Book Review

Asia

Until recently, Sinology—that is to say, historical studies produced by scholars trained as classicists in Chinese—has not been particularly fertile ground for feminist scholarship. This edited volume in the Sinica Leidensia series, largely European in authorship, is part of an admirable project to change the situation and also illustrates some of the problems it faces. The best recent work by feminist historians of China (Patricia Buckley Ebrey, Dorothy Ko, and Susan Mann) has had as an agenda to erase the stereotype of the backward, victimized Oriental female by recovering the voices of elite women of late imperial China. This undertaking has involved close intertextual reading of male-authored documents, from law cases to exemplary biographies and literary essays, as well as exploration of the marginalized writings of literary women, especially their poetry. For these purposes, an emphasis upon female agency has been a more powerful theme than that of discourse or representation. It has led scholars to explore the opportunities offered by the late Ming spread of publishing and literacy, the resources of a sex-segregated women's culture, and the advantages of a gender ideology rooted in the flexible relationalities of yin-yang cosmology.

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