Abstract
Man Xu has written a powerful, innovative, and imaginative study of women who lived in the southeast coastal province of Fujian in the Song dynasty (960-1279), during which rapid commercialization and urbanization propelled the economic prosperity of China in the backdrop of wars with the neighbor states. The focus on the materiality of women’s gendered experience yields visual images of women crossing various gates that took them from the inner quarters of their residence to the local community, government, religious centers, and arriving at the final resting place in the tomb. The author’s primary thesis is that, rather than abiding by the didactic Confucian texts that prescribed women’s cloistered life in the inner quarters, women in Fujian moved in and out of inner and outer spheres as they expanded their physical and social space. This path was facilitated by their exercise of agency and by the flexibility with which the male Confucian elite interpreted the practice of gender segregation and division of labor, where women assumed domestic roles in the inner quarters and men took charge of matters outside the home.
In Fujian, a thriving publishing industry helped formulate the orthodox Neo-Confucianism of Zhu Xi (1130-1200) and a lineage of associates and students over several generations. As officials, scholars, teachers, and mentors, they reiterated the Confucian ideal for family and society to practice morality, filial piety and chastity. With didactic intent and seeking to emphasize exemplary conduct, they wrote historical and literary works, philosophical treatises, family instructions, and epitaphs. In the absence of significant writings by women in Fujian, these epitaphs, tomb excavation reports, Confucian classics, genealogies, village contracts, anecdotal collections, legal casebooks, and local gazetteers serve as primary sources for Man Xu’s reconstruction of the lives of about a hundred women discussed in the study. To broaden the scope of research, she effectively integrates the Fujian data with more comprehensive studies on Song women, including Patricia B. Ebrey’s Inner Quarters: Marriage and the Lives of Chinese Women in the Sung Period (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Beverly J. Bossler’s Courtesans, Concubines, and the Cult of Female Fidelity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013); and Bettine Birge’s Women, Property, and Confucian Reaction in the Sung and Yuan China (960-1368) (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Chapter One locates the Fujian women in the jia (hereafter family), a multi-layered term referring to the family, house, home, and residence where the middle gate physically separated their living space in the inner quarters from the public area of the house. Women spent most of the day weaving and embroidering while dealing with domestic issues in the inner quarters. Male residents crossed the middle gate into the inner quarters at night while female residents crossed it to get to the public area to receive visiting relatives or acquaintances in the day. Without physically leaving the house, the women’s extraordinary acts of morality, filial piety, and chastity were individually commemorated by government-issued plaques that were hung on the house and lane gates. The texts on the plaques, visible to the neighborhood and travelers, brought glory to the household and placed the women under public gaze. As for commoner families, the limited living space and fewer rooms in the house made the physical segregation of male and female residents impractical.
Chapter Two is concerned about the objects and material traces of women stepping outside the house and lane gates to embark on trips. Man Xu argues that travel allowed women to cross into public space, but only to the extent of socially acceptable travel such as leaving the natal home for the marital residence, for religious pilgrimages, getting to work (e.g., as matchmaker), or evacuating from danger and calamities. Confucian moralists approved their mode of travel by sedan chair or carriage, which sheltered the women and segregated them from the outside world. The design and adornment of the sedan chair were not gendered, but showed the hierarchy and class of the passengers. Fujian saw a huge settlement of imperial relatives who formed the eminent lineage that blended in with the local elite families. As the economy prospered, the rapidly commercialized society saw the use of sedan chairs spreading to prostitutes and entertainers, but other commoner women could not afford the high cost of this mode of travel. Texts and paintings show that carriages were drawn by animals, and sedan chairs with female passengers were pulled by female servants and monks, thus setting the boundary of segregation between women and the outside by keeping them away from the public gaze. Women also rode on horses and donkeys, but to accommodate gender segregation, they wore hats with hanging veils, whose original function had been protection from wind and dust. Man Xu surmises that the women left few written traces of their travel because they understood that their prescribed space was inside inner quarters. Their travel and sojourns are indicative of their mobility and agency as they moved into male-dominated space, but they still affirmed Confucian moral ideals of segregation as they rode in sedan chairs, carriages, and covered their faces with the veil. The use of the veil was inconvenient and unlikely for commoner women, who were less constrained by Confucian gender segregation and who left the house every day for work to help support the family.
