| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 106.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Asia

Victoria Cass. Dangerous Women: Warriors, Grannies, and Geishas of the Ming. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield. 1999. Pp. xix, 156.

Victoria Cass has written a short, lively, and engaging study of female archetypes that were deeply imbedded in the structures of Chinese culture and daily life during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644). Cass focuses on women as outsiders, as revealed in the private and informal language of memoirs, miscellanies, short stories, and novels. Her goal is to place these women/outsiders in their own historical context of "the universals of myth and religion, and the verities of the cultural landscape," "so that they will speak coherently to the modern" (p. xii). In this, she succeeds admirably. 1

Cass opens with a chapter on "The Great Ming," emphasizing the prosperity of the Ming dynasty and the prevalence of male anxiety and warnings about dangerous women. She emphasizes three aspects of Ming culture as directly relevant to her study of female archetypes: the importance of piety and the cult of the family; the growth of urban prosperity with its attendant entertainment districts, cosmopolitanism, anonymity, and relative freedom; and solitude or reclusion as an abiding cultural ideal. Each of these, and sometimes two or all three at once, helped condition the roles of women as dangerous outsiders. . . .

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