Women, Gender, and Sexuality in China

A Brief History

Ping Yao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781317237501
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de la Chine

Women, Gender and Sexuality in China: A Brief History serves as a focal textbook for undergraduate courses on women, gender, and sexuality in Chinese history. Thematically structured, it surveys important aspects of gender systems and gender practices throughout Chinese history, from the earliest period to the modern era. Topics include the concept of yin-yang, life course and gender roles, kinship systems and family structure, marriage practices, sexuality, women's work and daily life, as well as gender in Chinese mythology, religions, medicine, art, and literature. In narrating how various traditions and practices were formed and evolved throughout Chinese history, this textbook draws heavily on personal stories and historical records.

Features in this textbook include:

• Primary source sections for each chapter, introducing students to types of documents that have been used by scholars in conducting research

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• Thirty-threetranslated texts of various genres, including epitaph, bronze inscription, medical text, imperial edict, legal case, family letter, ghost story, divorce paper, poetry, autobiography, etc.

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• Dedicated biography sections for five distinguished women

Offering richly layered accounts of women, gender, and sexuality, this textbook is essential reading for students of Chinese history, gender in world history, or the comparative history of gender.

1 Life courses and gender roles

DOI: 10.4324/9781315627267-2

On a fall day in 691, an elite woman named Zhang passed away at the age of 69. Her husband Wang had preceded her in death by 20 years. Her children wept and wailed, and arranged an elaborate joint-burial for the parents a month later. A joint-epitaph was commissioned to recount and exalt their virtues: he, having led an expedition against the barbarians, served the Tang court with distinction; she, having “comprehended the rules of yin and yang,” perfected their marital life. Both were known to have had an upbringing grounded in Confucian teachings. The funerary biography is entitled “Epitaph for Mr. Wang of Taiyuan, the Late Supreme Pillar of State of the Great Zhou.”¹ Zhang is not listed. The life courses and gender roles presented in this late-7th-century epitaph might not reflect how Wang and Zhang actually lived their lives, but they certainly reveal the expectations of men and women from elite families and many commoner families in imperial China.

What were “the rules of yin and yang” that Zhang was following throughout her life? In this chapter we will explore the origin and evolution of the yin–yang theory, its influence on the perception of gender, as well as its manifestations in the life courses and gender roles throughout Chinese history. We will also study a set of texts, particularly didactic writings and funerary biographies, that represented and reinforced such gendered ideals.

The conception of yin and yang

The concept of yin and yang as two opposite yet interdependent elements is one of the earliest and most fundamental ideas in Chinese thought. The symbol of yin and yang consists of a dark swirl, representing the yin (shadow), and a light swirl, representing the yang (brightness) (Figure 1.1). The prototype of the symbol appeared at least five millennia ago.²

Figure 1.1 Image of yin and yang.

During the sixth to fourth centuries BCE, Daoist philosophers developed the yin–yang concept into a complex theory to delineate the principles that lay at the foundation of the universe and the human body. The classic source for such theory is the divination manual the Book of Changes (Yijing), compiled around the Warring States Period. To Daoist thinkers, yin and yang are two opposing, yet mutually dependent forces in the universe. Hence the existence of dualities such as sky and earth, sun and moon, day and night, winter and summer, male and female, above and below, and left and right. It is the coexistence and codependence of the two forces that makes everything possible: “with yin alone, nothing will happen; with yang alone, nothing will grow.”³ In addition, Daoists conjectured that “when yang is at its extremity, yin rises; when yin is at its extremity, yang rises.”⁴ Such binomial coefficients can be applied to the human body as well. For example, The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine (Huangdi neijing), likely written by various authors during the Warring States Period, stresses that bodily functions, illness, and well-being, are all manifestations of the interactive relationship between yin and yang.⁵ The text further delineates that yin and yang are not fixed entities, and that yin–yang can be considered as an internal space-time structure in a lived body, in which yin and yang mark points in relations across a spectrum. The same element can be yin/female in a certain relation but yang/male in another.⁶

Confucian ethicists, on the other hand, relied on the yin–yang concept to define social and familial relationships. Han dynasty Confucian scholar Dong Zhongshu (192–104 BCE) specified that among the Five Relationships (wulun), i.e., ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife, elder brother and younger brother, friend and friend, the first three resembled the relationship between yin and yang:

The principle of being ruler and subject, father and son, husband and wife all draws from the way of yin and yang. The ruler is yang and the subject is yin; the father is yang and the son is yin; the husband is yang and the wife is yin.⁷

