The Inner Quarters

The Inner Quarters

Author: Patricia Buckley Ebrey

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1993-12

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 0520081587

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"Opening up questions about women's lives, about gender, about why we read history at all and how we write it, Patricia Buckley Ebrey has made The Inner Quarters a place we need to enter."—from the Foreword


In the Inner Quarters

In the Inner Quarters

Author: Mengchu Ling

Publisher: arsenal pulp press

Published: 2003

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781551521343

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A collection of five erotic stories from Ming dynasty China, in English for the first time.


The Inner Quarters and Beyond

The Inner Quarters and Beyond

Author:

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2010-07-14

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 9004190260

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Only recently has the enormous literary output of women writers of the Ming and Qing periods (1368-1911) been rediscovered. Through these valuable texts, we apprehend in ways not possible earlier the complexity of women’s experiences in the inner quarters and their varied responses to challenges facing state and society. Writing in many genres, women engaged with topics as varied as war, travel, illness, love, friendship, female heroism, and religion. Drawing on a library of newly digitized resources, this volume's eleven chapters describe, analyze, and theorize these materials. They question previous assumptions about women’s lives and abilities, open up new critical space in Chinese literary history and offer new perspectives on China’s culture and society. “This volume rewrites the history of Chinese women’s literature by taking a truly inter-disciplinary (instead of merely multi-disciplinary) approach. In so doing, it ends up illuminating the centrality of writing women to the social, political, and intellectual lives of the Chinese empire from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries.” Prof. Dorothy Ko, Barnard College, Columbia University, author of Cinderella's Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (California, 2005).


Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China

Confucianism and Family Rituals in Imperial China

Author: Patricia Buckley Ebrey

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2014-07-14

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1400862353

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To explore the historical connections between Confucianism and Chinese society, this book examines the social and cultural processes through which Confucian texts on family rituals were written, circulated, interpreted, and used as guides to action. Weddings, funerals, and ancestral rites were central features of Chinese culture; they gave drama to transitions in people's lives and conveyed conceptions of the hierarchy of society and the interdependency of the living and the dead. Patricia Ebrey's social history of Confucian texts shows much about how Chinese culture was created in a social setting, through the participation of people at all social levels. Books, like Chu Hsi's Family Rituals and its dozens of revisions, were important in forming ritual behavior in China because of the general respect for literature, the early spread of printing, and the absence of an ecclesiastic establishment authorized to rule on the acceptability of variations in ritual behavior. Ebrey shows how more and more of what people commonly did was approved in the liturgies and thus brought into the realm labeled Confucian. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.


Teachers of the Inner Chambers

Teachers of the Inner Chambers

Author: Dorothy Ko

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 1994

Total Pages: 422

ISBN-13: 9780804723596

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


Servants of the Dynasty

Servants of the Dynasty

Author: Anne Walthall

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2008-06-10

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 0520941519

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Mothers, wives, concubines, entertainers, attendants, officials, maids, drudges. By offering the first comparative view of the women who lived, worked, and served in royal courts around the globe, this work opens a new perspective on the monarchies that have dominated much of human history. Written by leading historians, anthropologists, and archeologists, these lively essays take us from Mayan states to twentieth-century Benin in Nigeria, to the palace of Japanese Shoguns, the Chinese Imperial courts, eighteenth-century Versailles, Mughal India, and beyond. Together they investigate how women's roles differed, how their roles changed over time, and how their histories can illuminate the structures of power and societies in which they lived. This work also furthers our understanding of how royal courts, created to project the authority of male rulers, maintained themselves through the reproductive and productive powers of women.


Technology and Gender

Technology and Gender

Author: Francesca Bray

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 2023-07-28

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0520919009

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In this feminist history of eight centuries of private life in China, Francesca Bray inserts women into the history of technology and adds technology to the history of women. Bray takes issue with the Orientalist image that traditional Chinese women were imprisoned in the inner quarters, deprived of freedom and dignity, and so physically and morally deformed by footbinding and the tyrannies of patriarchy that they were incapable of productive work. She proposes a concept of gynotechnics, a set of everyday technologies that define women's roles, as a creative new way to explore how societies translate moral and social principles into a web of material forms and bodily practices. Bray examines three different aspects of domestic life in China, tracing their developments from 1000 to 1800 A.D. She begins with the shell of domesticity, the house, focusing on how domestic space embodied hierarchies of gender. She follows the shift in the textile industry from domestic production to commercial production. Despite increasing emphasis on women's reproductive roles, she argues, this cannot be reduced to childbearing. Female hierarchies within the family reinforced the power of wives, whose responsibilities included ritual activities and financial management as well as the education of children.


Pavilion of Women

Pavilion of Women

Author: Pearl S. Buck

Publisher: Open Road Media

Published: 2012-08-21

Total Pages: 490

ISBN-13: 1453263500

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A “vivid and extremely interesting” novel of an upper-class Chinese wife’s quest for freedom, from the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth (The New Yorker). At forty, Madame Wu is beautiful and much respected as the wife of one of China’s oldest upper-class houses. Her birthday wish is to find a young concubine for her husband and to move to separate quarters, starting a new chapter of her life. When her wish is granted, she finds herself at leisure, no longer consumed by running a sixty-person household. Now she’s free to read books previously forbidden her, to learn English, and to discover her own mind. The family in the compound are shocked at the results, especially when she begins learning from a progressive, excommunicated Catholic priest. In its depiction of life in the compound, Pavilion of Women includes some of Buck’s most enchanting writing about the seasons, daily rhythms, and customs of women in China. It is a delightful parable about the sexes, and of the profound and transformative effects of free thought. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.


Bitterness of the Inner Quarters

Bitterness of the Inner Quarters

Author: Na Hye-seok

Publisher: Literature Translation Institute of Korea

Published: 2014-11-30

Total Pages: 19

ISBN-13: 899336043X

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. In Gyuwon, or “Bitterness of the Inner Quarters,” Na takes on the tragedy of being a young widow in a society that enforced both female chastity and absolute dependence on male family members. The story is framed as a cautionary tale: an older woman speaks to a group of women gathered at the home of a young mother and warns them of the tragedy that could befall any of them at any time. She tells of how she was widowed and left at the mercy of her in-laws, framed for adultery due to the meddling of a neighbor, and victimized by a mysterious stranger who was able to pursue her with impunity due to his gender and wealth. Despite her own wealthy background and unfailing adherence to the moral standards required of her by the patriarchal social structure, she finds herself stripped of both social status and personal rights due to the selfish motives of others, and utterly without recourse or protection from any quarter.