Chapter Eleven:
Women & Men in Society
In the cities of late imperial China, especially among the well-to-do, men and women usually lived their lives in different social worlds. The rigid gender-based social separation that prevailed among upper-crust urbanites was less pronounced in rural areas or among families who had to struggle and scrape to survive. Even those Chinese who did not or could not inhabit a world in which men and women resided in different social spheres were aware that the separation of genders was compelling ideal.
This chapter examines select topics in the realm of gender roles, sexuality, and relations between men and women. We begin by examining ideal moral values for women, which were not identical with those for men. Next we survey the typical male and female life courses in late imperial China, followed by an inquiry into the typical gendered organization of a well-to-do household. From there we move on to an examination of changing social roles and gender definitions for women during the Ming and Qing dynasties. Finally, we look at the practice of footbinding in some detail and use it as a vehicle for thinking about broader issues in Chinese history and human affairs in general.
Topics such as these may be somewhat unusual in a survey course, but they are just as important as any other and can be very interesting as well. For example, cultural scholar Jin Wenxue 金文学 points out that:
In any attempt thoroughly to understand the vast land that is China and the people who reside there, it is not enough to look only at the surface manifestations of culture such as politics, society, literature, and art. At the root of this culture is sex, deriving from the twisting and turning connection between women and men. That is to say, it is examining what lies behind cultural forms that enables someone to gain a three-dimensional understanding of authentic Chinese culture. (Kōshoku to Chūgoku bunka: Chūgoku no rekishi wa yoru ni tsukurareta 好色と中国文化：中国の歴史は夜に作られた [Lust and Chinese culture: Chinese history was created at night], [Kawaguchi-shi, Japan: Nihon kyōhōsha, 2004], p. 5.)
Our brief survey is unlikely to produce the depth of cultural understanding Professor Jin alludes to in the excerpt above, but it is a start. The topics in this chapter are complex and multifaceted, and the most we can do here is consider some of the major themes. There is an additional, optional chapter (a chapter within a chapter) for those who want to pursue these matters in greater depth. It is accessed via a link at the end of this chapter.
There are two general points to bear in mind while reading the material here. First, this chapter focuses primarily on the social life of well-to-do Chinese. Second, throughout our study, be sure to keep in mind the tension between ideal standards, values, et cetera, and actual behavior. Ideal values and actual behavior will inevitably be different to at least some degree, but they also influence each other. In other words, people usually pay at least some attention to ideal social values, even if their behavior may not embody these values or even if it is at odds with them.
We have seen that Confucius regarded filial piety as the root virtue from which all others derive. Later developments in Chinese thought concerning morality and ethics continued to reaffirm this view, at least for men. For women, however, the story was different and more complex because they had to deal with and additional set of moral values. By the Ming dynasty, there were a number of ethical treatises in circulation, often in illustrated editions, that explained ideal behavior in relatively simple terms without metaphysical theory or philosophizing. These treatises typically treated men and women separately. For men, filial piety was unambiguously the root virtue. Women, too, were expected to be filial, but by late imperial times, "chastity" (zhen 貞) received even greater emphasis as the foundational womanly virtue. Indeed, the Qing rulers promoted chastity to the point where it became virtually a cult, as we will soon see. But first let us go back briefly to the Han dynasty and trace the development of "chastity" over time.
The Han dynasty was a time when several important morality books and *scrolls* for and about women were published. These books became classics and were reprinted, revised, expanded on, and read in upper class households in all later dynasties. One of these classical morality texts was Biographies of Exemplary Women (Lienü zhuan 列女傳). Its contents can be summarized by listing the titles of each chapter: 1) Correct Deportment of Mothers, 2) The Virtuous and the Wise, 3) The Benign and Wise, 4) The Chaste and Obedient, 5) The Chaste and Righteous, 6) Those Able in Reasoning and Understanding, 7) Pernicious and Depraved Women, 8) Supplementary Biographies. These chapter titles serve as a summary of the major aspects of ideal female virtue as envisioned by Han dynasty elites and later generations of Chinese (Biographies of Exemplary Women remained in print through the Qing dynasty). To focus our attention, knowing the tremendous importance of chastity in later dynasties, consider two typical biographies that illustrate this virtue. Bear in mind that because Biographies of Exemplary Women was written during the Han dynasty, most of its tales are set in the Zhou dynasty. Even though they are about real people, we should regard the stories about them in Biographies as fiction. These stories, therefore, are reflections of Han dynasty elite values, not necessarily the values of the Zhou period.
First is the biography of *Chaste Jiang.* Jiang was the wife of King Zhao of Chu. One day the king departed for a trip and left his wife behind at the Jian Terrace. While he was away, the king heard that heavy rains were causing the river near the terrace to rise, so he sent an official to take Jiang to a safer location. In his haste, however, the official neglected to bring his seal of commission (a badge to indicate that he was on official business). When the official arrived and asked Jiang to come with him, she replied, "The king has an agreement with his palace ladies that if he sends a summons he must use a seal of commission. Now, you do not carry the seal with you, and so I dare not leave with you." The river is rising rapidly," protested the official, "I fear that it will be too late if I return to get the seal." Jiang replied at length: "I have heard it said that 'the duty of the chaste woman is to honor an agreement and that the brave do not fear to die. This is because they preserve the rule of chastity.' I know that if I follow you I shall live; if I remain I must die. But it is better to remain here and die than to pursue life by breaking an agreement and violating righteousness." The official left to go get the seal, but it was indeed too late, and the flood waters carried Jiang to her death. "Ah!" exclaimed the king upon hearing the news "in preserving righteousness, you died for the rule of chastity. You would not trade your life for an improper act; you kept our agreement and maintained loyalty in order to perfect your chastity."1 He then bestowed on his deceased wife the honorary title "Jiang the Chaste."
Notice here that the word chastity (zhen) in this Chinese text seems to have a broad range of meaning. Certainly it means the avoidance of improper sexual acts or contact, but it also seems to include any behavior that might appear, in the eyes of others, to lead to improper sexual contact. The Chinese "chastity" implied a particularly high level of virtue that precluded nearly any non-ritualized contact between woman and men to whom they were not married. Notice also the several terms associated with chastity in this tale: duty, honor, loyalty, righteousness, and trustworthiness. "Chaste Jiang" is an excellent example of chastity functioning as a root virtue from which other virtues grow.
Next is *Gaoxing of Liang.* Gaoxing was a widow, "glorious in her beauty and praiseworthy in her conduct." Her husband died when she was still young, but she refused to remarry despite many offers from distinguished noblemen of the region. Eventually the king himself heard of Gaoxing and sent a minister bearing betrothal gifts. Gaoxing replied:
My husband unfortunately died young; I live in widowhood to raise his orphans, and [I am afraid that] I have not given them enough attention. Many honorable men have sought me, but I have fortunately succeeded in evading them. Today the king is seeking my hand. I have learned that "the principle for a wife is that once having gone forth to marry, she will not change over, and that she may keep all the rules of chastity and faithfulness." To forget the dead and run to the living is not faithfulness; to be honored and forget the lowly is not chastity; and to avoid righteousness and follow gain is not worthy of a woman.2
Suspecting the main reason the king and others pursued her was because of her physical beauty, Gaoxing took a mirror and knife and cut off her nose, disfiguring herself to do away with such pressure to remarry. The king praised her conduct and honored her with the title "Gaoxing" (高行 roughly, "Lofty Conduct").
Here we see "chastity" take on the added dimension of absolute loyalty and faithfulness to a husband, living or dead. The concrete manifestation of this loyalty in this case was the surviving wife's devoting all her time and energy to the care of her children and refusing to remarry. Here, improper sexual relations--at least in the usual sense of the term--was not even an issue because Gaoxing could have remarried. Notice in both tales that the women show no fear regarding physical harm. Whether one's nose or one's life, no price was too high when upholding moral standards. And remaining chaste--in all senses of the term--was the highest moral standard for women according to nearly all morality texts.
The question of remarriage is worth a closer look. We should not assume from a tale like "Gaoxing" that it was necessarily the norm among elite Chinese women not to remarry in the case of early widowhood. Bear in mind that most of the tales in Biographies of Exemplary Women expressed what were very high ideals during the Han dynasty. It is unlikely that all or even most elite Chinese of the time practiced such ideal behavior. Throughout the time of the Han dynasty, remarriage was common for elite Chinese widows. Among ordinary people, there seems to have been no hesitancy at all for a widowed woman to remarry. Incidentally, morality books never suggested that men refrain from remarrying after the death of a wife, a point we take up in more detail later.
As time went on, the idea that widows should not remarry became steadily stronger and became more thoroughly incorporated into law and social practice. By the Song dynasty, the idea that a woman should never remarry regardless of any adverse consequences was a well-entrenched moral precept among elite Chinese. At this time, if her husband's death left a woman impoverished and she had children to support, she should work doubly hard at making a living by weaving cloth. If she did not have any dependents, an ideal course of action would be suicide. Didactic books from Song times through the Ming dynasty commonly held up the suicide of a widow as a glorious act of chastity and loyalty. The famous Confucian scholar Cheng Yi made the following well-known declaration when asked about a widow remarrying: "Marriage is a match. If one takes someone who has lost her integrity to be his match, it seems he himself has lost his integrity." In response, the questioner asked, "In some cases the widows are all alone, poor, and with no one to depend on. May they remarry?" to which Cheng answered, "This theory has come about only because people of later generations are afraid of starving to death. But to starve to death is a very small matter. To lose one's integrity, however, is a very serious matter."3 During the Song dynasty, the government officially encouraged widows not to remarry and tended to look the other way regarding the occasional practice of following one's husband into death by suicide (xunsi 殉死).
Even though there was strong social pressure for widows not to remarry during the Song dynasty, remarriage still took place even among the reasonably well-to-do. Despite official encouragement of chaste widowhood (jiefu 節夫), it was perfectly legal for a woman to remarry and surviving court documents indicated that many did. Some judges, contrary to Cheng's statement above, regarded remarriage as reasonable in the case of impoverished widows with no means of support. Here is an example of one magistrate's view: "When a woman has no one to depend on and is rearing a son to continue the descent line of her former husband, to give her body to a second husband is within the bounds of reason and there is nothing in the law that clearly prohibits it."4 The complexities of real life, in other words, often prevented people from acting in accord with high moral ideals. Indeed, it is more likely that suicides by widows, or married women, were responses to miserable situations than positive affirmations of moral principles. Consider some details from different time periods:
According to Gujin tushu jicheng, there were records of only three women martyrs during the 210-year rule under the Liao dynasty (916-1125). During the Jin (1115-1234), the number rose to thirty. But the Yuan dynasty (1271-1368) recorded 402 women who killed themselves for chastity. This did not include those who mutilated themselves to avoid a second marriage. When China was finally under the [ethnic] Han rule again in 1368, one of the things that the first Ming emperor did was to collect the stories of these exemplary women, build arches, and give out honors to the villages and clans that produced such women. . . . With encouragement from the top, the cult of female chastity spread like wildfire. The number of exemplary women recorded in the Ming skyrocketed to 35,829 in comparison to the Yuan's record of 408. . . . This did not include those who were not on the record. (Wang Ping, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], pp. 69-70)
It was during the Ming dynasty that official glorification of chaste widowhood and the practice of following husbands into death increased dramatically. The title "the person who has not died yet" (wei wang ren 未亡人) became a common way for widows to refer to themselves. The government began to provide financial and other incentives to households to promote chaste widowhood, and female remarriage among elites declined significantly compared with previous eras.
