as the equipment used for weaving, or the arrangement of courtyards within a house complex). Others should be seen as artistic interpretations of texts.
Many questions can be asked of the illustrations authors use: Do pictures of palace women tell us much about women not in the palace? What significance should we place on the differences in the ways gender is conveyed in paintings and in prints? What meaning should we give the tendency to portray all sorts of women with nearly identical faces? Can we and should we distinguish pictures of women made for men and those made for women? Why are there so few pictures of women made by women?
Several art historians have written on depictions of women, particularly Julia Murray, Ellen Laing, James Cahill, and Wu Hung. As these scholars have shown, illustrations of didactic texts are not always didactic themselves. But they have also shown that two art historians can disagree about whether a depiction of a woman is erotically charged or not.
Art historians have concentrated their efforts on paintings, while Ming and Qing historians have drawn their illustrations of women more often from wood-block prints found in Chinese books. Prints have much to recommend them. Since these were from the beginning made to serve as illustrations (perhaps of a novel or play), their original purpose is not being distorted when they are put in another type of book. Moreover, they usually do not have to be radically reduced in size, making it much easier to see the significant details in them. And since it is thought that illustrations were aimed at a relatively broad audience, prints have the advantage of not seeming so limited to the elite. Of course, another reason why historians often use prints is probably that they are not under copyright protection. To that might be added that narrative painting was not highly esteemed in the Ming and Qing periods, so that the sorts of scenes historians want to evoke are found more often in prints than in paintings.
Panel 3
Ishinpo and its Excerpts of Chanjing:
Japanese Medical Text as a Source for Chinese Women's History
Jen-der Lee
Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica
Ishinpo 醫心方 is the oldest extant medical work in Japan. It was edited by Tanba Yasuyori 丹波康賴 (912-995), an imperial doctor of the Heian period (794-1183), who cited medical theories and technologies from over two hundred Chinese texts introduced into Japan up until his time and put them into thirty volumes without any foreword to explain his ideas and categorization of medicine. This article compares Volumes 21 to 24 of Ishinpo with the Chinese texts from which Tanba excerpted to analyze the different conceptualization over women's health problems between this Japanese doctor and his Chinese predecessors. It first introduces the history of compilation and transmission of Ishinpo, and then discusses different views concerning the origins of women's diseases between Ishinpo and several Chinese texts it quoted. A detailed examination over a set of pictures that indicated taboo points of acupuncture and moxibustion for pregnant women is followed. These pictures came from Chanjing 產經 (Canon for Childbirth), which Tanba relied more heavily than any other Chinese medical work in his four volumes on women. The conclusion then points out the practice-oriented characteristics of medieval Japanese medicine and Tanba's primary concern over childbirth, in contrast to the menstruation-based conceptualization over women's health issues in Chinese tradition.
Women in Chinese Encyclopedias
Harriet Zurndorfer
Leiden University
This paper re-examines women in leishu 類書 (classification books), conventionally known as encyclopedia. Following my earlier published study "Women in the Epistemological Strategy of Chinese Encyclopedia" (1999), this paper continues my investigation of this particular source for the study of women and gender. I will focus on a series of leishu in the Siku quanshu 四庫全書compendium, and compare them with other encyclopedia originating in late imperial China.
Panel 4
Gazetteers and the Talented Woman
Ellen Widmer
Wesleyan University
My paper explores the potential of local histories for illuminating talented women's lives and writings. Because of the huge number of local histories in existence, I have limited the project to the following three focused areas of interest. First, I begin by asking what local histories could contribute to the study of six women that have interested me in other connections. The six are Gui Maoyi 歸懋儀, Wang Qingdi 王慶棣, Shan Shili 單士釐, Gu Taiqing 顧太清, Wang Duanshu 王端淑, and Wang Duan 汪端. These investigations led to successes and failures that I will detail in the paper. Tracking these six women further allows me to propose a set of rules, far from perfect, on how to use local histories in this type of inquiry. Second, I note a few local histories that are especially important to our field.With only two or three examples, my list makes no claim whatsoever to be exhaustive. Finally, I consider the process by which local histories began to take up the lives and writings of women. Women of talent were not included in local histories from the beginning but made an appearance only gradually during the Qing. In demonstrating this point I rely on only one example, Ruan Yuan's 阮元 Guangdong tongzhi 廣東通志 (published 1864). I look at the materials it drew on and its stimulating effect on later histories. I go on to discuss the other areas of China that were most likely to include women in their local histories. Throughout I have relied on Hu Wenkai's 胡文楷 Lidai funü zhuzuo kao 歷代婦女著作考 of 1958 and 1985 and Xian Yuqing's 冼玉清 Guangdong nüzi yiwen kao 廣東女子藝文考 of 1941 for guidance. Both works rely heavily on local histories, although other types of materials were also employed. I began most of my inquiries by consulting these sources but went beyond them as I learned more.
