294 Part IV: East Asian Civilization
women were not eligible for the examinations and the government careers that
were their purpose. Chinese culture valued the private life spent in scholarly or
artistic pursuit for both men and women; a bureaucrat dreamed of retiring to
become a private man of letters, even while women were potentially born to
this life. In the field of painting, the work of amateurs was considered superior
to professional painting, which meant that women could become accom-
plished artists and gain fame by the same route as the scholar-official who
painted, wrote poetry, or did calligraphy.
After the sixteenth century there were rising female literacy rates and
women both wrote and enjoyed novels, poetry, and plays. Susan Mann docu-
ments a lengthy debate in the late eighteenth century on what women should
learn, and why. Some women were writing poetry admired by men who were
attracted to female sensuality. “Whether in the palace or in pleasure boats,
whether at courier outposts or in the heart of the court, women’s talents were
mainly devoted to singing and dancing, all to please men,” complained one
critic (Mann 1994:31). But many other women poets were writing about their
own lives as gentry women; the subject of death in childbirth, from illness, and
by suicide recurs in women’s writings in the eighteenth century. Mature
women plumbed emotions born of empty marriages and cloistered lives.
There was a “poetry of desire” that lifted women from their actual lives to
imagined lives. Even very young women and girls earned fame as poets and
lived writers’ lives. The poet Jin Yi brought her inkstone and brushes into her
marriage as part of her dowry and within a few days turned the bedroom into
a study.
Women of literati households formed poetry and painting societies, such
as the Banana Garden Poetry Society formed in the early Qing in Hangzhou
by Gu Yurui. They were painters as well as poets; Xu Can, one member,
painted female figures, images of the goddess Guanyin, flowers, and plants. Ju
Qing, a member of a famous painting family in nineteenth-century Guang-
dong, captured a mood of tranquility and leisure in “Lady with Fan.”REFERENCES CITED
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Female Labor. Signs 19(3): 677–712.
Carlitz, Katherine. 1994. Desire, Danger, and the Body: Stories of Women’s Virtue in
Late Ming China. In Engendering China; Women, Culture, and the State, eds. Christina
K. Gilmartin, Gail Hershatter, Lisa Rofel and Tyrene White. Pp. 101–124. Cam-
bridge: Harvard University Press.
Chang, Chung-li. 1955. The Chinese Gentry; Studies on Their Role in Nineteenth-Century
Chinese Society. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
Chou, Hung-hsiang. 1979. Chinese Oracle Bones. Scientific American 240(4): 135–149.
Chow, Kai-wing. 1994. The Rise of Confucian Ritualism in Late Imperial China; Ethics, Clas-
sics, and Lineage Discourse. Stanford: Stanford University Press.