During the Qing dynasty, the cult of chaste widowhood reached new heights and received even greater support from the state. Essentially the Qing court continued the policies of the previous Ming dynasty, but it did so with greater vigor and was successful in imposing its ideals of womanly behavior on many of the common people as well as the wealthy and powerful. Local communities were instructed to forward the names and biographical sketches of chaste widows to the county government, which sent those meeting the official criteria on up the chain of government. Ultimately, the Board of Rites examined files from around the empire and selected those deserving of official imperial honors. To be eligible, a woman must have been widowed before the age of 30 and must have remained celibate past the age of 50. Possible rewards included a certificate of commendation written in the emperor's own hand, or, even better, money for the construction of a *memorial archway to honor the chaste widow.* Such archways were highly prestigious and included the name of the widow along with stock expressions such as "chaste and filial." In the Jiangnan region (lower Yangzi) between 1644 and 1736, for example, 6,870 widows received imperial honors for their chaste fidelity. Many Qing emperors were determined to seek out ordinary commoner women for such honors and were bothered by the tendency of elites to put forth the majority of candidates. On the other hand, the Qing court vigorously opposed and criticized the practice of widows committing suicide, calling it barbaric and cowardly. In the 18th century, the Qing court sought to construct orphanages in every major city and special homes for indigent chaste widows.5
(For a critical look at the development of the cult of chaste widowhood that includes some additional points, #click here.#)
What about men? Although a few moralists had words of praise for men who remained devoted to the memory of a departed wife, most morality books insisted that widowers remarry. As Patricia Ebrey points out, contemporary "western" readers tend to see misogyny in Confucian writings on widows and remarriage since "to impose on a widow faithfulness to her dead husband without imposing similar faithfulness on widowers hardly seems equal treatment." It is important to understand, however, that the very concept of marriage was different in premodern China. Today, we typically think of marriage as the union of two individuals. In the Chinese case, however, the joining of two individual spouses was only a small part of marriage, which "was primarily about how families perpetuate themselves through the incorporation of new members." In China it was normally the woman who entered a man's household. Therefore, "For a woman, remarriage meant renouncing the family she had joined. It was comparable to a son abandoning his parents, not a man taking a new wife."6 Women, in other words, married into a new household in Chinese thinking (although under certain unusual circumstances, a man might marry into a woman's household). Furthermore, Dorothy Ko points out that in premodern Chinese families:
Boys and girls were often equally loved, but forces larger than human emotions dictated that boys were valued more. To ensure peace and harmony, the Chinese family established clear rules for passing on property, ritual responsibilities, and authority along, and authority along the male line--from grandfather to father to son. . . . The intent was not so much to discriminate against women, as it is often taken to be, but to prevent family assets from falling into the hands of the families of the sons' wives. Unlike our society in which individuals own their houses and cars, in traditional China, strictly speaking, it was the family as a whole--not the sons--that owned houses and land, if any. The wealthiest families thus functioned more as a corporation jealously guarding its assets from hostile takeovers by its marital relatives. (Dorothy Ko, Every Step a Lotus: Shoes for Bound Feet [Toronto: The Bata Shoe Museum; distributed by the University of California Press, 2001], p. 50)
To summarize the material so far, chastity, defined very broadly and strictly, was the root virtue for women in Chinese moral thought from the Han dynasty onward (*see graphic*). In later dynasties, one important manifestation or aspect of chastity was celibate widowhood. It should be emphasized that although morality books were usually (though not always) written by men, both men and women accepted the values described here as "natural," although a close reading of male writing on gender roles and female writing on gender roles often reveals subtle but significant differences in interpreting the same terminology and concepts. Premodern China was indeed a male-dominated society, but as we will see in the remainder of the chapter, women played a major role in defining their own social roles and in giving meaning to them.
One reason that the state took such a strong interest in female virtue in late imperial China was because of a general view that women were the moral foundation of society. This view is common around the world and may be the flip side of male fears or anxieties about the power of female sexuality. In any case, in China we find women portrayed as morally stronger than men and as moral instructors of men from at least as early as the Han dynasty. One example from Biographies of Exemplary Women is the *Chaste Woman of the Capital.* This woman's husband had enemies who wanted to take revenge on him but could not find an effective way to do so. Learning that the man's wife was a person of high moral character, they kidnapped her father to force her to cooperate with their plan to kill her husband (thus setting up a conflict between her duty as a wife and as a daughter). The father sent word to his daughter of the men's plan, and she thought to herself, "If I do not obey them, then I will cause the death of my father and that is unfilial; If I obey them they will kill my husband and that is unrighteous. If I were unfilial or unrighteous, how could I go on living?"7
Having assessed the problem in this way, she decided to give up her own life to spare those of her father and husband. She told the plotters the exact room of the house in which her husband slept. Returning home, she told her husband of his enemies' plan and had him sleep in another room. She dressed herself to resemble her husband and lay down with the doors and windows open. At midnight, the husband's enemies came in and cut off the head of the person they assumed was the husband but was in fact his wife. In the morning, when they looked at the severed head, they were all grieved and awed by the wife's selfless deed and gave up any further plans to kill her husband.
There are several interesting aspects to this story, but we shall examine only that of the wife's moral superiority to her husband and the other men. The husband in particular is remarkable for his moral passivity. Notice especially that the wife's deed had a transforming effect on the murderers. Present-day readers might regard this story and those discussed previously as evidence of repression of women in a male-dominated society, but such an interpretation would surely have struck most premodern Chinese as odd. The moral of this tale in its own time and context was that women, as the moral foundation of the household, can transform society in a positive way if they adhere scrupulously to the highest standards of virtue and apply their intelligence. It was not always the case that Chinese women died in making themselves heard, and their moral voice sometimes took the form of direct censure of a husband or ruler (in the case of a monarch's wife).
Here is a different kind of manifestation of female moral authority, part of a letter written by a woman in the Qing dynasty to her husband. The husband was away in the capital to sit for the third level of exams, which he had failed several times previously. His wife wrote this sarcastic letter after hearing that he had once again failed the exams:
When a man leaves home and goes into the outside world, he should not be distracted by concerns about his domestic affairs. So if you run short of money, my two elder brothers holding office in the capital will be glad to help you out. If you grow depressed staying alone in your lodgings, by all means get out and enjoy yourself with the beautiful women in the pleasure quarters! My brothers won't begrudge you their money! For myself, I long ago cast aside any dream of "growing old together," that old mandarin duck fantasy. As for you, concentrate on this: Serve wise men; befriend humane persons; succeed in your studies, conduct yourself in accordance with the Dao; spread your fame; bring glory to your ancestors! These are your responsibilities. I cannot take them on for you. You are the one who must strive with all your might.8
Among other things, the wife contrasts her two successful older brothers (officials in the capital) with her unsuccessful husband and suggests that he go ask them for money so that he may amuse himself in the red light district. The letter ends with the wife reminding the husband of the responsibilities he has yet to fulfill. The "mandarin duck fantasy" refers to the idea that husbands and wives (who were often strangers before marriage) would gradually draw closer together in friendship as they age, becoming inseparable companions like a pair of mandarin ducks. Mandarin ducks were a standard symbol of a happily married couple. Notice the overall tone of the letter. This is not the voice of a meek, subservient women. It is the voice of moral authority, and it is a voice in which Chinese society had long expected women to speak.
The role of women as moral exemplars co-existed, sometimes uneasily, with other traditional gender-specific roles. The basic tenets of these roles were: 1) the idea of separate spheres; 2) the three followings; and 3) the four womanly accomplishments. The "doctrine of the two spheres," to use Dorothy Ko's terminology,9 contained two points. First, men and women should inhabit separate social spheres, and second, men should inhabit the "outer" sphere and women the "inner " sphere. By the Song dynasty, this doctrine was firmly entrenched among the urban well-to-do. The influential Confucian scholar and historian Sima Guang (司馬光 1019-1085), for example, described what he considered the ideal degree of separation:
In housing there should be a strict demarcation between the inner and the outer parts, with a door separating them. The two parts should share neither a well, a washroom, nor a privy. The men are in charge of all affairs on the outside; the women manage the inside affairs. During the day, men do not stay in their private rooms nor do the women go beyond the inner door without good reason. A woman who has to leave the inner quarters must cover her face (for example, with a veil). Men who walk around at night must hold a candle. Menservants do not enter the inner quarters unless to make house repairs or in case of calamity (such as floods, fires, or robberies). If they must enter, the women should avoid them. If they cannot help being seen (as in floods, fires, and robberies), they must cover their faces with their sleeves. Maids should never cross the inner gate without good reason (young slave-girls also); if they must do so, they too should cover their faces. The doorman and old servants serve to pass messages and objects between the inner and outer quarters of the house, but must not be allowed to enter rooms or kitchens at will.10
Naturally, only wealthy households could have afforded such rigid arrangements, but the housing and living arrangements described here represent the ideal from Song times onward. Most well-to-do household compounds were surrounded by a large outer wall and then subdivided, also with walls, into at least two major areas, an outer courtyard and an inner courtyard. The wall demarcating these two areas also demarcated the living areas for men and women, with women occupying the inner courtyard. Wealthy households were very large. Not only did several generations of relatives typically live in the same household, but so did servants, maids, specialist employees (scholars, tutors, physicians, etc.), and possibly other types of people. The rigid separation of the sexes was, at its core, an attempt to preserve the virtue of chastity, the moral foundation for women who constituted the moral foundation of the household--*at least in theory.* During the daylight hours, most wealthy households in late imperial China maintained a separation of men and women similar to that advocated by Sima Guang above.
At night, however, the potential for transgression increased (Recall the subtitle of Jin Wenxue's book quoted at the start of this chapter: "Chinese history was created at night"). Of course, households made arrangements for married persons to sleep together, although even this type of mixing of the spheres involved formality and restriction (the details depending on circumstances). If it was acceptable for a man to sleep with his wife or concubine, what about the same man visiting a maid during the night or for the husband's father to visit one of his son's wives or concubines? These and other possible combinations of liaisons were entirely possible, with varying degrees of acceptability. The male head of a household, for example, was essentially free to have sexual relations with any of the maids, although such behavior did not conform to ideal moral standards. A younger male member of the household would be less free in this regard, although from the maids' point of view he might be more attractive as a sexual partner than an elderly patriarch. For a man to have sex with his son's wife was improper to the point of being illegal, but owing to the hierarchical nature of filial piety, sons had little practical leverage over fathers who engaged in such behavior. Household sexual affairs, in other words could become highly complicated, and there were any number of #possibilities for transgressing# the strict daytime lines that divided men and women into separate spheres. Indeed, the very rigidity of the separation of men and women may have added to the overall erotic appeal of certain types of transgressions.
(Incidentally, what was the layout, appearance, and function of a typical elite Chinese bedchamber like? Here is a summary of Jin Wenxue's #"The bedchamber revealed."#)
Even during the daytime, it would have been impossible to adhere to a complete policy of separation between men and women. Works of art, for example, commonly depict women in the presence of men in elite households. Even in such cases, however, the women are usually on the sidelines and are present to serve the men, as in, for example, *Examining Antiquities.* The doctrine of separate spheres is most dramatically illustrated in paintings of street scenes from late imperial China. In most such paintings, women are nowhere to be seen on the streets or out in public. When visible, women are usually seen inside doorways or in some other relatively "inner" space. Examine the *painting here* as well as those shown in class (it may, of course, be difficult to distinguish between men and women without some knowledge of Chinese costume of the period).
The next major tenet of ideal gender roles for women in premodern China was the *Three Followings,* sometimes called the "Three Obediences." While the doctrine of separate spheres does not explicitly portray women as subordinate to men, the Three Followings does. In this view, a woman "follows" or "obeys" men throughout the three primary stages of life. Specifically, she follows her father as a girl, her husband after marriage, and her son in her old age. Implied and assumed in the Three Followings is that a woman's primary role in life is that of wife and mother. What about the letter cited above from the wife chastising her husband for his failure in the exams and implied laziness? It hardly seems like a woman "following" or "obeying" her husband. The Three Followings may seem particularly oppressive to contemporary readers, but as we shall see, they could be interpreted in a rather wide variety of ways. Moreover, women played an active role in creating their own interpretations of the Three Followings and other moral precepts. At the same time, it should be emphasized that it was not until the final decades of the Qing dynasty that even a significant minority of Chinese, men or women, began to question the idea of separate spheres or the Three Followings.