Social Hierarchy, Gender and Institutions:
Sources Relating to Women in Chinese Standard Histories
Jo-lan Yi
National Taiwan University/ Cambridge University
Although women have been included in Chinese standard histories for centuries, scholars have given little thought to the value of these works for studying the history of Chinese women. This paper attempts to show both how the standard histories can help towards an understanding of Chinese women's history in general and their limitations. It examines twenty-six volumes of standard histories in order to establish the location of sources relating to women and their significance.
Most references to women appear in the Biographies, Tables, Treaties Hereditary Houses, and even the Basic Annals sections. Women in these sources are categorized in three ways – according to social hierarchy, gender and institutions. Apart from female figures (especially women in the palace), there are also some records of the political, ritual and social institutions relating to women.
The standard histories are considered the most authoritative record of Chinese history. They mostly offer us a portrait of women or the official ideas of women from a particular dynasty rather than covering much detail of women's daily lives and kinship. However, this is a reflection of the purpose of writing the standard histories. They are intended to describe the prosperity of the dynasties and the opposition they faced. Given such a framework, everyone or everything related to the empires or the rise and fall of the dynasty had to be included. Once we understand the nature of the source materials themselves, we can avoid erroneous assessments of their contents and better interpret the history of Chinese women.
Overt and Covert Treasures:
An Investigation into the Sources for Women's History in the Sibu
Clara Wing-chung Ho
Hong Kong Baptist University
Since the Tang dynasty, sibu 四部 (the four branches, also translated as the four departments or the four parts), has become the major and paradigmatic classification of traditional Chinese books. This paper is an overall analysis of the sources for women's history contained in the sibu by examining how women figures feature in the four categories of the sibu, namely, jing 經 (classics), shi 史 (histories), zi 子(philosophers) and ji集 (belles-lettres). Basing on the classification of the Siku quanshu 四庫全書(The complete collection of the four treasuries) as the norm of the dominating four-fold division, a comprehensive survey on all the forty-four sub-categories of this great imperial compilation will be carried out to trace the records of women.
Each of the four branches holds sketches of women's lives and materials which reflect the contemporaneous attitudes toward women in different historical periods of time. Works classified under the jingbu were considered to be important and noble, usually setting up rules for emulation and including benchmarks for gender's roles. Besides, the belief that classics were often vehicles for deep meaning in limited words (weiyan dayi 微言大義) had planted in subsequent dynasties an emergence of a huge quantity of annotations and interpretations of such classics, which in turn encompassed elaboration on women's behavior. Works collected under the shibu were further subdivided according to their genres. Apart from the overt information on women in the standard histories, local histories, and biographies, of which many scholars are aware their existence, much other covert information in this branch also contained valuable sources on women of different social classes. Much of this information has hitherto remained hidden and has been left untouched by historians. The richest sources of materials on women are embedded in works classified under the zibu. Unlike the shibu, the zibu categorizes works according to their subjects, but not formats or genres. Unlike the single-sided perspective of Confucianism which permeates the classics in the jingbu, there exists in the zibu a myriad of scholarships on multiple disciplines such as medicine, astronomy, mathematics, divination, art, agriculture, encyclopedias, miscellaneous writings, as well as writings by military experts, Buddhists, Daoists and so on. The abundant collections of materials in the zibu have made this branch of scholarships much worthy of academic pursuit and curiosity. As for the jibu, collected works and anthologies are two dominating subdivisions out of the five. Previous scholarships have highlighted the significance of anthologies of writings authored by women and poetry collections of individual female writers. However, there is also a vast amount of records on women in families of scholar-officials contained in many collected works of male scholars waiting for historians to uncover.
Some information on women in the sibu may be apparent and easy to detect, whereas others are concealed and may require intelligent reading between the lines. A thorough and meticulous examination of various sources contained in the sibu will provide a promising prospect towards a historiography of Chinese women's history. It is the wish of the author that this paper will contribute in this direction.
