Historians of women often draw from travelers' accounts because features of male–female relations that the authors of one country take for granted may seem noteworthy to those from elsewhere. In the case of China, through the nineteenth century the richest outsiders' accounts were written by those from furthest away, from Europe and later the United States. 1 In the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries European visitors gave detailed descriptions of the practice of female seclusion, the ways finance entered into marriage arrangements, the cut of women's clothing, and the ways women made up their faces. By the nineteenth century, Western visitors, including some who had lived for years in China, brought up a wider range of topics, from women's opportunities for education, to child-rearing practices, the degree of sexual segregation in everyday activities such as eating meals, and regional and class variation in footbinding and women's work.
An historian of European cultural history could use these writings to analyze the ways changing Western social, political, and religious preoccupations found expression in changing attitudes toward distant non-Christian lands and China in particular. After all, travelers' accounts invariably reveal as much about themselves as about those they describe. But Western writings on Chinese women also are worth the scrutiny of historians of China interested in the intellectual foundations of their field. Western authors, while creating interest in the West in the topic of Chinese women, were framing the topic certain ways and focusing attention on some issues to the exclusion or neglect of others. Even today, when Western writing on Chinese women's history is based more on close study of Chinese texts than on travels through China, the vocabulary and concepts established by these earlier generations are still in use.
In this article I trace some of the elements involved in Westerners' creation of knowledge about Chinese women by looking closely at what they
____________________-194-
Questia, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning. www.questia.com
Publication information:
Book title: Women and the Family in Chinese History.
Contributors: Patricia Buckley Ebrey - Author.
Publisher: Routledge.
Place of publication: New York.
Publication year: 2002.
Page number: 194.
This material is protected by copyright and, with the exception of fair use, may not be further copied, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means.
One moment ...
- Georgia
- Arial
- Times New Roman
- Verdana
- Courier/monospaced
Reset