The Four Womanly Accomplishments derived from classical sources. They were 1) womanly speech; 2) womanly virtue; 3) womanly deportment; and 4) womanly work. Even more so than the Three Followings, the Four Womanly Virtues were sufficiently vague as to admit a wide variety of interpretations. Study, scholarship, and writing, for example, would certainly have been regarded as men's work among the well-to-do. But could these activities also be considered integral parts of women's work? As we shall see, increasingly large numbers of woman and men came to regard literary pursuits as fully acceptable examples of "woman's work," which also included raising children, weaving, and embroidery. In short, while there were some hard and fast boundaries connected with the Three Followings and the Four Womanly Accomplishments, there was also room for new interpretation. The state had its own interpretations, a variety of men had theirs, and so too did a variety of women. Although nearly everyone affirmed the basic tenets of gender roles in Chinese society, not everyone agreed on the specific, practical meaning of those roles. Should a "good wife" (or "good daughter") study classical literature? A "yes" answer might include as a reason that doing so helps her to be a better mother because she would be able better to train her (male) children for competition in the civil service exams, which would contribute to the prosperity and fame of her household. If the study of classical literature were desirable, would it be appropriate for a woman to travel to the homes of other women to participate in study and poetry groups? In the late Ming dynasty especially, many elite women did just that. Suddenly their "inner" roles brought such women into the world outside the home. Before examining these matters in detail, it is first necessary to cover two other topics: the typical male and female life courses, and relations between husbands, wives, and concubines.
Gendered categories permeated society to such an extent that most Chinese imagined the basic life course for men and women operating in different time zones. Specifically, women matured faster than men and moved through life's stages at a faster pace because the lives of women were measured in seven year units, while those of men were measured in eight year units. Girls lost their baby teeth at 7, boys at 8; girls reached puberty at 14, boys at 16; women reached full sexual maturity at 21, men at 24; women reached the mid point or peak of physical development at 28, men at 32. On the declining side, women's bodies began to decline at 35, whereas men did not start physical deterioration until 40. At 49, women supposedly ceased menstruation, and the assumption was that they also lost all interest in sex (hence a widow need only be certified as having been celibate until 50 to be eligible for imperial honors). Men, on the other hand, saw sexual energy start to decline beginning at 56, a process not complete until 64.
Because the average age differences between husbands and wives was only about three years (with the wife younger), at least in the Qing period, a peculiar imbalance often resulted. As Mann explains: "A wife at menopause was likely to find her spouse, aged roughly 53, at the make-or-break point in his career, just when his aging parents needed the most care and when the couple's children were engaged in their own life-course passages: early education, marriage, childbearing, or examination taking."11 Bear in mind that it was not necessarily the case that women and men actually experienced such a different aging cycle in purely physical terms. The ideas above should be regarded as social constructs, not biological facts, even though most Chinese would have regarded them as the latter.
The responsibilities that one assumed while moving through the different stages of life were always specific to gender. To keep this section reasonably brief, let us examine these stages in some detail only for women, mentioning the situation of men only for brief comparative purposes. The main point to keep in mind for elite men is *career pressure,* first to pass the exams (and many failed) and then, if successful in passing the highest exam, to negotiate the treacherous waters of an official career. Those elite men who did not attain qualifications sufficient to become officials often pursued careers in business, typically managing one or more aspects of their household's business activities.
Men often imagined the "inner quarters" of the household to be a tranquil paradise free from the pressures they experienced in the "outer" world. Few women would have shared this view. The life course for girls and women was, in many respects, a series of traumatic adjustments to new situations until the onset of old age around age fifty. After that point, life generally became better for most women. Men, by contrast suffered somewhat less in the early years, but usually had to wait until their mid sixties before they could start to unload life's burdens. The first traumatic adjustment for girls came at around age seven. The standard way of expressing the end of the first seven-year unit was to say that girls "shed their milk teeth" at 7. But this expression was a euphemism for a much greater and more painful transition: footbinding. We will examine this topic in greater detail later. At its core, foot binding was an erotic practice, although you may not be able to imagine it in these terms yet. In contrast to women in Ming China, Qing elite women tended not to talk about footbinding, which had become by that time a taboo, highly private subject. From the standpoint of a small child, the process must have been horrifying, as the following passage from a contemporary novel suggests. The protagonist is a girl named Fragrant Lotus:
Fragrant Lotus dared not even speak, and, when she peered through the crack of the slightly opened door into the courtyard, she shivered at the gruesome scene--the gate was shut tight and secured with a huge bar. The big black dog was tied to a post. A pair of red crested, white-feathered roosters--from who knew where--lay flopping helplessly on the ground. Their rough, fingerlike legs were tied with twine. What did roosters have to do with foot binding? In the middle of the courtyard a whole set of things was laid out: a small table, some stools, a cleaver, a pair of scissors, a jar of alum, a jar of sugar, a kettle, some cotton, and some rage. The starched foot-binding bandages lay coiled in neat rolls on the table. On the front of Granny's coat were pinned a few huge needles normally used for sewing quilts; from the needles' eyes trailed lengths of white cotton thread. Although young, Fragrant Lotus understood very well the scene in front of her and the amount of suffering it portended.
Granny sat her down on one of the stools and took off Fragrant Lotus' shoes and socks.
With red, swollen eyes Fragrant Lotus begged, "Granny, just one more day. Tomorrow. I promise you, tomorrow!"
Granny did not hear a word. Sitting facing Fragrant Lotus, she pulled the two roosters to the ground and stepped on them with one foot. With her other foot she stepped on the roosters' feet. Her hands quickly plucked several clumps of feathers from the roosters' breasts, and with the cleaver she sliced the breasts open. Before the blood could begin to flow, Granny grabbed Fragrant Lotus' feet and pressed them--first one, then the other--into the roosters' stomachs. The hot, burning, sticky sensations and the convulsions of the dying roosters so shocked Fragrant Lotus that she tried to pull her feet back. But Granny screamed madly, "Don't move!"
Fragrant Lotus had never heard such a tone from Granny, and she froze. She just watched as Granny pressed her feet into the roosters. Granny's won feet stood hard on the two roosters to hold them down. Fragrant Lotus shuddered; the roosters heaved; and Granny's arms and legs shook from exhaustion. They all trembled as one. As she pressed ever harder, Granny's hips rose from the stool, and Fragrant Lotus feared Granny could not hold this position and might fall forward and crash into her.
In short, while Granny relaxed her grip and pulled out Fragrant Lotus' feet. The rooster's blood flowed freely and her feet were covered with it, scarlet and sticky. Granny flung the two roosters aside; one stiffened and died immediately, the other flapped weakly toward its death. She pulled over a wooden basin, washed and dried her granddaughter's feet, and placed them on her knees. The binding was to begin. Fragrant Lotus as so confused she wondered if she should cry or beg or throw a fit, but all she did was watch Granny, who grabbed her feet--first the right and then the left. She left one big toe alone, and she pressed the other four toes downward and back, at a slight angle toward the arch. With a muted crack, the bones in the toes broke and gave way. Fragrant Lotus cried out, mostly in surprise. Granny had already shaken loose a roll of bandage and tied the four toes securely down. Fragrant Lotus saw the new shape of her feet, and even before she felt the pain, she began to cry.
Granny's hand moved fast. She was afraid Fragrant Lotus would start to kick and scream, so she quickly completed the binding. She wrapped the bandage around the four toes, down to the arch, up over the instep, behind the heel, and then quickly forward. over the four toes again. On the next round, when the bandage came over the toes and back toward the instep, she gave it a sharp tug toward the heel so the four toes bent even more downward toward the sole. . . . She wrapped from front to back, layer on layer, until the four toes, now next to the arch, were locked firmly in place, as if by metal bands. They were unable to move, even a minute fraction of an inch.
In her pain and fright Fragrant Lotus shrieked like a pig being butchered. . . . [She] grabbed Granny so hard her fingernails drew blood from the old woman's arms. But even if heaven had fallen now, Granny would have ignored it. Her hands kept moving around and around, with each wrap the bandage became shorter and shorter, until it eventually came to an end. . . . Granny brushed back the crescent locks of hair stuck to her sweaty forehead; the muscles on her face relaxed, and she said, "Well it's over. Aren't they nice?"12
But the process was not over. Indeed, it had just started. Over the next few weeks, Granny forced Fragrant Lotus to walk on the newly-bound feet, re-binding them tighter and tighter. Feng's description of this re-binding process makes the experience of the initial binding seem relatively mild. (By the way, Fragrant Lotus does rather well for herself in the end, thanks primarily to her skillful use of her sexually powerful feet--for which she had Granny to thank.)
It is unlikely that Chinese girls were overly concerned with "shedding the milk teeth" at this time in their lives! By 14, the worst pain of the footbinding process was over, and girls entered puberty. With their small feet, girls at this age were eligible to marry, and this life passage was symbolized by pinning the hair. At this age, sexual desire must have started to make its appearance in women, but they were expected to keep it suppressed. Males, on the other hand, at least in elite households, were encouraged to indulge their youthful sexual desire (simply stated, to get it out of their systems so that they could concentrate on passing the exams). Formal sex education was not available for young women, but because pre-married young women lived in proximity to wives, concubines, and others, it is almost certain that they learned something of sexual matters from observation of and conversations with these older women. Women usually married soon after reaching puberty, and marriages were generally arranged by parents in cooperation with professional matchmakers. Rarely did husband and wife know each other prior to betrothal.
Marriage was another traumatic shock for most young women, often roughly similar in magnitude to footbinding. For one thing, the onset of sexual activity was abrupt. Even worse, a woman was taken from her natal family and thrust into a stranger's household where she occupied a relatively low position in the hierarchy. As Mann explains:
For newly married young women the very intimacy of natal family ties compounded the profound loneliness and alienation that followed her wedding. Even if she cared for her husband, a bride from an upper-class family had to spend most of her early married life in the company of her mother-in-law or the other women in her husband's family. Though many affectionate memoirs attest to the bonds between a kindly mother-in-law and her devoted daughter-in-law, mothers-in-law were demanding and sometimes cruel. A husband's sisters or his brothers' wives might be vindictive or spoiled, jealous of the attention a new bride received and anxious about their own future. In any case, since the average elite couple waited more than six years for a son, a new bride could not expect comfort from children for several years after marriage.13
A young husband rarely had sufficient authority within the household to shelter his wife from abuse in the "inner quarters," even if he knew of her situation (unlikely, at least not in full) and had the time and energy to be concerned with it (also unlikely).
Women in elite households called the childbearing years of marriage the years of "rice and salt," and they generally constituted the busiest time in a woman's life. Duties connected with raising children, looking after sick or aging household members, and managing certain economic aspects of the household required much time and energy, even with the assistance of servants. Once she made it through these years and into her fifties, however, the burdens of household life began to ease. Having proven herself by bearing and raising children and assisting in household management, a woman in a wealthy household had earned a high place within its hierarchy. She had increasing time to devote to literary pursuits as well as religious devotion, usually some form of Buddhism.
It would be around this time, or slightly earlier, that a woman's husband might bring one or more concubines into the household. The intrusion, sexually and otherwise, of a younger woman was sometimes a source of stress, but owing to the beliefs about physical maturation discussed above plus the widespread social acceptance of concubinage and relatively greater male sexual promiscuity, a common reaction was for women to turn to private pursuits as a respite from the decades of hard work they had endured. Laws and social custom strictly forbade a concubine from taking a wife's place, so there was usually no threat to her social standing or status within the household.
Wives, Concubines, Husbands & the Family
The topic of relations between men and women and gender roles is inextricably interconnected with marriage practices and the family institution. If we regard concubines as secondary wives, then it is safe to say that Chinese society during any time period expected all adults to marry. Single life was abnormal, except in the case of "chaste" widows and Buddhist monks or nuns. Even slaves were expected to marry, and Qing dynasty law made it a crime for owners of slaves to be negligent in getting them married at the appropriate time. Most women married in their teenage years, and most men married in their late teens or early twenties.
Throughout much of China's history, there was a shortage of wives for at least two reasons. First, wealthy men often purchased concubines, many of whom originally came from impoverished families. Second, destitute families in some regions practiced female infanticide. The result of these two factors was a shortage of wives among the poorest groups in society, where the rate of men who never found a wife could be as high as ten percent in certain times and places.
Being a wife or concubine in an upper class household usually intersected with sex, motherhood and child rearing, the education of children, relations with the husband, relations with other women of the household, and certain forms of domestic work other than raising children. This section focuses rather narrowly on the relationship between husbands, wives, and concubines. From the Song dynasty onward, there was a sharp legal distinction between wives (also called "primary wives") and concubines (also called "secondary wives"), with the former having higher status.
