Women and Confucian cultures in premodern China, Korea, and Japan
By: edited by Dorothy Ko, JaHyun Kim Haboush, and Joan R. Piggott.
Contributors: Ko, Dorothy, 1957-; Haboush, JaHyun Kim.; Piggott, Joan R.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2003
Place of publication: Berkeley
Language: eng
Number of pages: 337
Subjects: Women -- China -- History; Women -- Japan -- History; Women -- Korea -- History; Confucianism -- Social aspects
Description: "Representing an unprecedented collaboration among international scholars from Asia, Europe, and the United States, this volume rewrites the history of East Asia by rethinking the contentious relationship between Confucianism and women. The authors discuss the absence of women in the Confucian canonical tradition and examine the presence of women in politics, family, education, and art in premodern China, Korea, and Japan. What emerges is a concept of Confucianism that is dynamic instead of monolithic in shaping the cultures of East Asian societies. As teachers, mothers, writers, and rulers, women were active agents in this process. Neither rebels nor victims, these women embraced aspects of official norms while resisting others. The essays present a powerful image of what it meant to be female and to live a woman's life in a variety of social settings and historical circumstances. Challenging the conventional notion of Confucianism as an oppressive tradition that victimized women, this provocative book reveals it as a modern construct that does not reflect the social and cultural histories of East Asia before the nineteenth century"--Publisher description.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 313-315) and index.
Table of contents: title: Pt. 1. Scripts of male dominance.  The patriarchal family paradigm in eighth-century Japan / Hiroko Sekiguchi ; The last classical female sovereign: Kōken-Shōtoku Tennō / Joan R. Piggott ; Representation of females in twelfth-century Korean historiography / Hai-soon Lee; title: The presence and absence of female musicians and music in China / Joseph S.C. Lam; title: Pt. 2. Propagating Confucian virtues.  Woomen and the transmission of Confucian culture in Song China / Jian Zang ; Propagating female virtues in Chosŏn Korea / Martina Deuchler ; State indoctrination of filial piety in Tokugawa Japan: sons and daughters in the Official records of filial piety / Noriko Sugano; title: Pt. 3. Female education in practice.  Norms and texts for women's education in Tokugawa Japan / Martha C. Tocco ; Competing claims on womanly virtue in late imperial China / Fangqin Du and Susan Mann; title: Pt. 4. Corporeal and textual expressions of female subjectivity.  Discipline and transformation: body and practice in the lives of Daoist holy women of Tang China / Suzanne E. Cahill ; Versions and subversions: patriarchy and polygamy in Korean narratives / JaHyan Kim Haboush.