Teachers of the Inner Chambers

Rejecting both popular image and accepted Western and Chinese scholarship on the status of women in premodern China, this pathbreaking work argues that literate gentrywomen in seventeenth-century Jiangnan were far from being oppressed or silenced. The author reconstructs the social, emotional, and intellectual worlds of these women from the interstices between ideology, practice, and self-perception.

Introduction: gender and the politics of Chinese history; Part I. Social and Private Histories: 1. In the floating world: women and commercial publishing; 2. The enchantment of love in The Poetry Pavilion; Part II. Womanhood: 3. Margins of domesticity: enlarging the women's sphere; 4. Talent, virtue, and beauty: rewriting womanhood; Part III. Women's culture: 5. Domestic communities: male and female domains; 6. Social and public communities: genealogies across time and space; 7. Transitory communities: courtesan, wife, and professional artist; Epilogue; Reference matter; Notes; Index.