In the inner quarters women raised the children, supervised their education, managed the household finances, and organized marriages and funerals for family members. In Chapter Three we observe women stepping into the public domain as viable members of the local economic network. With arithmetic and managerial skills, they invested the household funds in commerce and agriculture while supporting poor relations and neighbors. Because funding from the local government was inadequate, the women financed charity schools, local welfare, and public projects in water conservancy, irrigation, and transportation. Certainly, the dowries, inheritances, and weaving earnings enabled them to act with increased agency and confidence in business and public projects. Although Confucian texts prescribed domestic roles for women inside the family, in practice the local community, male kin, and epitaph writers accepted women’s public exposure and acknowledged that their philanthropy and management of the family business solidified the reputation and social status of the family while freeing the men to focus on outer affairs—office-holding and scholarship.
Chapter Four examines how women negotiated the Confucian gender norms and interacted with the public domain of local government and officials in daily life. Women moved out of the inner quarters into non-gendered parks, roads, bridges, and gardens and gendered hot springs and bathhouses, the latter separating men and women in public space. Elite women had close relationships with local officials, some of whom were husbands or sons. As Man Xu puts it, Fujian women transferred intellectual capital to the husband’s family as they urged sons and husbands to adopt morality and integrity in executing public power as government officials. When they supervised their sons’ education, they advanced their careers and transmitted to them technical and practical knowledge of irrigation and water conservancy projects. As a show of filial piety, sons in government service built halls, ponds, and pavilions to honor their mothers in the inner quarters of the official residence.
The Fujian commoners had face-to-face contact with the local government through economic, cultural, legal, and family matters involving adultery, incest, and divorce. Civil litigation included dispute over property rights and the family business while the criminal court dealt with crimes such as abduction, poisoning civilians, smuggling salt, and assaulting officials. In both civil and criminal cases the court opposed summoning as witnesses mothers, wives, and daughters, arguing that their presence would take them out of the inner quarters and break gender segregation norms. Female infanticide was a serious problem in Fujian, where families killed newborn girls they could not afford to raise. The court blamed the fathers and brothers, but Man Xu points out that women played an active role in the inner-family decision that the state considered criminal. The birth of girls became a public matter when the local government took preventive measures to stop infanticide by forcing families to report births while diverting some land taxes to support unwanted children for several years.
In Chapter Five Man Xu argues that women in Fujian exercised personal agency as they sought to pursue religious faith and spirituality without violating Confucian social order, propriety, and obligations. Song Fujian had more religious structures per capita than elsewhere in the state, so it is not surprising that many epitaphs of the women show them as laywomen moving through the inner quarters to the outer spheres of Buddhism, Daoism, and popular religion. They donated to monasteries and temples, where they chanted, prayed to the deities, and listened to the lectures. The epitaph writers accepted their religious rituals at home and pilgrimages outside the home, as long as these activities did not disrupt the Confucian social order. They underscored the women’s creation and consumption of religious material culture in the form of texts, icons, embroidery, and paintings. The circulation and distribution of these religious icons benefited the local community and connected women to religious networks where the presence of non-kin men could compromise Confucian gender segregation.
In the last chapter, through an examination of eighty-two tombs in Fujian, Man Xu takes us to the last gate that women crossed into the burial chamber. While descendants worshipped their ancestral tablets in the former residence and marital home, the tomb now marked the end of a gendered life and it became the posthumous residence where gender segregation was no longer significant. Single chamber burials (one couple in one chamber) were later replaced in popularity by double and triple chambers for joint burials for couples or a husband with multiple wives. Rather than gender segregation, the partitions and the passageways in the double and triple chambers reflected concerns about preservation of the corpses and other matters. The Fujian textual and archaeological material indicates that the Fujian Confucian scholars were not rigid with gender segregations in burial regulations. The mural paintings show scenes of daily life, including bedrooms, servants, civil and military officials, and males and females standing next to each other. The funerary accessories, or the objects of daily life, that were placed in the chambers of the husband and wives, show no gender differentiation. By selecting their clothing and other funerary accessories for the afterlife, Fujjian women exercised a degree of personal agency and independence. In examining the few accessories of the burials of commoners, Man Xu notes that they were also not concerned with gender segregation in conceptualizing the after-life.
In this study we have seen mostly elite women in Fujian crossing the gates of the family to arrive at the community, government, religious centers, finally entering the imagined after-life. The shortage of epitaphs, textual, and archaeological sources on commoner women accounts for incomplete visual images of their everyday life. Man Xu is to be commended for taking painstaking efforts to include this majority group in every chapter. Using the integrated scholarship on Song women, she has additionally given us an insightful comparative perspective on women in the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, whose writings and material objects demonstrate that they encountered more rigid boundaries between inner and outer spheres than had been the experience of their sisters in Song Fujian.