In theory, a wife should defer to and obey her husband just like a child should defer to and obey his or her parents. Here is a classical, idealized summary of the relationship between husband and wife, starting with its cosmological underpinnings:
From the chaotic cosmos were yin and yang separated;
From emanate force and amorphous form were they moulded and shaped.
With Fu Xi as ruler were the divine and the human distinguished.
Thus began male and female, ruler and ruled.
The family's dao is regulated and the ruler's dao stabilized.
Feminine virtue honours yielding, holding within codes of moral behaviour;
Submissive and meek is the female's proper role within the household.
Having assumed matrimonial robes, she should reverently prepare the offerings;
Dignified and grave in deportment, be a model of propriety.
(Quoted in Shane McCausland, First Masterpiece of Chinese Painting: The Admonitions Scroll [New York: George Braziller, 2003]. p. 39.)
*Click here* for an illustration of this text. Similarly, a famous line from the popular morality text, Classic of Filial Piety for Girls states, "The husband is heaven. How could one not serve him?" *Shown here* is part of a Song-era painting made to illustrate this passage from the text. The respective postures of the husband and wife reveal the latter's bodily show of deference as "she bows her head slightly, as if awaiting instructions."14 Compare the postures of the husband and wife in this depiction with those of the father and son *shown here*--part of a Song painting illustrating the Classic of Filial Piety.15
In idealized visions, wives assisted their husbands by taking care of household matters (keeping financial records, supervising servants, etc.) so that the husband could concentrate on his tasks in the "outer" sphere--studying for the civil service exams, for example. Husbands and wives ideally adhered to a division of labor that left relatively little time for them to be with each other.
Marriages were usually arranged by parents and other family members. In elite households, marriages served to reinforce business and political alliances between families. Because husbands and wives were often strangers prior to marriage, one might wonder how common it was for couples to love each other. A loving marriage was in fact the ideal situation, and diaries, poems and other forms of literature attest that such marriages, if not a majority, did sometimes exist. "Love," however, has a number of different aspects. The typical Chinese conception of a "loving couple" was that as they go through life's trials and tribulations together, they gradually appreciate each other more and more, acquiring a deep, mature affection in their later years akin to that of cherished friends.
Romantic or passionate love was not the ideal (except perhaps during the late Ming dynasty--see the next section), and husbands and wives often behaved quite formally in other's presence. A typical image of a loving couple might show the two standing together in a pavilion watching the scenery with serene looks on their faces. They would not be holding hands, much less embracing each other. The classic symbol of marital happiness is the mandarin duck, which lives in pairs and mates for life.
Ideally, husbands and wives tended to their respective functions with diligence, cultivated their moral virtue, and gradually became spiritually closer. Sometimes that happened; often it did not. Husbands could be violent, and wives could be bossy and vindictive. There was no shortage of ways husbands and wives could make each others lives miserable. It was generally acceptable for husbands to beat their wives as a form of "education." Beating a wife to death, however, would result in serious legal problems unless it could be shown that she had behaved extremely improperly and the husband had not actually intended to kill her. In one case, for example, a man who had beaten his wife to death explained his reasons to the local magistrate as follows: "My mother was yelling at my wife, and my wife was talking back. I couldn't take it, and in my anger I beat her. By accident I killed her." The official was sympathetic and assured the man that he would not face the death penalty because "beating an unfilial daughter-in-law is not the same as beating a wife."16 In other words, because the "offense" (talking back to the mother-in-law) involved considerations of filial piety, the extreme use of force became more acceptable in light of regarding the dead woman not as a "wife" but as a "daughter."17 Notice also the great importance of relative social position in the operation of the law, which was typical from the middle dynasties onward.
In terms of intra-household relations, the greatest degree of friction was often between the wife and her mother-in-law. Being the mother of her husband gave mothers-in-law great power over wives. New wives in particular often went through a sort of hazing experience, criticized at every turn by an overbearing mother-in-law.
Wives beaten by their husbands often reacted by beating the concubines or maids. Also, it seems to have been almost as common for a strong-willed wife to bully a timid husband as it was for a domineering husband to beat his wife. In very rare cases, wives actually beat their husbands physically. More typically, they employed verbal and other forms of harassment. Here is part of one man's description of his wife's sister: "My wife's father's fifth daughter, named Zongshu, was quick-witted from youth and knew how to read. When she came of age, she married the scholar Dong, twenty-eight, of Xiangyang. Dong was weak and timid, [Zhong]shu arrogant and overbearing. She bossed him around as though he were a servant." Dong soon died, and his bossy wife even had strong words for his spirit, which she uttered through a medium. When her father proposed that he find her a second husband, she said, "I've already been troubled once in my life by a literary official and have no desire to repeat the experience. I'd be satisfied with a military officer."18
Wives from families with higher status than their husbands or the wives of husbands adopted into the wife's family had relatively greater power vis-à-vis their husbands. Morality books, therefore, warned against these kind of marriages on the grounds that the husband would have difficulty "controlling" his wife. Court records indicate that judges (local officials) sometimes admonished husbands not to let their wives to boss them around. In short, different personalities and circumstances could result in a number of possibilities for marital stresses and difficulties.
Relations between a single husband and a single wife could be complicated enough. Concubines made matters even more intricate. In wealthy households, most men in their forties or fifties had *one or more concubines.* A man at this age who could afford a concubine but did not have one would have been a social oddity. As you might imagine, these concubines were usually young and in the prime of their physical beauty. A man might tell his wife, for example, that he was acquiring a concubine so that she could have someone to help her out with household tasks now that "my dear wife" is getting older. Other husbands told their wives that having a concubine (or two) was necessary for status reasons. When the husband began spending most of his nights in the quarters of the new concubine, jealousy was certainly a possible result, especially if the husband and his primary wife had been having regular sexual relations prior to the concubine's arrival. The introduction of a concubine, particularly the first one, was nearly always tense for all parties. The young concubine would have made the wife aware of how much she had aged, and, although the wife might not dream of talking about them in direct terms, sexual issues complicated the emotional responses.
The wife's legal status in the household was secure. She would always outrank any concubines. After the initial shock, several courses of action became possible. During the daytime, men and women generally lived in separate places. Under such circumstances, husbands were often unable to protect concubines from the wrath of a jealous wife, who could make a concubine's life miserable in many ways. Some wives, on the other hand, became increasingly detached from household affairs and turned to religion (usually some variety of Buddhism) for solace. In other cases, wives and concubines got along fine, some becoming dear friends. When the age difference was great, as if often was, some concubines looked to the wife as a substitute mother figure. As with relations between husbands and wives, relations between wives and concubines were open to a rather wide range of possibilities.
Concubines often came from impoverished households. Typically, they would be sold to traveling concubine brokers (or their agents) while still small girls. The concubine broker would calculate the cost of raising and educating the girl and weigh it against how much she could command as a concubine at age sixteen or seventeen. The broker would pay the girl's parents a sum that, when added to the cost of raising the girl, was still less than her anticipated selling price. To most readers such cold calculation and trade in human beings may sound heartless and cruel. Before reaching that conclusion, however, we should keep several things in mind. First, personal freedom for nearly anyone in premodern China, male or female, was much less than what we have in today's United States. Second, had the girl not been sold, her life would probably have been one of constant toil just to keep one step ahead of starvation. Training to be a concubine, though rigorous, provided girls with education and a measure of material security. A concubine in a wealthy household might be able to enjoy a quality of life her mother back on the farm could not even imagine. Or she might be beaten to death by a jealous wife. Fate would have been hard to predict. Life in Song or Ming China was difficult for many people, as was also the case in Europe at the same time. Finally, we should keep in mind that behavior related to sex, courtship and marriage in contemporary America often contains much more calculation of economic gain and loss than many people might want to admit.
Changes in Gender Roles: Late Ming & Early Qing
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, gender roles among elite households in China underwent significant changes, which Dorothy Ko19 has examined in detail. We begin with some relevant background information. By the latter half of the Ming dynasty, increases in literacy combined with efficient printing technology had produced conditions for a thriving commercial press. Although the vast majority of China's population remained illiterate, even a 10% literacy rate would have resulted in a huge number of potential book buyers in absolute terms, considering a population of over 200 million. Aside from books marketed for those studying for the civil service exams, commercial publishers strove to produce books that would sell as many copies as possible, and Confucian morality books were not high on the list. Novels and plays did much better, and a heavy dose of romance and sex in such works did nothing to hurt sales. Even stuffy Confucian scholars often enjoyed the latest spicy novels, but they had to read them secretively to keep up appearances. Poetry also sold well and should be thought of as roughly comparable to the CDs, MP3 files, and DVDs of today.
An interesting and important phenomenon in the world of popular literary culture was *The Peony Pavilion* (Mudanting), the late 16th-century masterpiece of playwright Tang Xianzu (#image#) (1550-1616). This play was a tribute to the power of love and featured a female protagonist, Du Li'niang, who was highly educated, sensuous yet respectable, and strong willed. She knew what she wanted and strove to get it, achieving success in the end. The Peony Pavilion soon became immensely popular both in book form and in live performance. Tang became a celebrity among women and received fan mail from all over China. Some writers expressed their love for Tang and offered themselves to him. Du became an alter ego for her female audience in particular, although many men undoubtedly also found her captivating. The play inspired some women to take up the literary arts as a serious vocation, the first major project often being a critical commentary on the play (commentaries were a fully respectable literary genre in China).
The uproar over The Peony Pavilion was part of a broader phenomenon of late Ming literary and social life: the cult of qing 情. Qing might be translated as passion, love, or desire, depending on the context. Interest in qing dominated the literary life of the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, and it soon became a cliché among educated men and women. Literary critics wrote essays explaining this somewhat elusive concept, and the late Ming literary world celebrate love, romance, and, under certain circumstances, even passionate sex. Tang Xianzu described qing as follows in his preface to The Peony Pavilion (qing is translated as "love"):
Love is of source unknown, yet it grows ever deeper. The living may die of it, by its power the dead live again. Love is not at its fullest if one who lives is unwilling to die for it, or if it cannot restore to life one who has so died. And must the love that comes in dream necessarily be unreal? For there is no lack of dream lovers in this world. Only for those whose love must be fulfilled on the pillow and for whom affection deepens only after retirement from office, is it entirely a corporeal matter.20
In its usage in passages like this one, qing lies at the nexus of physical lust and aesthetic passion, the intellect and the emotions.
Some writers interpreted qing as a force tending to minimize the difference between the sexes. "Although men and women are different," stated one, "in love they are all the same." But this emphasis on minimizing differences was a minority view. More commonly, commentators *celebrated qing* as a force that accentuated the distinctiveness and difference between the male and female spheres.21 The cult of qing helped bring sexuality into the realm of explicit literary discourse, and both male and female commentators acknowledged that women were entitled to physical and emotional satisfaction in their relations with men--albeit within the bounds of marriage and the family. Sexuality also became a proper subject of poetry and other literary genres, again, provided that it was expressed within the proper context.
A related development was the emergence of companionate marriage (caizi jiaren 才子佳人) as a literary ideal. In this vision of marriage, both man and wife should be well educated and compatible, both sexually and intellectually. Such a couple would be partners in love, lust, friendship, and scholarship. From the inner chambers, the wife would directly contribute to the advancement of the husband's career in the outer realm. The prototypical example of a companionate marriage was a famous couple in the Song dynasty. Here is the wife's poem written after her husband's death:
We were happy together in those years,
Our lives like incense filling sleeves
By the fire we made tea.
We traveled on beautiful horses, by flowing streams, in light carriages,
Undaunted by sudden storms,
So long as we could share a cup of warm wine and sheets of paper.
Now embracing each other is impossible.
Can there be times like those ever again?22
Elsewhere she wrote as follows of her life with her husband:
We had the finest paper and the most complete collection of paintings and calligraphy in our house. After dinner, we would retreat to our Guilai Hall, heat up water for tea, and finger through piles of books and histories. [We had a little contest]--name an event, then name the book title, chapter, page, line. The winner can have a sip of tea as a reward. When both were right, we lifted up our cups and broke into laughter; sometimes [we got so excited that] the tea spilled all over our laps.23
It is important to stress that although companionate marriage had become a literary ideal by late Ming times, it was not the case that most marriages were actually like the situation described above. Parents often worked hard to place their daughters into households where such a match was at least possible, but elite marriages remained primarily a means of forming business and political connections between households, and individuals had little choice regarding marriage partners. The ideal of the companionate marriage, therefore, may have done more psychological harm than good in some cases. All too often, the image of companionate marriage served to highlight the great gap between ideal and reality. One way that women coped with this gap was by turning to literature.