Panel 5
Autobiographical Subjects:
Ming-Qing Women's Poetry Collections as Sources for Women's Life Histories
Grace S. Fong
McGill University
As the premier genre for self-expression, poetry has always functioned as a significant vehicle for self-representation for male scholars in imperial China. With the increase in female literacy in the late imperial period, the practice to record one's own life history in poetry collections became also quite pronounced among women writers, particularly in the Qing period. Women constructed themselves as autobiographical subjects not only in the act of writing poetry but also in editing and organizing their poems in chronologically meaningful ways for publication. Drawing on the corpus of more than 90 representative texts available on the McGill-Harvard-Yenching Ming-Qing Women's Writings website (http://digital.library.mcgill.ca/mingqing), I intend to examine three forms of “women's publications” for their significance as sources for the study of women's life histories: poetry collections by individual women authors published independently (bieji 別集), poetry collections by women of the same family published together as a group (jiake 家刻), and poetry collections by women appended to their husbands' collected writings. The organization, structure, and content (including front and back matter) of these forms of publication will be examined for their particular implications for autobiographical articulations and biographical constructions.
Personal Experience, Public Records:
Sources on Women in the Qing Collected Works
Weijing Lu
University of California, San Diego
At what moment in Chinese history did men begin to write about women in their own families and preserve those records? For what occasions and purposes did they write about them? How did these writings differ from those they wrote for women to whom they were not personally related? Are there historical shifts in the ways in which they wrote about them? One place to explore these basic yet important historical questions is the wenji文集, or collected works of scholars.
The wenji perhaps is one of the most, if not the most, readily available sources in which we can locate scholars' accounts of female family members—mothers, wives/concubines, daughters, sisters, aunts, and other female relatives. The accounts appear most often in various types of formal or informal “zhuan傳 ” and tomb inscriptions, but references can also be found elsewhere in the wenji. The accounts are of special historical value, first of all, because of the scarcity of such records. Even in the wenji, writings about women that were not by a male relative greatly outnumber those pieces which were authored by a man from the woman's own family.
My essay will concentrate on examining the history and the characteristics of these writings as well as evaluating their strengths and limits as a distinctive type of source for women's history. In contrast with the biographies and epitaphs that men wrote for women outside the family, male accounts about women in their own lives are personal, and they are less formulaic in style and didactic in message. Woven through their own emotions, the accounts are often filled with small details—the kinds of details likely ignored in more formal writings—about family hardships, tensions and interactions in which women took center stage. These sources are doubly revealing: they reveal men's own lives and subjectivity in relation with female family members as well as the perspective of women's lives as seen through the eyes of male family members. The rich details make them excellent materials for our study of women's roles and their relations with their natal and marital families, parent-child and sibling relations, and even conjugal sexual relations in a gendered and personal context.
In the end, despite the personal nature of the accounts, they remain a type of public record, selectively chosen by men to be recorded for various reasons. The essay will discuss this nature of these sources, and suggest ways to make the best use of them in constructing women's history.
Men's Memoirs of Women as Sources for Women's History
Wai-yee Li
Harvard University
Accounts based on memories of wives, concubines, and courtesans by male authors promise glimpses into the private and intimate details of women's lives. However, such writings are also mediated by conventions and the authors' self-images. I propose to examine the interplay of revelations and silences in these works, using as examples Mao Xiang's 冒襄(1611-93) Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Studio (Yingmei an yiyu影梅庵憶語), Yu Huai's 余懷 (1616-96) Miscellaneous Records of the Plank Bridge (Banqiao zaji板橋雜記), Li Yu's 李漁 (1611-1680) Combined Biographies of Qiao and Wang, My Concubines (Qiao Wang erji hezhuan 喬王二姬合傳), Chen Weisong's 陳維崧 (1625-82) On Women (Furen ji婦人集), Shen Fu's 沈復 (1763-ca. 1808) Six Records of a Floating Life (Fusheng liuji浮生六記), Chen Peizhi's 陳裴之 (1794-1826) Reminiscences of the Xiangwan lou (Xiangwan lou yiyu香畹樓憶語), Jiang Tan's 蔣坦 (ca. 1820-1862) Fragments of Memories Under the Autumn Lamp (Qiudeng suoyi秋燈瑣憶 ), and Yu Qiqiang's 余其鏘 (b. ca. 1880) Heartfelt Words (Jixin suoyu 寄心瑣語).
These works share enough common traits in different combinations for us to make subgeneric distinctions. Mao Xiang, Yu Huai, and Chen Weisong frame their accounts in the context of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition, and imply that the fate of women (and, in Chen Weisong's case, their writings) defines one important venue for broader historical understanding. Other accounts are more self-consciously personal and non-political. Yu Huai mixes personal recollections with reported anecdotes, and Chen Weisong relates many stories he or his friends heard about in a mode akin to “secondary memory.” The other examples are more focused on the texture of daily existence with a woman beloved by the author. All seem intensely nostalgic, although the object and articulation of nostalgia differ. All propose to tell of lives, but none obeys the logic of chronology. Instead fragmentation, lyricism, and the aesthetic organization of experience hold sway. Cross-references indicate a consciousness of “memoir” (yiyu憶語) as genre: this is especially pronounced in Chen Peizhi's work; but Jiang Tan and Yu Qiqiang also show familiarity with earlier memoirs. For all of them, except Shen Fu, who came from a humbler background, the telling of women's lives cement ties in male socio-literary communities.
