Organizer: Brian R. Dott, University of Pittsburgh
Chair and Discussant: Susan Mann, University of California, Davis
The renewed vigor of neo-Confucianism in Qing China often gives the impression that women's lives were governed by increasingly rigid intellectual, moral, and social norms. In reality interactions between precepts and practices were fluid and complex. Social norms functioned not as well-defined rules or abstract principles, but rather as loose parameters of right and wrong. These left considerable room for individual decision-making and personal or familial priorities, as well as differences of opinion over what was supposedly proper, true and correct.
This panel will examine the interaction between precepts and practices in three areas affecting women's lives in late imperial China: medicine, religion, and law. Yi-Li Wu examines different approaches to women's health, especially noting widespread literati endorsement of popular gynecological guides, despite their departure from the standards of classical medicine. Brian Dott examines the controversial and contradictory nature of female pilgrimage, contrasting its condemnation by literati and lineage heads with the supportive views of popular religious texts and the experiences of women. Janet Theiss examines the concepts of moral transgression and violation in cases of sexual assault, comparing the interpretations given by judicial officials and orthodox commentators with those of the women and communities involved. In addressing the problems of curing illness, obtaining heirs, or dealing with disgrace, women and men certainly demonstrated awareness of dominant norms. However, they interwove these with their own desires into a rich and varied tapestry of social practice, forging solutions which responded to their own needs and circumstances.
Of Monks and Menstruation: The Bamboo Grove Monastery and Gynecological Self-Help
Books in Nineteenth-Century China
Yi-Li Wu, Yale University
The enduring image of the sick woman in imperial China is that of a pale hand, stretched out from behind a curtain. Prohibited from directly seeing his patient, the male doctor arrives at his diagnosis thanks to mastery of pulse lore. This stereotyped clinical encounter assumes the primacy of three factors in the management of women's diseases: Confucian propriety, the male medical practitioner, and classical medical theory. In reality, however, women employed many strategies for coping with illness, strategies in which social and medical ideals might be absent or considerably reinterpreted.
This paper examines the tradition of gynecological self-treatment in 19th century China by analyzing a body of medical texts attributed to the Bamboo Grove Monastery of Zhejiang Province. These easy-to-use handbooks, aimed at women and their families, circulated throughout the empire and can thus provide a window onto popular perceptions of women's diseases and their treatment. Although the Bamboo Grove texts drew on classical theory, they embodied a "paint-by-numbers" approach to medicine, relying on patent formulas targeted at specific symptoms. While this approach was criticized by learned doctors, the Bamboo Grove texts were embraced by literati and officials who sponsored their publication. This was partly because the Confucian emphasis on producing children made women's health an ongoing male concern. Medically speaking, furthermore, women were seen as sicklier than men, harder to cure, and thus more likely to fall prey to incompetent doctors. Self-treatment was thus an important strategy for managing women's diseases.
Piety vs. Propriety: The Dilemma of Female Pilgrimage to Mount Tai
Brian R. Dott, University of Pittsburgh
Contradictions within Qing society are evident in female pilgrimages to the chief Daoist peak, Mount Tai. For centuries, the mountain god itself drew many worshipers. By the sixteenth century, however, his daughter, the goddess of Mount Tai (Bixia Yuanjun) had usurped her father's popularity. This compassionate deity drew pilgrims, predominantly women, seeking health, good fortune and male heirs.
Many genealogies and some magistrates' handbooks contain explicit injunctions against women visiting temples or traveling on pilgrimage, for it provided for freedom, exposure to outside influence and especially the creation of female bonds of friendship and mutual support. Since the goddess of Mount Tai was a highly efficacious fertility goddess, however, women justified their journeys through Confucian reverence for male heirs. This presented purveyors of traditional moral rules with a dilemma. Could the impropriety of women leaving their homes (nei) to go on journeys (wai) be over-ridden by the imperative filial duty of continuing the family line?
Popular, predominantly 18th century sources, such as baojuan (sacred scrolls) and woodblock prints with religious instructions, contrast sharply with literati injunctions. These popular works instruct women to visit temples and also inform them how to perform the necessary rituals.
Such contradictions are recurrent throughout Chinese society. In the case of women pilgrims to Mount Tai, the contradiction never developed into a large-scale conflict, I believe, because of the mediating influence of the necessity to continue the family line and women's skillful integration of their female rituals into filial piety and home life.
Boundaries of Body and Mind: The Meanings of Violation in Law, Ethics and
Experience
Janet M. Theiss, University of California, Berkeley
In traditional China, household space and the patterns of daily life were differentiated, gendered and suffused with ritual meaning according to a complex array of ethical and religious principles. This system of ethical and ritual boundaries defined the parameters of proper behavior and social interaction for women. Perhaps the most significant of these boundaries was that which separated the inner family spaces appropriate to women (nei) from the more public spaces in which men interacted with outsiders (wai). In this paper, I will analyze cases of sexual assault and harassment, in which interpretation of the boundary between inner and outer and the meaning of its transgression or violation was crucial in determining whether the crime was assault or a consensual illicit encounter.
Biographies of chaste women who committed suicide in response to assaults imply that these boundaries were clear and their violation was an abrogation of universal principles of chastity. However, victims of harassment and assault in criminal cases reacted to the experience of violation not with moral outrage, but shame at their loss of face. Violation was thus a matter of reputation, informed by communal norms. Yet these cases reveal the frequent lack of consensus definitions of subtle gender boundaries. This made it difficult for adjudicating officials to establish the context and intent of the interaction between perpetrator and victim and judge whether the victim had transgressed the parameters of female propriety in encountering the male suspect, or whether he, on the contrary, had violated those boundaries himself.