As mentioned above, starting in the late sixteenth century, we find a significant rise in the number of women who #pursued literary careers.# That they did so is not to say that these women abandoned the traditional roles of wife and mother. Indeed, many women grounded their literature in precisely those roles. Women began to publish their work, and publishers began to discover a thriving market for poetry and literary criticism by female authors. Women who made a name for themselves in the literary world often became the pride of their localities. The following entry from the 1596 edition of a county gazetteer praises a local woman-of-letters, Lu Shengji: "Her father died when she was young, and her mother ordered Lu to marry Zhou Kai as wife. Lu was given to poetry by nature. Depressed and unhappy over marrying a man who failed to be her match, she poured her sorrows and frustration into her verse. Her poetry collection Scribbles by Wenluan (Wenluan cao), was published and is known to the world.24 Wenlaun, by the way, was Lu's literary name. Notice that her poetry was inspired by the lack of a companionate marriage, at least if the description of her situation given here is correct.
Some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century publishers adopted the view that women were generally better writers than men. Men, the argument went, poured their time and energy into preparation for the grueling process of sitting for the civil service examinations. These examinations encouraged a rigid, uninteresting style of prose, lacking emotional richness. Women, on the other hand, had more incentive to craft their writing as an art that expressed true human feelings. In any case, publishers and readers began to take women seriously as writers during the later Ming dynasty.
A high level of education was no longer something only for men. The late Ming rise in education levels among elite women was not only the result of the increased role of women in literary circles or the ideal of companionate marriage, although these were contributing factors. Another reason for high levels of education among women was the increasingly stiff competition in the civil service exams. Although women did not take these exams, if a man were to pass the exams at a reasonably early age (e.g., his 30s), his education and training had to #start when he was but a few years old.# To fulfill their roles as good mothers, therefore, women needed a full education so that they could teach their sons (and daughters) and supervise their studies during the early years.
A tension developed during the seventeenth century concerning the proper roles of women. Nobody questioned that women should be wives and mothers--nothing else was even conceivable. The issue was how to be the best possible wife and mother. An older tradition glorified the simple, uneducated, plain-talking women who taught others by being a living (and often dying) example of simple, concrete moral virtues. Many of the stories from Biographies of Exemplary Women fall into this category. On the other hand, even by the Song period it was common for prominent men to attribute their success to mothers who drilled the Confucian classics into them at an early age. The Ming state formally recognized the contribution of women in educating men through a system of honorary titles. "A woman's niche," says Ko, "was enlarged to encompass both the kitchen and the scholar's studio."25 Recall from earlier chapters the tremendous power that literature and the written word in general possessed in Chinese culture. By mastering the classical literary tradition, women acquired cultural and moral authority on a par with men.
The ideal woman in seventeenth-century China embodied a mix of three qualities: talent, virtue, and beauty. Virtue had long been part of the mix, as had beauty. Talent, here meaning scholarly and literary ability, was newer and more controversial. Once it became the norm for elite women to acquire a classical education, however, there was no turning back the clock. Scholarship by women continued to flourish and to be appreciated by both men and women from this time onward.
In summary, the late Ming dynasty experienced a small scale revolution in gender roles. I say "small scale" because new attitudes about romance, sex, literature, learning, and women's roles modified but did not fundamentally change the prevailing system of gender roles. Nearly all elite women, for example, continued to defined themselves socially as wives and mothers who adhered to the Three Followings and the Four Womanly Accomplishments. But they also reinterpreted those roles, redefining what it meant to be a good wife and mother. Many claimed to have rediscovered the true meaning of womanly roles based on classical examples such as the beautiful, talented, and virtuous Ban Zhao (#image#) a famous figure from the Han dynasty. In Chinese high culture, reinterpreting a classical text or concept while claiming simply to be elucidating its "true" meaning was the usual way to advance new ideas. Confucius, for example, claimed merely to be a lover of ancient antiquity, not an innovative thinker. Women of the late Ming dynasty often claimed to be following in the footsteps of Ban Zhao and other learned women of antiquity, when, in fact, they were forging new roles for themselves by broadening the boundaries of the categories of wife and mother.
The Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries
Some of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments in gender roles carried over to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but there were also major changes during the Qing dynasty. China's new Manchu emperors enhanced their authority to rule by adopting Confucian learning and values, but they also retained many aspects of Manchu culture. The early Qing emperors esteemed Spartan, martial values, and they disapproved of the Ming-era sexual customs in the imperial palace and the homes of top ministers. Specifically, the Qing rulers dismissed the many female entertainers (dancers and courtesans) that had traditionally served in the palace and prohibited their presence in the households of leading ministers as well.
During the Ming dynasty, courtesan (jinü 妓女) culture flourished at all levels of well-to-do society, and there was extensive interaction between the wives and concubines of elite households and courtesans.26 The world of the elite brothel and the elite household overlapped intellectually and aesthetically in Ming times, and poetry and novels often celebrated courtesan culture. As Jin points out, there was cultural and literary exchange between men of letters, artists and courtesans, with the Qinhuai River in Nanjing being especially famous as a place where these two groups associated. Confucius’ tomb was nearby, as was the examination grounds. Those who passed needed to celebrate and those who failed needed to console themselves. The boats on the Qinhaui River were ready to serve those needs. The courtesans in this area played a major role in nurturing and extending Chinese literary and artistic culture, especially in the realm of music, poetry, painting, and dance. (Kōshoku to Chūgoku no bunka, p. 40) Once the Qing emperors established themselves firmly in power, however, they insisted on as much of a separation of these two worlds as possible. Courtesan culture moved to the margins of the literary world, and although wealthy men still patronized the "pleasure quarters," their learned wives moved to eliminate all traces of courtesan influence from their poems and other writings.
The Qing state attempted to regulate sex and gender roles in other ways. For example, early Qing emperors attempted to prohibit footbinding. The prohibition proved unenforceable, unlike the requirement that men wear the queue, because women grew up in relative seclusion. Eventually the Qing government accepted footbinding as inevitable. As we have already seen, the Qing government vigorously promoted the cult of chaste widowhood as well as other classical virtues, but it actively criticized widow suicides. Unlike its attempt to prohibit footbinding, the Qing state was relatively successful in encouraging chaste widowhood--or at least the outward appearance of it. During the Qing dynasty, officials were more diligent than ever in attempting to police female behavior. They tended to be especially suspicious of religious observances as a potential threat to chastity. One official wrote that the Zhiping Temple "has 22 chambers. Like bottomless sacks in plentiful supply, they become havens for intimate encounters where women can indulge their licentious passions without restraint." A provincial governor wrote:
A woman's proper ritual place is to be sequestered in the inner apartments. When at rest, she should let the screen fall [in front of her]; when abroad, she must cover her face to distance herself from any suspicion or doubt and prevent herself from coming under observation. But instead we find young women accustomed to wandering about, all made up, heads bare and faces exposed, and not a care in the world! Some climb into their palanquins and go traveling in the mountains. Some ascend to pavilions and gaze at the evening moon. In the most extreme cases, we find them traveling around visiting temples and monasteries, burning incense and forming societies for prayer and meditation, kneeling to listen, chanting the sutras. . . . They may spend the night in a mountain temple to fulfill a vow made to ensure the birth of a son. Or they may renounce the world and shut themselves up in a cloistered chamber, performing menial services on the first and fifteenth days of each lunar month. The monks and priests entertain them cordially; evil youths encircle the place. And their husbands and relatives think nothing of it! This is really a blight on the reputation of the local community!27
These passages indicate, among other things, that despite footbinding, women could and did get out of the house. In the late Ming dynasty, women frequently traveled to meet with other women in literary circles or to visit shrines and temples. In the Qing dynasty they apparently continued to do so, but government officials often regarded such activity as problematic. The cases of local officials severely punishing prostitutes and adulterers in some of the stories in Yuan Mei's Censored by Confucius reflect the Qing dynasty tendency for officials to take an active role in promoting strict sexual morality.28
In part because of state policy and in part for other reasons, the Qing dynasty was a time of a revival of scholarly interest in China's classical literature. This classical revival affected gender roles. Scholars, both male and female, began to notice that China's classical tradition provided extensive evidence of literary activity by women. Women, they discovered, tended to speak in two voices in the classics: that of the moral instructress and that of the passionate lover. Qing-dynasty scholars tended to single out examples of the moral instructress for praise but to suppress or write off the voice of the passionate lover. Notice by contrast that the tendency during the Ming dynasty was to accept both voices as legitimate and important. In the Qing period, the Ming formula of talent, virtue and beauty was reduced to talent and virtue, with "beauty" (insofar as it suggested the physical passions) left out or minimized.
One of the best examples of women's writing during the Qing dynasty was a lengthy collection of women's poems from throughout the empire called Correct Beginnings: Women's Poetry of Our August Dynasty (Guochao quixiu zhengshi ji), compiled by Wanyan Yun Zhu and published in 1831, which Mann analyzes in detail.29 Yun Zhu regarded poetry as the locus of women's scholarly authority, and she thought that the ideal female poetic voice should perfectly unite talent and virtue. She was not interested in "beauty" in the Ming dynasty sense, and explicitly excluded all poems dealing with love, sex, or romance. She also explicitly excluded the poetic work of courtesans, again in sharp contrast with Ming traditions. Proper poetry, she thought, was the truest expression of women's moral authority. She summarized the principles by which she compiled the anthology as follows:
In compiling this anthology, I have attached the greatest importance to purity of emotional expression and the harmony and elegance of the rhymes; style has been a secondary matter. As for female adepts and Buddhist nuns, among whom are many able poets, they are not fit to appear in the ranks of respectable ladies, and accordingly I have not included them. However, I have devoted a special section to Xia Longyin and Zhou Yubu, who in fact had hidden reasons for avoiding fame and preserving their chastity in order to display their concealed virtues.
Poems about sexual love and romance by courtesans, those fallen women of the green chambers [a euphemism for a brothel], whom earlier compilers anthologized profusely and rhapsodized over, are not included here. However, women like Liu Shi, Wei Rongxiang, Xiang Yun, and Cai Run were in fact able to live a pure life in their advanced years. Accordingly, out of respect for the empire's practice of honoring such persons, I have included them in a separate chapter in order to display their quest for purity.30
In short, we see in this widely-read poetry anthology and elsewhere the deeply-seated place that "talent" (scholarly and literary attainment) had come to occupy as part of elite women's self-definition in Qing times--a continuation of the trend in late Ming times. The late Ming cult of qing, however, is nowhere to be seen in the mainstream female literature of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
(For a closer look at the prohibitionist mentality that developed during the Qing dynasty with respect to sex, #click here.#)
We now turn to one of the most complex topics in Chinese social history: footbinding. The practice of binding female feet was widespread throughout most of Chinese history among the upper strata of society, and, by the start of the Qing dynasty, it had spread to almost all social groups, even relatively poor peasants. Despite the widespread practice of footbinding, many consider its discussion in a classroom environment is considered "politically incorrect." The main reason for this silence is the legacy of imperialism. European and American imperialists from the nineteenth century onward commonly cited footbinding as evidence of China's alleged social backwardness and inferiority (while almost never acknowledging analogous practices in their own countries). To talk of footbinding today, therefore, conjures up images of an exotic, strange land, with echoes of the "Orientalist"31 discourses that contributed to western imperialism in China--a topic to which most Chinese today remain acutely sensitive. Indeed, it is not unusual in today's China to deny that footbinding was ever widely practiced. In this view, the very idea of widespread footbinding is a product the western Orientalist mind. Western imperialists conjured up many strange and inaccurate images of China, but they did not fabricate the notion that footbinding was widespread. Writing ca. 1990, John King Fairbank commented on the lack of scholarly attention to the topic of footbinding as follows:
So general has been Chinese avoidance of the topic of footbinding that modern Chinese publication on it is meager. Westerners studying China naturally imbibe Chinese sensitivities, and few are muckrakers by temperament. Yet footbinding darkened the lives of most Chinese women for several centuries, with social and psychic repercussions that call for historical appraisal. (John King Fairbank, China: A New History [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992], p. 173.)