It is difficult to disentangle representation from historical reality. We can, however, try to ponder aspects of women's lives these authors are telling by measuring them against different sources (if they are available) or what is not said. Several issues especially invite consideration from different perspectives: the relationship between wives and concubines and between women and their relatives by marriage, the balance between women's ties with their natal families and with their husbands' families, attitudes towards women's literacy and literary endeavor, ideas about the boundaries between orthodox and unorthodox behavior for women, the aestheticization of domestic space, and the conceptions of romantic and marital happiness.
Panel 6
Gendered Fictions and Women's History
Louise Edwards
University of Technology Sydney
Implicit to the expansion of women's history writing is the notion that women have particular experiences of life that differ from those of men and that those experiences require special attention. In literary theory a similar argument appeared—for example, women writers were perceived to have unique perspectives that generated a distinct female literary voice. On this logic, a natural first step in seeking sources for women's history in literature would be to excavate the particular women's perspective within fiction written by women. Unfortunately, this tack presents historians and literary scholars of pre-twentieth century China with a very limited data set. In contrast to the considerable list of poems, essays, commentaries, funerary notes and letters written by women over China's extensive textual history—there is no notable fiction output. Does this render fiction less useful as a source for Chinese women's history?
In addressing the scope of the utility of fiction as an historical source in Chinese women's history the paper examines the following problems. How does the genre's inherent fabrication of character identity challenge the privileging of the author's sex as the key signifier of meaning? What problems does fiction's freedom to merge the “unreal and the real” present? The paper argues that while these foundational problems of authorial authority and the fraught mingling of fact and fiction are important they can also often distract from other potential valuable connections between fiction and women's history in the Chinese case. For example: What was the social context of fiction writing within the Chinese text-world that limited women's engagement with the genre? Does the connection between fiction and the pre-twentieth century moral order enable us to explore underpinning gender ideologies? What are the links between pornography, fiction and history given the risqué content of both short and long fiction in the Chinese tradition?
Material Cultures and Women's History
Dorothy Ko
Columbia University
This paper seeks to delineate the limits of the written archive by exploring an alternative knowledge system embedded in the world of things. Emphasis would be placed on the myriad things that women made in the vernacular home--textiles, embroidery, and meals--and the tools needed for these tasks.
The first half of the paper focuses on methodological issues involved in studying material culture, including the definitions of "material" (wu物) and "culture" (wen文). The second half consists of a case study: an analysis of sewing implements and embroidery pattern books from the late imperial and Republican periods. What kinds of questions can be brought to bear on the production, consumption, and circulation of these pattern books? What insights can be gained about household production, female knowledge and skills as well as their transmission? How would women's history be revised if this alternative knowledge system is being taken into account?
Early Modern Women Calligraphers and Gendered Art Practice
Hu Ying
University of California, Irvine
This paper examines the art of calligraphy as a particular cultural resource in the construction of modern womanhood. I look at the practice of a number of artists around the end of the 19th century, some well known such as Qiu Jin 秋瑾 (1875-1907), and some less known, such as Wu Zhiying 吳芝瑛(1868-1934). My main objective is to find a meaningful framework to interpret their art, which requires a two-pronged approach: to re-locate their cultural practice in the precise historical context, and to examine closely the formal aspects, such as their choices of script, where the art pieces appear (on stele, as book cover), and how they are presented (collotype print, public display).
Using calligraphy as a source to construct women's history presents several particular challenges. Calligraphy has been named the premier art form of the Chinese cultural tradition, but also the most conservative art. It is said to be an art form that preserves the physical presence, creative personality and moral core of the artist; yet there have been many cases of mistaken gender identity. It is an art form with a mixed male-female transmission and has been practiced by men and women of the literati class.
For many women who lived around the turn of the last century, traditional arts like calligraphy provided an important avenue through which they responded to the rapid historical and political changes. Epigraphic art especially offered the artist a previously unavailable model of action, namely, direct political participation. Not limited to the private beauty of the “decked-out lady,” their art served as a vital conduit for active engagement with history that was unfolding around them.
