| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott, editors. Women and Confucian Cultures in Premodern China, Korea, and Japan. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. 2003. Pp. xiii, 337. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95.
This book, conceived as a companion volume to Under Confucian Eyes: Writings on Gender in Chinese History (2001), makes a signal contribution to the study of gender and social history in East Asia. Both books are the products of an international collaboration spearheaded by Dorothy Ko and Susan Mann. Under Confucian Eyes is a collection of translated texts by late imperial Chinese women; the book under review expands consideration to Korea and Japan, both of which have been in dynamic contact with China since early in the common era. The eleven essays collected here aim to "restore both female subjectivity and historical complexity" by analyzing "the complex constellations of constraint and opportunity shaping the lives of men and women in China, Korea, and Japan from the seventh to the nineteenth century" (p. 1).	1
"Confucianism," as the editors point out, is a Western neologism; East Asia speaks rather of traditions based on texts, norms, and practices venerated and added to by Confucius and later followers. These texts and teachings did not start out as instruments of repression but rather the reverse. Confucius's radical innovation was to accept the hierarchical organization of society but to locate authority in individual moral cultivation rather than birth, rank, power, or wealth. Despite the hierarchical constraints that Confucian tradition was later employed to support, Confucianism never lost the function of "speaking truth to power," as a history of martyrs can attest.	2
Women's position in this discourse was complex. Classical Confucian texts, when they mention women, generally assume that they, too, can achieve moral authority. For the most part, though, women are expected to achieve moral authority by perfect realization of subordinate roles, remaining "inside," apart from public life. These gender ideals, coupled with pre-Confucian patrilineal descent systems, sent women of imperial China to live with their husbands' families, divided their filial loyalties between natal and marital families, and explicitly demanded the "Three Obediences" to father, husband, and son. When these Confucian texts and ideals reached Korea and Japan, however, they interacted with indigenous traditions to produce new cultural paradigms—and these paradigms, as the essays here demonstrate, changed over time.	3
After an introduction that sketches out the complexities of the term "Confucianism" and the evolution of Confucian traditions in China, Korea, and Japan, the book is divided into four parts. Part one, "Scripts of Male Dominance," presents the earliest materials treated in the book, from eras when ideals of virilocal marriage, female chastity, widow fidelity, and patrilineal succession had not yet achieved hegemony in Korea or Japan. Hiroko Sekiguchi shows us that while a Chinese-style patriarchal family paradigm was prescribed in Japanese legal codes as early as the eighth century, census records from the same era suggest that an indigenous matrilocal pattern was still very common. At the same time, as Joan R. Piggott shows, Japan's experiment with a Chinese-style empress ended in turbulence that thereafter doomed female succession to the Japanese throne.	4
In Korea, the twelfth century saw the beginnings of Chinese-style historiography, but the tales of virtuous women described by Hai-soon Lee feature patterns of fidelity and filiality quite different from Chinese chastity suicides and filial ordeals. And even in China, as Joseph Lam shows, Confucian orthodoxy never captured the entirety of Chinese experience: the orthodox discourse on music simply ignored the legions of women musicians who entertained Chinese of all classes from earliest times to the end of the imperial period.	. . .

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