Reluctance to talk about footbinding is nothing new. The bound foot has long been a taboo subject. According to Wang Ping:
Taboo has always been part of the history of footbinding. When the practice reached its peak as a national fashion and cultural fixation in late imperial China, lotus feet became the synonym for femininity, beauty, hierarchy, and eroticism. In other words, feet were the place of honor, identity, and the means of livelihood for many women. They guarded their feet fervently, forbidding men other than their husbands or lovers to touch their feet or shoes. After it finally faded out [in the twentieth century] through the national propaganda launched by Chinese intellectuals and Western missionary organizations, and through brutal force and punishments upon the female body, footbinding was rarely talked or written about because it became a symbol of national shame. (Wang Ping, Aching for Beauty: Footbinding in China [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], p. xi)
There is a danger in discussing footbinding as briefly as we do here. This danger is that students will regard the practice as particularly bizarre and characteristic of a strange and exotic China--the Orientalist view in a nutshell. But we take this risk because footbinding is an excellent window through which to view several important issues in human affairs generally as well as Chinese history specifically. On balance, the benefits of studying it outweigh the dangers, but the dangers are real. It is important, therefore, as a reader, to keep an open mind and to be aware that footbinding was one specific example of a nearly universal human tendency to modify the body. Indeed, as we move through the subsequent paragraphs, bear in mind the following statements by Julian Robinson about the deep-rooted, universal tendency of people around the world to modify their bodies:
Long before there was any form of written history, men and women were already going to elaborate and often painful lengths to change and beautify their natural naked bodies in their quest for a mate, to gain tribal prestige, to protect themselves from evil spirits, or to appease their gods. Since that time, no feature of the human body has been spared these attempts at modification, enhancement, and beautification, and scant regard has been paid to the time, the cost, or the suffering involved. Individuals, and sometimes whole communities, have altered the shape, color, texture, and size of almost every feature--waist, hips, nose, eyes, teeth, hair, ears, head, breasts, skin, hands, fingers, finger and toenails, nipples, lips, navel, genitals, shoulders, wrists, neck, legs, feet, ankles, rib cage, cheeks, pubic region, silhouette, and so on--in order to achieve a socially desirable and sexually appealing appearance.
Even today, throughout the world men and women subject themselves to mutilation and other ordeals for this elusive, ephemeral, and often questionable "improvement." They willingly submit to a regime of distorted or broken bones, a constricted blood supply, restricted breathing, poisoned skin, debilitating diets, exhaustive exercise, regular purges, and complicated surgery, frequently suffering an agony that in any other context would be condemned as torture--all this to achieve an appearance that will be the envy of their peers, that will be admired by members of the opposite sex, or that will clearly and visibly mark them as members of a particular tribal or cultural group. (Julian Robinson, The Quest for Human Beauty: An Illustrated History [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1998], pp. 19-20.)
Footbinding in China, in other words, was one culturally-specific manifestation of what appears to be the universal human practice of body modification. In today's world, we continue to modify our bodies in ways that are painful and expensive. In contemporary China, for example, #leg lengthening to enhance beauty# is rapidly gaining in popularity (#National Geographic video#). In the contemporary United States, risky operations for improved "toe cleavage" to permit the wearing of shoes on the cutting edge of fashion are becoming popular (#If the Shoe Won't Fit, Fix the Foot?#).
To get started with the details, read this short article, *"Sex, Machismo, and Footbinding"* from the Shanghai Star.
At its core, footbinding was a form of erotic adornment of the body through modification of the shape and (to a lesser extent) size of the feet. Its significance extended beyond eroticism--for example, bound feet became markers of socioeconomic status--but these secondary significations were rooted in the function of erotic adornment.
The practice of footbinding seems to have started around the time of the Sui dynasty, when palace dancers began to make their feet appear smaller by binding them with strips of cloth. Even in Han times, small feet were mark of beauty, although there is no evidence of anyone attempting to bind feet at that time. During the Song dynasty, footbinding as an erotic practice spread widely among elite women, as well as elite courtesans and prostitutes. *Actresses,* for example, commonly appeared on stage with bound feet, which added to their sexual allure. By the start of the Ming dynasty, footbinding was the norm among the upper classes. By the end of the Ming dynasty, even ordinary peasants commonly bound their feet, albeit not as tightly. Footbinding was common practice among Chinese women of all social strata until the first decades of the twentieth century. It persisted in some remote areas until the 1950s. Footbinding was exclusively or almost exclusively a female practice. It may have been the case that men bound their feet in a few rare instances as a form of what today we might call cross dressing.
Footbinding was primarily sexual, but sex cannot be separated from other aspects of social life and social power. For example, the smaller a woman's feet, the higher her social and economic status was likely to have been. Because women of the upper classes had servants to do most of the physically demanding labor, they could afford to bind to a smaller size. Peasant families, on the other hand, had to make a difficult decision. The smaller the feet, the better a daughter's chances for a good marriage, but at the cost of the ability to perform demanding labor. Although by the Qing dynasty most peasant women bound their daughters feet, the degree of compression generally went down in proportion to the household's level of wealth. Among all social strata, women were expected to be able to walk on their bound feet, although not necessarily for long distances. Indeed, upper class women strove to develop a particular style of elegant, nimble walking (called "lotus steps"). Footbinding that resulted in a complete inability to walk would be like badly botched cosmetic surgery. A perfect small foot, on the other hand, would have been comparable to a *fine work of sculpture.* Such feet were called "Golden Lotuses."
"But didn't it hurt?" you many wonder. Yes it did. Binding the feet was extremely painful, and the pain never fully went away in many cases. Pain is, of course, a physiological phenomenon, but it is also closely linked with psychology. People frequently subject themselves to extreme pain when highly motivated to accomplish something (e.g., win an Olympic medal, escape from personal danger, save the life of a loved one, conform to social pressure, or enhance beauty). In such cases, human will can override the body's increasingly strident message of "stop!!" This ability to override severe pain helps explain continued diligence in the process of molding the feet, which lasted into adulthood. Binding typically started around age seven. At such a young age, binding was imposed from without. It must have been a terrifying experience, the fear adding to the physical pain.
Wang Ping describes the connection between beauty and pain in part as:
A Pair of bound feet must meet seven qualifications--small, slim, pointed, arched, fragrant, soft, and straight--in order to become a piece of art, an abject of erotic desire. Such beauty is created, however, through sheer violence. For about two or three years, little girls go through the inferno of torture: the flesh of her feet, which are tightly bound with layers of bandages day and night, is slowly putrefied, her toes crushed under the soles, and the insteps arched to the degree where the toes and heels meet. (Aching for Beauty, p. 3)
At this point, you might be wondering how such apparently *grotesque* and *deformed* feet could be erotically appealing to anyone. In dealing with foot binding, perhaps more than any other topic in this course, it is necessary to make every effort to put aside contemporary cultural biases. Although sexuality is driven at some deep level by hormones and other physiological agents, in its surface manifestations it is a cultural phenomenon. In other words, although sexuality is universal to all humans, the ways it is expressed are as numerous and varied as culture itself. To understand footbinding in China as a major social phenomenon, it is essential to move beyond the view that it was a merely a strange, perverse, or aberrant practice, the ultimate foot fetish. That men and women once considered such feet beautiful and alluring is nearly inconceivable for us today, and equally so for contemporary Chinese. The past is foreign to us all, and to understand footbinding in any sophisticated way, we must strive temporarily to suspend our present-day preferences, cultural and political biases, aesthetic sensibilities, and so forth.
Chinese literature and art provides ample illustration and proof of the sexual nature of feet and footbinding. Indeed, feet were the *most eroticized part of the female body* until the 1920s. Let us now examine the erotic dimensions of footbinding in more detail. The following passage is from a late Qing essay by a man defending the practice of footbinding by explaining its many social and sexual benefits:
As to why a woman considered this part of the body [the feet] most excitable: it was ordinarily concealed and regarded most sedately, even hidden from a servants view except possibly when binding. And then one day, rubbed and played with in a man's hands, the sexual effect was like an electrical charge between them. While [the rest of] the world commonly regards the woman's foot as dirty, [in China] it was so favored and liked that it was placed in the palms, lifted to the shoulders, and even kissed and smelled. As a stimulus and comforter, it was unparalleled. These moments of joy compensated the woman sufficiently for the eight to ten years of pain which she had previously suffered.32
It seems that for a part of the body to take on erotic dimensions, it must be made mysterious. Literature dealing with bound feet frequently stressed the excitement of the unknown. Hidden under layers of wrapping, a pair of shoes, and robes, feet became the most private, and therefore the most exciting, part of a woman's body. Sexually explicit pictures from late imperial China typically leave little to the imagination, *except women's feet,* which are always covered. The following poem from the fourteenth century suggests the authors thrill at catching a glimpse of a woman's (shod) feet:
Caught by the gentle wind,
Her silk skirt ripples and waves.
Lotus blossoms in shoes most tight,
As if she could stand on autumnal waters!
Her shoe tips do not peek beyond the skirt,
Fearful lest the tiny embroideries be seen.33
Because the feet themselves became so mysterious, clothing associated with them--wrappings and shoes--also became the *object of erotic desire.* Special "sleeping shoes," complete with suggestive embroidery patterns, functioned in ways similar to today's lingerie. Recall the story of Fragrant Lotus from the novel The Three-Inch Golden Lotus from an earlier section. Thanks to Granny's tough love, Fragrant Lotus developed an excellent set of feet and was able to marry into a household of substantially higher status than that in which she grew up. When she was about to go to the house of her future husband to get married, Granny gave careful instructions about shoes:
"These are your sleeping shoes. When you get to the bridal chamber, take off the hall-treading shoes, and change to this pair of sleeping shoes. Remember, just before you go to bed, let your husband take these off. What are you being so shy about? All girls go through this on their wedding night! Now listen carefully, I have something very important to tell you. On the linings of these shoes are some pictures. You and your husband must look at them, together."34
Incidentally, her husband (whom she had never met), was hardly a sensitive guy:
But before Fragrant Lotus could change into her sleeping shoes as Granny had instructed, the Young Master pinned her to the bed, pulled off her shoes, and tore away the bindings. He grabbed her feet, and holding them in his hands, went into an unceasing fit of shouts and howls. The man had a stupid animal strength, and . . . she could not control him. . . . so she closed her eyes, submissively stretched out her feet, and let the idiot fondle her feet, like he was playing with kittens or baby chicks.35
Recall the ideal of the companionate marriage and the cult of qing in the previous section. In the real world, marriage and sex often left much to be desired.
By comparison, the father of Fragrant Lotus's husband was a much more refined "lotus lover," as she soon found out:
A few days after the wedding, a weird thing occurred. . . . One day at noon, while [her husband] was away at the bird market, Fragrant Lotus was taking a nap, and in her light sleep she felt somebody squeezing her feet. At first she thought it was her dumb husband playing around, but she suddenly realized it was not. Her husband's touch was never so gentle, so refined. First the thumbs touched her small toes, and two other fingers curved around her heels. The middle fingers stroked the hearts of her soles, but they did not really tickle. In fact the sensation was very pleasant, very comforting. . . . He continued in a deliberate and systematic way, tensing and loosening. . . . She felt shame and fear on the one hand, but curiosity and pleasure as well. She ever so slowly opened her eyes, and --oh my god!--it was her father-in-law, Tong Ren-an!36
Incidentally, the lusty father-in-law making his rounds of the household was a common theme in Chinese literature and sometimes an occurrence in real life.
The sense of mystery associated with bound feet and the paraphernalia around them, was perhaps the most important dimension of feet as erotic objects. Women with exquisite feet might appear in at least some men's eyes as having transcended the bounds of human flesh and having taken on the qualities of a superior being, a Daoist immortal for example. Consider, for example, this early Qing poem by Liang Qingbiao:
The silk bandage still warm and fragrant,
Jade lotus hidden under the skirt,
She comes like a floating fairy,
Next to the lifted curtain,
She looks so delicate as if the wind could blow her away;
She walks lightly around the pond, not disturbing the moss.
