Chinese Women Education and Literature Prosperity in the Late Ming and Early Qing Dynasties

Name
Professor
Course
15 February 2019
The Education of Chinese Women
In modern Chinese society, women have the same access to education as their male counterparts. However, this was not the case in the past, women were denied the right to education under the dominant Confucian ethics, and the few who had access could not study in the same room as men. The coming of the missionaries and China’s defeat in the Opium war forced it to open its door to the Westerners who eventually influenced a change in the cultural practices that allowed women to access education. This paper briefly looks into the history of the education of Chinese women, particularly during the prosperity of literature in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties and highlights the changes in Chinese women’s thinking under the influence of feudal society.
The education of Chinese women has origins in the Zhou dynasty. Noble women in this dynasty were instructed in the following aspects: court music, inner-chamber behaviors and proper conducts of pregnancy (Du, 1). In the Eastern Han dynasty, the emperor employed Ban Zhao, a prestigious female historian, to instruct imperial consorts and princesses. Her Admonitions for Women intended to regulate the behaviors of her noble students to adhere to Confucian ethics. From a feminist point of view, Ban Zhao’s teaching promoted female inferiority. At the time Ban Zhao was the only one well-versed of the Scripture of the Constitution of Zhou (Du, 1). Chinese literature continued to flourish in the Tang and Song dynasties, poetry and lyrics respectively. There was a continued emergence of “talented women” who compared to their predecessors had greatly improved the number of published works. Neo-Confucian scholars of these periods did not object to educating women but limited the number of books they accessed.
In traditional Chinese society, there was no consensus on the concept of “talented woman.” Despite the society admiring talented women throughout the centuries, there was much debate aroused by the issue of female literacy on how their orientation would fit into Confucian ethics. Challenges facing the education of Chinese women included belittling female literacy that talented women joined themselves. “Cultural mix” was a term used to refer to the cultural relations of the time, particularly geared towards morality than flashy talent (Judge, 775). The cultural mix shaped the attitude of women and guided them as to where they could utilize their talents, if any, conforming to the Confucian ethics partly by virtue rather than talent.
In the late imperial period, the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, female writing and publishing thrived (Liu, 92). Women had more opportunities to get educated, read books, publish and travel in the commercialized Yangzi area. The late Ming period experienced the peak of courtesan culture while the early Qing period, “China’s long eighteenth century” saw the emergence of multiple elite women writers who transformed the urban culture of the region. Due to its stability, the early Qing period...