Jottings from the Granite Studio

From the Everything Old is New Again Desk:

The Chinese government this month announced the names of China’s 100 Outstanding Mothers with some of the awardees gathering in Beijing this week to meet with officials.

Wang Zhaoguo, President of the NPC, praised the women for showing their spirit of selfless maternal love, their outstanding moral character, and displaying the self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-reliance that is the character of the proper “modern woman.” The awards were given so that these mothers could serve as inspirations and exemplars for all Chinese women. Wang added that building a harmonious society begins in the home, and an essential part is the training and education of the children. Strike me down with an incense burner, but Zhu Xi couldn’t have said it any better himself. In fact he did. Over 800 years ago.

The Chinese government has long been in the business of giving awards or jingbiao (旌 表) to reward exemplary behavior by women. In parts of China you can still see the “widow arches” erected for a town or family to celebrate one of their womanfolk not remarrying after the death of her husband. Or not marrying at all after the death of a fiancee. Or any of a number of sacrifices in the name of an idealized code of conduct for women. The government used these awards to promote social order and as a way to regulate female behavior. In many Chinese writings on female behavior, there is a not unsubtle hint that the (male) authors considered the unregulated female a danger to the family and to society in general.

For their part, local elites competed for these rewards as a kind of social capital, with status being conferred on the family whose women were the most upright and chaste. It is worth noting however that in at least one case, studied by Arthur and Marjory Wolf on Taiwan in the late 1960s, the rate of births for “faithful widows” was almost the same as for married women of the same age. Ideals and practice have never been easy to reconcile.

The officials had little to go on. Confucius barely mentions women at all except to say that “By nature, women and servants are much alike. If you treat them well, they take advantage of you and if you ignore them, they resent you.” There’s also the famous retort by the Song philosopher Cheng Yi on the subject of women: “To starve to death is a small matter, but to lose one’s virtue is a great matter.” (餓死事小，失節事大) Let’s just say this guy probably needed to get hugged more as a child.

And so the government kept giving these awards and local scholars and officials had to keep printing handbooks and guides for womanly behavior. All of which suggests that Chinese women were far from the cloistered, footbound flowers of the Western imagination. Almost all the didactic works for women were written by men, representing distinctly male concerns, and often in response to behavior that flew in the face of what fathers, husbands, sons, and officials considered acceptable. This included things like writing poetry, traveling, consorting with courtesans, and generally living life as fully as an 18th century Chinese woman could. Girls, to quote the Minstrel Lauper, just want to have fun. Inevitably these male writers would drag in poor Ban Zhao, the sister of a famous court historian in the Han, whose “Admonitions for Women” was required reading for little girls in the late imperial period as they learned that a life of humility and service was all they could expect. No confirmation that an earlier draft was entitled: “Ban Zhao: Selling out the Sisterhood.”

(Actually, a recent revisionist history of Ban Zhao suggests that Ban was speaking for a particular time and audience: court women in the turbulent period of the late Han. Given the political strife, assassinations, and intrigue of the period, keeping your mouth shut and your head down seemed sensible. It wasn’t Ban Zhao’s fault that this was mistaken as being a set of rules applicable to all women and for all time. See Chen Yu-shih, 1996.)

Works by scholars such as Susan Mann, Dorothy Ko, and Katherine Carlitz (to name only a few, see my list of suggested readings below) argue that elite women enjoyed far more freedom and–dare I utter the word–agency then once thought. In fact, Dorothy Ko has argued that our image of women in Late Imperial China owes much the intellectuals of the May Fourth era who put forth the apparition of the weak, illiterate, crippled Chinese woman as a symbol (and excuse) for China’s backwardness and weakness. Nobody is saying that Chinese women in the 18th century were raging feminists or had complete freedom, but the restrictions followed by Chinese women at the time would not have seemed particularly onerous to their sisters in Europe during the same period.

Women’s virtue has always mattered in China and women have often been, in the words of one scholar, “Vessels of the symbolic,” more important for how their behavior reflected on a particular village, family, or nation than who they were as people. In the 20th century, new social groups, such as women’s federations, emerged to further extend the state’s influence on female behavior. Tellingly, it was the All Women’s Federation who selected the awardees for this year.

There’s nothing wrong with these awards. I’m sure the women who received them are deserving of recognition. Let’s just assume this in the spirit of the season. Interestingly, of the 10 women who met with Wang Zhaoguo this past week, one was Uighur, one was Muslin, and one was Mongol. It seems that the Federation chose their awardees with one eye on inclusiveness. But it’s disappointing that Wang only mentioned qualities in the domestic space such as an elegant bearing and early childhood education. It seems the old divisions of nei/wai (inner/outer) continue to figure strongly in Chinese (male) ideas of gender, women continue to be symbols/scapegoats for social stability, and somewhere in the ether, Zhu Xi is cracking a smile.
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A selected reading list for this issue:

Birge, Bettine. “Chu Hsi and Women’s Education.” In Neo-Confucian Education: The Formative Stage, edited by William T. de Bary and John Chaffee. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Bossler, Beverly. “Faithful Wives and Heroic Martyrs: State, Society and Discourse in the Song and Yuan.” In Chugoku no rekishi sekai, togo no shisutemu to tagenteki hatten 中国の歴史世界、統合のシステムと多元的発展, edited by Chugokushi gakkai 中国史学会. Tokyo: Tokyo Metropolitan University Press, 2002.

Bray, Francesca. Technology and Gender: Fabrics of Power in Late Imperial China. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Carlitz, Katherine. “The Social Uses of Female Virtue in Late Ming Editions of Lienu Zhuan.” Late Imperial China 12, no. 2 (1991): 117-152.

Chen, Yu-shih. “The Historical Template of Pan Chao’s Nü Chieh.” T’oung Pao 82, no. 4-5 (1996): 229-257.

Ebrey, Patricia. The Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Song Period. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Elvin, Mark. “Female Virtue and the State in China” Past and Present no. 4 (1984): 111-152

Ko, Dorothy. Teachers of the Inner Chamber: Women and Culture in Seventeenth-Century China. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994.

—————. Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding. University of California Press, 2005.

Mann, Susan. Precious Records: Women in China’s Long Eighteenth Century. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997.

———. “Widows in the Kinship, Class, and Community Structures of Qing Dynasty China.” Journal of Asian Studies 46, no. 1 (1987): 37-56.

Wolf, Margery. Women and the Family in Chinese Society. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1972.