Heroines of the Qing: Exemplary Women Tell Their Stories(Heroines of the Qing)

Heroines of the Qing introduces an array of Chinese women from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries who were powerful, active subjects of their own lives and who wrote themselves as the heroines of their exemplary stories. Traditionally, "exemplary women" (lienu)-heroic martyrs, chaste widows, and faithful maidens, for example-were written into official dynastic histories for their unrelenting adherence to female virtue by Confucian family standards. However, despite the rich writing traditions about these women, their lives were often distorted by moral and cultural agendas. Binbin Yang, drawing on interdisciplinary sources, shows how they were able to cross boundaries that were typically closed to women-boundaries not only of gender, but also of knowledge, economic power, political engagement, and ritual and cultural authority. Yang closely examines the rhetorical strategies these "exemplary women" exploited for self-representation in various writing genres and highlights their skillful negotiation with, and appropriation of, the values of female exemplarity for self-empowerment.

Acknowledgments

Note to Readers

Introduction

1. Breaking the Silence: Cases of Outspoken Exemplary Women

2. Visualizing Exemplarity: Women's Portraits and Paintings for Self-Representation

3. Staging Family Drama: Genealogical Writing as Ritual Authority

4. Enacting Guardians of Family Health: From Exemplary Wife to Reformer

Conclusion

Chinese Character Glossary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Binbin Yang is assistant professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong.

"This study is not only of interest to students of traditional Chinese women's literature. It ranges over fields as widely apart as print culture, art history, social history and medical history. In each of these fields it shows a far more assertive participation of women than is commonly assumed. . . . Equally relevant to the students of Republican history as to the students of Qing history. The book is very well written and throughout a pleasure to read."

"Through women's own writings, Yang greatly expands our picture of gentry women's roles in Qing society. She shows how women used their writings, not just to seek literary immortality through publication, but to empower themselves and to reform and renew their society. . . . Binbin Yang has made a most valuable contribution to our understanding of late Qing social, literary and political history."

"Binbin Yang's book illuminates a new direction in the study of women's literature in late imperial China. Aiming at (re)discovering women's own autobiographical voices, this innovative and engaging book goes beyond poetry, which is often the source of such studies, to explore neglected literary and artistic genres: prefaces, (auto)biographies, inscriptions, paintings, letters, political essays, and medical texts . . . Yang has extended the discussion on writing women in late imperial China from a small privileged group of upper-class gentry women to educated women in poor households."

"To those who have read ad nauseam the eulogies of long-suffering widows or women who committed suicide to guard their chastity in the predominant late imperial discourse on female exemplarity, Yang's book offers a welcome alternative view of women's lives that is not only more felicitous but also more representative . . . Methodologically innovative, carefully researched, and clearly written, Yang's book makes an important contribution to the study of Chinese women's history and will be used widely in both teaching and research."