The Han dynasty marked the era when the concept of yin and yang was accentuated in interpreting gender roles and gender relations.⁸ In the Comprehensive Discussions in the White Tiger Hall (Baihu tongyi), the most important Confucian text of the Han dynasty, Ban Gu (32–92) reasoned:

Why is it that according to the Rites the man takes his wife, whereas the woman leaves her house? It is because the yin is lowly, and should not have the initiative; it proceeds to the yang in order to be completed.⁹

Ban Zhao (49–121), Ban Gu’s sister, shared his belief that the relationship between men and women should resemble the relationship between yin and yang; however, instead of emphasizing gender hierarchy, she advised women on the complementary aspect of the yin–yang relationship.¹⁰

The equal and binominal relation between yin and yang in the Confucian designation of gender and gender roles would soon give way to a theoretical foundation for male dominance and patriarchy. The Tang dynasty didactic text Classic of Filial Piety for Girls (Nü xiaojing), for example, made clear that, by nature, men were superior to women:

The way of establishing heaven is called yin and yang; the way of establishing earth is called gentle and tough. Yin and yang, gentle and tough, are the beginnings of heaven and earth. Male and female, husband and wife, are the beginnings of human social relations. … The wife is earth and the husband is heaven; neither can be dispensed with. But the man can perform a hundred actions; the woman concentrates on a single goal.¹¹

During the Song dynasty, Neo-Confucian scholars would expand such ideas to cement the dominant position of men in the family and in gender relations, as Sima Guang (1019–1086) explained in his Precepts for Family Life (Jiafan),

The husband is heaven; the wife is earth. The husband is the sun; the wife is the moon. The husband is yang; the wife is yin. Heaven is honored and occupies the space above. Earth is lowly and occupies the space below. The sun does not vary in its fullness; the moon alternates between being round and being incomplete. Yang sings out and gives life to things; yin joins in and completes things. Therefore wives take as their virtues gentleness and compliance and do not excel through strength or intellectual discrimination.¹²

Such interpretation of yin–yang cosmology is omnipresent in didactic texts for women, family precepts, and clan regulations in late imperial China. By then, the ideal of yin and yang being equally essential and important had long been lost.

Prescribed life courses for men and women

In traditional China, ideal life courses for men and women were charted out biologically and were role specific. According to The Yellow Emperor’s Canon of Internal Medicine, biologically speaking, a woman’s life course is measured in units of seven:

When a girl is seven years of age, the emanations of the kidneys become abundant, she begins to change her teeth and her hair grows longer. When she reaches her fourteenth year she begins to menstruate and is able to become pregnant and the movement in the great thoroughfare pulse is strong. Menstruation comes at regular times, thus the girl is able to give birth to a child.

When the girl reaches the age of twenty-one years the emanations of the kidneys are regular, the last tooth has come out, and she is fully grown. When the woman reaches the age of twenty-eight, her muscles and bones are strong, her hair has reached its full length and her body is flourishing and fertile.

When the woman reaches the age of thirty-five, the pulse indicating [the region of] the “Sunlight” deteriorates, her face begins to wrinkle and her hair begins to fall. When she reaches the age of forty-two, the pulse of the three [regions of] Yang deteriorates in the upper part (of the body), her entire face is wrinkled and her hair begins to turn white.

When she reaches the age of forty-nine she can no longer become pregnant and the circulation of the great thoroughfare pulse is decreased. Her menstruation is exhausted, and the gates of menstruation are no longer open; her body deteriorates and she is no longer able to bear children.¹³

Meanwhile a man’s life course is measured in units of eight: boys lose baby teeth at the age of eight, reach puberty at 16. They are fully grown at 24 and become able-bodied and fertile at 32. While the text seems to suggest that a woman’s life course ends at the age of 49, it adds an additional unit to a man. He becomes weak when he reaches 64, at which point he loses his teeth and hair, and is unable to have children.¹⁴ Such biological marking of age, as Susan Mann has pointed out, “complicated gender relations in the elite family system.” Even though the traditional well-wish for newlyweds was “going through life together until white hairs of old age” (baitou daolao), the woman who passed her fertile years would find her husband in the peak of his official career and frequently assigned to various regional offices, sometimes accompanied by his young concubine.¹⁵

Throughout Chinese history, copious writings were produced to ensure that men and women understand and fulfill their responsibilities and gender roles at each ...