On the silent path,
Her flowing skirt does not stir any dust.
After a swing,
She leans on her lover's shoulder with a smile,
And takes time to pull off her shoes.
Wang comments on this and similar poems, pointing out that "The women presented in these poems and literary works all have the same qualities: they are floating and weightless like a fairy or goddess, fragile and delicate like a child, hidden and mysterious like unreachable treasure. Men cannot help feeling pity for them and falling in love with them. All these are indispensable elements for Chinese eroticism and female allure." (Aching for Beauty, p. 51) Incidentally, there is a tension in Chinese sources regarding two very different types female sexual beauty, one being the wispy Daoist immortal-like figure that Wang describes here and the other represented by a woman like Yang Guifei of the Tang dynasty. #Click here# for more on this topic.
As Wang's comments suggest, closely connected with the sense of mystery associated with bound feet was a sense of pathos owing to the suffering required to obtain and maintain alluring feet. Consider the following poem from the late Song dynasty:
Anointed with fragrance, she takes lotus steps;
Though often sad, she steps with swift lightness.
She dances like the wind, leaving no physical trace.
Another stealthily but happily tries on the palace style,
But feels such distress when she tries to walk!
Look at them in the palms of your hands,
So wondrously small that they defy description.37
Here, sadness and distress go hand-in-hand with beauty, elegance and wondrousness. By the time of the Song dynasty, ideals of feminine beauty (as revealed mainly in poetry) came to emphasize sickliness, fragility, and and a languid appearance. Such ideals dovetailed with the erotic sense of pathos centered on the bound foot. As Wang points out, "It is no surprise that bound feet--so tiny, broken, deformed, delicate, and most important of all, so pitiful--became the symbol of feminine beauty from the Song period on." (Aching for Beauty, p. 50)
Closely connected with the sense of pathos was a feeling of superiority and strength on the part of many males. One frank commentator stated: "Among scholars I cut a poor figure. I am timid, and my voice plays me false in gatherings of men. But to my footbound wife, confined for life to her house except when I bear her in my arms to her palanquin, my stride is heroic, my voice is that of a roaring lion, my wisdom is that of the sages. To her I am the world; I am life itself."38 This passage expresses one husband's interpretation of his wife's feelings, although, of course, she might well have seen things differently. The point here is that bound feet were erotic to at least some men because they allowed these men to feel powerful in at least one of life's arenas. The question of power inevitably comes up in discussions of footbinding.
A further aspect of footbinding as an erotic practice was its perceived effect on the rest of the body, particularly the sexual organs. Men commonly wrote as follows about this topic: "Binding the feet to a small size caused the private parts to become tight and narrow because of the pain which was felt. The buttocks became full and large, and immeasurable wondrousness was added to bodily beauty. Because it was difficult for her to walk long distances, the tiny-footed woman lived an uncomplicated existence in the inner boudoir, with sexual desire develop to a fullness unattainable by the natural-footed woman."39 This author portrays footbinding as enhancing sexuality both physically and psychologically. There is no evidence that binding the feet actually strengthened muscles in the vicinity of the vagina or had any similar effect (even if walking on bound feet did involve certain muscles to a greater extent, the smaller the feet, the less walking one did). But for centuries, many Chinese believed that bound feet produced such effects. Walking on bound feet, of course, did result in a peculiar, nimble gait. This gait became an important aspect of body language, closely associated with the sexual power of the feet.
Footbinding was a social practice with numerous dimensions besides the erotic. Strange as it many first sound, many educated Chinese regarded footbinding as a form of wen. Recall that wen 文 means "pattern," "writing," "literature," "culture," and "civilization." The idea was that dainty bound feet signify gentility, refinement, aesthetic sensibility, and sophistication. The practice of footbinding, therefore, became a key distinguishing feature between civilization and barbarism in the minds of many Chinese. Toward the end of the Ming dynasty, one scholar wrote the following proposal concerning the increasing Manchu threat from the north:
The reason these barbarians [Manchus] are able to leave their own territory easily and swiftly and come to invade us from a great distance is that there are no beautiful women in their northern regions. If we want to control these northern barbarians, we should bring it about that they have many beauties and cause their men to be ensnared and deluded by feminine charm. We should teach them footbinding and persuade them to imitate us in dress. They will prize women with a willow waist and a lotus gait and a weak and alluring attitude. Barbarians who have been deluded by such women will then lose their cruel and harsh natures.40
This passage is interesting for several reasons. Notice, for example, the contradictory portrayal of women with bound feet. On the one hand, their attitudes and appearances are "weak." On the other, the power of their "feminine charm" would be so great as to "delude" and enervate (but also partially civilize) the warlike northerners. This passage says much about male Chinese anxieties at the end of the Ming dynasty.
A second dimension of footbinding not directly connected with eroticism was its role in mother-daughter bonding. Perhaps you have noticed that most of the literature quoted thus far reflects a male voice and perspective. One reason is that until recently, nearly all Chinese and foreign studies of footbinding have viewed it as a male-directed practice designed to subjugate women. Levy's classic study, for example, begins:
Footbinding, a vivid symbol of the subjection of woman, has survived countless dynastic changes and flourished for centuries. It was an integral part of a man's society which taught women to obey a strict and comprehensive moral code hallowed by time and tradition. A lady of virtue passively accepted her role as an intellectual inferior and remained ignorant of the outside world.41
Viewing footbinding as something that powerful men inflicted on weak women tended to ignore women's perspectives on the matter, except as victims. The work of recent social historians has criticized the above view of footbinding as an oversimplification. "It is natural for modern-day reformers to consider footbinding a men's conspiracy to keep women crippled and submissive, but this is an anachronistic view that finds no support in the historical records."42 The recent trend in Chinese social history is to highlight new perspectives on footbinding, particularly that of woman-to-woman. According to Ko:
Our present understanding of footbinding is based on four sources, all written by men: missionary accounts, literati studies of the customs origins, erotica, and abolition literature, which sometimes include interviews with women. These sources naturally perpetuate our current reading of footbinding as a man-to-woman story. The other half of the picture, footbinding as a woman-to-woman story, has to be sought in the voices of the women themselves, both the binder and the bound.43
The actual binding of the feet was an exclusively female affair. Through the binding and subsequent instruction on the care of the feet, mothers instructed their daughters in gender roles and femininity. "Through footbinding," Ko points out, "the doctrine of separate spheres was engraved onto the bodies of female children."44 The process often forged a close bond between mother and daughter. When elderly women with bond feet in Taiwan were surveyed in the 1960s about their early childhood experiences, many reported generally positive experiences with footbinding, despite the pain. A positive view (in retrospect) was particularly likely when the mother, as opposed to some other relative or caretaker, did the binding. In one case, the elderly women did not even recall any pain. All was pleasant and happy, or so she said:
It didn't hurt. Mother liked her daughters very much and when the process started she was very comforting, telling me that when I married small feet would be considered the most beautiful and would impress everyone. I never stealthily removed the bandages, as I wanted to be beautiful. I liked making the shoes very much. Because my family was relatively well-off, I often competed with my sisters to see whose foot was the prettiest and who made the most elegantly embroidered shoes. Every day we were very happy together.45
Of course, this account is unusual, and most of the elderly women surveyed remembered considerable pain. Still, the most important factor in mitigating that pain seems to have been the attitude and actions of the mother. Those women whose feet were bound by someone other than their mother tended to recall the greatest degree of suffering.
What did women in premodern China say about footbinding? In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as mentioned above, respectable women had almost nothing to say about it. Footbinding had become so intensely private, and the explicit talk of sexually-related matters had become so improper, that footbinding became "a taboo subject laden with symbolic meaning," such that "the practice of footbinding was surrounded by such powerful taboos that few women refer to it in their writings."46 During the Qing dynasty, it seems that:
the meaning of bound feet shifted away from eroticism and toward social respectability. Late Ming woman's poetry hints at a strong attraction, even an erotic response, to bound feet among upper-class women as well as men. In Qing times, perhaps because of the erosion of the cult of qing and its displacement by familistic moralism, the erotic significance of bound feet for elite wives may have diminished.47
Although the evidence for a firm conclusion is lacking, it seems that footbinding in Qing times became primarily a mark of elite social status and secondarily a sign of sexuality. In Ming times, the relative importance of these two signs was reversed. Let us examine some of what some Ming women said about their feet.
According to poems, letters, and other written sources, it seems that many well-to-do women in Ming times saw footbinding as fundamental to their identity as women. Through footbinding, women forged three key elements of female identity.48 First, footbinding reflected women's agency as individuals (in stark contrast with many modern views). One dimension of this agency is reflected in the popular expression "A plain face is given by Heaven, but poorly bound feet are a sign of laziness." Within the formula talent, virtue, and beauty, the feet were the one aspect of "beauty" that a woman could control and shape, if only her will were sufficiently strong. Small feet thus became a sign of *beauty properly attained,* a work of art. Another dimension of this agency was the sexual power of the feet, a power that could potentially be "translated" into economic or political power, as Fragrant Lotus did in The Three Inch Golden Lotus. The following poem, "Feet," was written by a young woman of sixteen and reflects the author's delight in the erotic power of her feet. The poem may be difficult to understand on first reading because it is full of historical and literary allusions (explained below):
They say lotuses blossom as she moves her feet,
But they can't be seen underneath her skirt.
Her jade toes so tiny and slender,
Imprinting her fragrant name as she pauses.
Her pure chiffon skirt swirls in a dance,
Steadfast as the new moon.
Her light silk garment sways in soft, flowing motions,
As she kicks her jade hook halfway up.
[Consort Yang] left her stocking behind at Mawei,
Adding to the remorse of the Tang emperor;
At the banks of the River Luo the goddess treads elegantly,
Bringing sadness to Cao Zhi.49
The phrase "new moon" in the fifth line is a reference to Yao Niang, an imperial consort who supposedly started the practice of footbinding. Consort Yang is, of course, Yang Guifei, China's most famous femme fatale, who supposedly caused the downfall of the Tang emperor Minghuang. Her "jade hook" and "stocking" refer to the widely-accepted story that she left behind at three-inch stocking at Mawei, where she was killed. It is almost certain, however, that the real Yang Guifei had natural feet, but the thinking seems to be that if she was beautiful enough to captivate the emperor, she must have had tiny feet. Cao Zhi was a Han dynasty poet who wrote *"Rhapsody of the Goddess of the River Luo."* This goddess appeared in the form of a beautiful women who could walk across the surface of the water without getting her feet wet. Some legends claim that she was the daughter of Fuxi. This poem not only attests to the great depth of learning many elite teenage women possessed, but also to a positive, celebratory view of bound feet.
The second way in which bound feet served as a marker of feminine identity was that they were an aspect of women's work (one of the Four Womanly Accomplishments). Footbinding was entirely within the realm of female culture, and men would have had little or no idea how it was done. Not only the foot binding process itself, but also all of the other cultural items (shoes, for example) associated with it were made and utilized only by women.
Finally, as mentioned above in connection with wen, the bound foot was a marker of civilized gentility. Those with very small feet were members of society's elite. By late Ming times, even most peasants bound their feet, but they did not do so to the same degree as elite women. Thus, foot length served as nearly a perfect measure of a person's overall social status. The following poem is by a woman from a wealthy background who had fallen on hard times:
Remember those bygone days in the depth of my inner chambers,
Fragrant pieces of jade adorned my tender skin.
My little maid stood by me under canopy of flowers,
So that my tiny shoes wouldn't slip on mosses so green.
Little did I know that in mid-life I would have to roam around,
Braving the scorching sun and furious storms.50
Clearly for this woman, her small feet were the defining emblem of the wealth and privilege she enjoyed as a youth. Again, notice the contrast between this woman's view of her small feet and many modern and contemporary views of footbinding.