Panel 7
A Kaleidoscope of Knowledge about Women:
The Chinese Periodical Press, 1872-1918
Joan Judge
York University
Scholars of turn-of-the-twentieth-century China have largely overcome the reductive “tradition/modernity” binary and the notion of the incommensurability of the imperial and post-imperial periods. Just as a reified “tradition” was not subsumed by but blended into a new “modernity” in the early twentieth century, so existing narrative and textual forms were not replaced by but appropriated into new print media. Many of the numerous sources on women's lives in imperial China discussed at this conference—biographies, poetry, scholarly jottings, visual portraits, remnants of material culture—were integrated into the new medium of the late Qing and early Republican periodical press. As these sources engaged China's often contentious woman question, they produced a veritable kaleidoscope of knowledge about Chinese women.
In this paper I focus on the question of female chastity which is central to late imperial Chinese women's history and prominent in a range of periodicals including mainstream daily newspapers, popular pictorials, organs of the mosquito press, and an array of women's journals. I trace the treatment of this issue from the 1870s when the Shanghai newspaper Shenbao 申報 reprinted court gazette (jingbao 京報) reports on exemplary chaste widows, to 1918 when Lu Xun 魯迅 definitively condemned the practice in the pages of New Youth (Xin qingnian 新青年). In the interim chaste women were variously represented as sacred, praiseworthy, or misguided in terse gazetteer-like reports, sensational pictorial stories, and heartfelt laments penned by both men and women. These dissonant voices reveal the enduring complexity of a practice that had been fundamental to notions of Chinese femininity, morality, and culture for centuries.
Prostitutes in the Dianshizhai Pictorial
Hon-ming Yip
The Chinese University of Hong Kong
The Dianshizhai Pictorial 點石齋畫報 has been known for its vivid representation, in both narrative and illustrational forms, of Chinese society on the verge of modern transformation. It certainly signified a kind of visual modernity as offset lithography was a novel technology in late 19th century China and it emerged along with new social formations that favoured the expansion of market for popular journalism in a modern urban arena to reach out for the masses including female readers/seers. One important aspect of this phenomenon was public visuality. And illustrations in the Dianshizhai Pictorial did embody both social seeing and being seen. Strikingly revolutionary was the depiction of the fair sex in the public space while the most prominent women in public were those of the lower classes, in terms of their popularity as the subject matter of public opinion in mass media such as Shenbao申報, the newspaper that issued the Dianshizhai Pictorial. Among these women, prostitutes stood out as the most popular of all that first captured the public gaze because they were a more convenient object for the public to pry into before the traditional Chinese code of privacy for women became gradually outdated. In the process of compiling a full-text index to the Dianshizhai Pictorial, I have been struck by its large coverage of courtesans, prostitutes, and prostitution. The Pictorial is also recognized to be the pioneer in figuring prostitutes in the city such as Shanghai and for its great influence on the rise of the genre of illustrated urban novels on courtesans in the 1890s.
Indeed, the Dianshizhai Pictorial provides us with a rich body of materials for the studies of prostitution. Scholars in the field have inserted illustrations from the Pictorial in their works to prove their points on the courtesan culture, the urban milieu, the transformation of the trade, etc. Students on women's fashion also used illustrations of the Pictorial to testify to the role of prostitutes as pioneers and trend setters in this regard. The issue is however yet to be explored in terms of the nature of the text, its materiality, representation, contextualization, and so forth. On the research agenda are intertextuality of narration and illustration, relations between illustrators/narrators, their models/objects, and readers/seers, the complexity and subtlety of patronization and subversion, and so on, not to mention the implications for the fields of gender and sexuality.
Urban Women and Protestantism in South China:
Potentials and Limitations from Missionary Sources
Timothy Man Kong Wong
Hong Kong Baptist University
Since late imperial China, Christianity has played a role in changing the status of women in China. The exemplary book by Kwok Pui Lan ably shows us the general picture of Christianity and Chinese Women. There are also books that enable us to understand the works of women missionaries and their impact on the modern fate of Chinese women, including the earlier one by Jane Hunter and the most recent one by Lin Mei-mei. This paper would at first draw from the contributions of prior scholarship to depict a general view about Urban Chinese women and their encounter with Protestantism. In particular, it would try to pay closer attention to the changing situations in South China through the stories of a few Chinese Women who embraced this new religion and accordingly acquired not only a new identity or identities but also new openings for opportunities that would otherwise become unimaginable for their contemporary counterparts.
Although extraordinary at their own terms, their stories were not yet fully explored. This paper will try to make use of these examples to show possibilities of exploring this overlooked history in modern China. In order to achieve this end, this paper will discuss in some details about the potentials and limitations of these sources.