Notice also that this woman had "to roam around." There is the view that footbinding evolved as a way to consign women to the inner chambers and, by crippling their feet, prevent them from roaming into the outer world inhabited by men. It is entirely possible that some Ming or Qing Chinese men regarded the hindrance to mobility caused by binding to be desirable from a moral standpoint. Footbinding, however, did not prevent women from moving around. It should be emphasized that walking was possible, even in the case of very small bound feet. The binding produced a peculiar gait, which, as we have seen, had erotic connotations. Women with feet bound to a moderate length were even able to engage in sustained manual labor. For women from wealthy households, walking would not have been practical for long distance travel, but in wealthy households, male or female, one would never imagine traveling on foot anyway. Travel was typically by palanquin or sedan chair carried by servants. Contemporary students sometimes assume that young women in Ming or Qing China would have wanted to engage in vigorous exercise or sports, but such a thing would have been *unimaginable among wealthy men or women* from Song times onward (horseback riding was a popular activity for women in the Han dynasty and to some extent the Tang as well). Vigorous physical labor was for the lower classes. Poetry contests, literature recitation contests, often accompanied by drinking, musical performance, and similar activities constituted upper-class recreation in Ming or Qing China. Again, it is a useful exercise to comprehend footbinding within its own cultural context instead of transposing it onto today's social conditions.
Another example of interpreting footbinding in light of today's modes of thought is the tendency to view the practice as mutilation of the feet. Women of Ming and Qing China viewed it as adornment or enhancement of the body. Owing to the dominance today of the medical model, we tend to focus on the bent skeletal structure and the "unnatural" deformation of the feet themselves and feel repulsed. But what did footbinding look like in the eyes of premodern Chinese? We cannot answer this question with complete certainty, but there are several differences compared with today's way of looking. First, the feet themselves were typically seen, at most, as a small portion of a shoe peeking out from under a robe. The bare foot would have been seen by others only in the most private, intimate situations. Second, the feet were, of course, attached to the rest of the body. What might a young woman of 18 or 20 look like all dressed up walking across a room or down the hallway? We will never know unless someone figures out a way to travel back in time with a video camera. But suppose we could go back in time and make such a video. At a minimum, it would probably convey *a very different sense* of footbinding than would a picture of a bare, unwrapped foot or a drawing of its underlying skeletal structure.51
In late Qing times, footbinding took on a significance it had never previously had. It became a symbol of China's weakness and its victimization by powerful foreign imperialists. Indeed, it is from this time that the stereotypical view of women in China as oppressed and crippled stared. Ko explains some of the main reasons as follows:
The identification of women with backwardness and dependency acquired a new urgency in the May Fourth-New Culture period (1915-27). As imperialist aggressions intensified, the victimized woman became the symbol of the Chinese nation itself, "raped" and dominated by virile foreign powers. Women's enlightenment thus became a prerequisite for the political liberation of the nation as a whole as well as for China's entrance onto the modern world. In short, women's subjugation to the patriarch epitomized the savageries of old China, the roots of its present-day humiliation. The image of the victimized feudal woman was vested with such powerful nationalist sentiments that it assumed the mantle of unassailable historical truth.
[ . . . ]
The May Fourth image of the miserable traditional woman was reinforced by the political agenda of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP): to claim credit for the "liberation" of women, the CCP and its sympathizers perpetuated the stark view of China's past as a perennial dark age for women.52
Exercise--In light of Ko's points here, study and compare these three images: 1) early Qing era *imperial concubine;* 2) *China's Roar,* 1935; and 3) *Women of China,* 1930s
Although we do not study modern China in this course, it is important to bear in mind that many of the images of women in China that linger on in the contemporary imagination have less to do with the views of women in "traditional" or premodern China than they do with modern political agendas connected with ridding China of imperialist aggression, making China into a strong country, and the battles between various political and military organizations. Historical scholarship is never free from contemporary biases or political concerns.
Footbinding was an integral part of women's culture in premodern China, and women's culture was an integral part of the larger Chinese cultural world. Although we should be careful about jumping to quick and easy conclusions, it can be a useful exercise to inquire into a variety of topics of contemporary concern to see what light footbinding may shed on them. One issue that inevitably comes up is that of power. The small feet of premodern China were nodes of power, *but not in any simple sense.* Certainly these feet were in part the products of patriarchal power and the power of male sexual desire. For this very reason, however, they were also in part the products of matriarchal power. As Ko has pointed out, footbinding was in part an act of inscribing the doctrine of separate spheres onto the bodies of girls. Because footbinding was so closely associated exclusively with the female sphere, it should be no surprise that women themselves played an active role in defining its significance and meaning. Bound feet were always an ambiguous sign in Chinese society because they represented two contradictory female social roles: objects of male sexual desire (beauty) and moral guardians of society (virtue). Feet were also a sign of economic power and social status, and even of Chinese cultural chauvinism (vis-à-vis Manchus, for example). Because there was, at least potentially, some degree of translation possible between sexual power, literary power, economic power, and political power, the question of footbinding and power becomes quite complex--it is sufficient for our purposes simply to be aware of this complexity and to recognize multiple possibilities.
The topic of footbinding invites comparison with other social practices from different times and places. What about corsets in Europe and the U.S.? Today, the negative image of corsets today is almost on a par with the image that footbinding took on China of the 1920s and 30s. Corsets are indeed an excellent example of bodily modification (albeit usually temporary--the much alleged surgical removal of ribs appears to be a contemporary myth, not an actual 19th-century practice), but a sophisticated analysis of corsets and sexuality would be as complex as an analysis of footbinding in China. Those interested in this topic should read Valerie Steele's excellent study of European fashion and its relations to eroticism53 as well as her more recent book on the corset (and don't forget her book on fetishes). You may be surprised at what Steele's research reveals.
What about other forms of body modification in order to enhance beauty and sex appeal? Liposuction, breast implants, and anorexia/bulimia come to the minds of most people immediately, and those with some exposure to other cultures often bring up examples like lip rings or neck elongation. And from e-mail-transmitted spam and the web, you are surely aware of an obsession with penis size among at least enough men to generate vast quantities of "enlargement" gimmicks. Can you think of any other forms of male body modification in past times or in other societies? There are actually many examples, but they seem to be much less known than cases of female body modification. For example, ". . . Dinka men wear ultra-tight corsets of beads that cause their buttocks to swell in a manner that emphasizes their thin waists. The corsets also carry special symbolism—the color of the beads indicates the wearer’s age and status." (source) Julian Robertson's The Quest for Human Beauty: An Illustrated History (W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York, 1998) is a good survey of body modification throughout the world and over time.
A study of footbinding also leads to questions about human sexuality, namely, *what is it?* Is it rooted in biology/nature, in social practice, or in both? Which aspects of it are universal to all humans, and which aspects are specific to individual cultures? We find sex wherever we find people (or most other animals), of course, but if all of its practices were universal, why do today's men and women find bound feet so grotesque? Sexuality can and should be studied as a biological phenomenon, but if it were exclusively or even predominantly biological, what was sexy merely a century ago should be sexy today. Again, how come neither contemporary Chinese nor anyone else is attracted to bound feet (of course, there may be a small handful people who are, but . . .)? In the phenomenon of footbinding we can see that human sexuality is in large part a social construct, and as societies change, so to do prevailing forms of sexual expression. What about fetishism? Was Freud correct when he said that all human sexuality contains at least some element of fetishism? Where does one draw the line between fetishistic practices and "normal" practices? Finally, what is "nature"? Does it exist apart from human social practice (the ontological question), and, if so, how can we determine what it is (the epistemological question)? What does it mean to say that something is "natural"? You need not answer these questions, but I hope you will at least give a few of them some thought.
Let us give Dorothy Ko the final word about footbinding: "The usual explanations of 'women were victims of beauty' or 'men fetishized tiny feet' are not entirely wrong, but they oversimplify. Without denying the very real pain involved, I do not view footbinding as a senseless or perverted act. . . . [F]ootbinding was an entirely reasonable course of action for women who lived in a Confucian culture that placed the highest moral value on domesticity, motherhood, and handwork." (Every Step a Lotus, p. 15) So what was footbinding and its significance? This chapter provides some degree of an answer, but if you want to delve into this matter in much greater depth and breadth . . . .
. . . then please read #this lengthy supplementary chapter#. Doing so is entirely optional, and the material in it will not be on any exam. It is here entirely to help satisfy intellectual curiosity.
1. Quoted passages are from Wu Hung, The Wu Liang Shrine: The Ideology of Early Chinese Pictorial Art (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), pp. 261-262.
2. Quoted passages from Ibid., pp. 253-254.
3. Quoted in Wing-tsit Chan, trans., Reflections on Things at Hand: The Neo-Confucian Anthology Compiled by Chu Hsi and Lü Tsu-ch'ien (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), p, 177.
4. Quoted in Patricia Buckley Ebrey, The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung [=Song] Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 211.
5. Susan Mann, Precious Records: Women in China's Long Eighteenth Century (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), pp. 23-25.
6. Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, p. 199.
7. Quoted in Wu, The Wu Liang Shrine, p. 267.
8. Quoted in Mann, Precious Records, pp. 123-124.
9. Dorothy Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994).
10. Quoted in Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, pp. 23-24.
11. Mann, Precious Records, p. 46. For summary of the life courses of men and women, see pp. 45-47. Much of the life course material presented here and below is based on Mann's summary.
12. Feng Jicai, The Three-Inch Golden Lotus, David Wakefield, trans. (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994), pp. 15-17.
13. Mann, Precious Records, p. 61.
14. Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, pp. 152, 153.
15. By Song times, there was a women's version of nearly all the Confucian classics. These "XXX for Girls/Women" genre of texts were morality guides for women and had little connection with the original classic. The Analects for Women, for example, had little to do with the original Confucian Analects in terms of content.
16. Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, p. 161.
17. Notice in this example, and throughout our study of China, the legal importance of ones social relationship with others. In many important respects, people did not exist as individuals, but as husbands, wives, daughters, sons, rulers, ministers, subjects, and so forth. Incidentally, the law generally permitted fathers to kill their sons should the son use foul language toward the father or otherwise blatantly disregard filial duty--Han Feizi in the clothes of Confucius.
18. Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, pp. 160-161, with minor modification.
19. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers. Much of the material in this section is based on this book.
20. Quoted in Ibid., p. 79.
21. Ibid., p. 111.
22. Quoted in Ebrey, The Inner Quarters, p. 160.
23. Quoted in Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, pp. 184-185.
24. Ibid., pp. 123-124.
25. Ibid., p. 159.
26. See Ibid., pp. 251-293.
27. Quoted passages are from Mann, Precious Records, pp. 194, 195-196.
28. Kam Louie and Louise Edwards, trans., eds., Censored by Confucius: Ghost Stories by Yuan Mei (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996). See, for example, "The Magistrate of Pingyang" and "Quan Gu."
29. Mann, Precious Records, pp. 94-117 and elsewhere. The material presented in this paragraph is based on Mann's analysis.
30. Ibid., p. 98.
31. The term "Orientialism" was coined by Edward Said to refer to European attitudes toward the Middle East as reflected in literature. Orientalism is a useful concept with applicability to East Asia as well as the Middle East and other parts of the world. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage Books, 1978).
32. Quoted in Howard S. Levy, Chinese Footbinding: The History of a Curious Erotic Custom (New York: Bell Publishing Company, 1966), p. 151.
33. Quoted in Ibid.
34. Feng, The Three-Inch Golden Lotus, p. 38.
35. Ibid., p. 42
36. Ibid., p. 43.
37. Quoted in Levy, Chinese Footbinding, p. 47.
38. Quoted in Ibid., p. 89.
39. Quoted in Ibid., p. 151.
40. Quoted in Ibid., p. 32.
41. Ibid., p. 23. Compare the view of Chinese women expressed in this passage with the very different views presented in the previous sections of this chapter. The women with the smallest feet would have been least likely to regard themselves as "intellectual inferiors" of men in general or anyone else.
42. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, p. 148.
43. Ibid., p. 169.
44. Ibid., p. 149.
45. Quoted in Levy, Chinese Footbinding, p. 239.
46. Mann, Precious Records, p. 56.
47. Ibid., pp. 27-28.
48. Most, but not all, of this discussion of female identity and footbinding is based on Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, pp. 169-171.
49. Quoted in Ibid., p. 168.
50. Quoted in Ibid., p. 171.
51. I would like to thank Xun Liu for his insights regarding contemporary views of footbinding and the medical model.
52. Ko, Teachers of the Inner Chambers, pp. 1-2.
53. Valerie Steele, Fashion and Eroticism: Ideals of Feminine Beauty from the Victorian Era to the Jazz Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
